Catherine Pepinster

TODAY, AUGUST 15, is traditionally the day that Catholics celebrate the feast of the Assumption, that marks Mary, mother of Jesus, being taken both body and soul into heaven. Countless Catholics even before the Church made it official dogma, believed it. What intrigues me, though, is when the Church did make the Assumption dogma. It was confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. So just five years after the end of the Second World War, when millions of Jewish people lost their lives in the Holocaust, the Catholic Church officially endorsed a Jewish woman as Queen of Heaven. There’s still controversy about Pius XII, elected Pope in 1939. Some historians argue that he didn’t do enough for the Jewish people, while others say he worked behind the scenes to help save Jews from the Nazis. Before he became Pope, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, he signed on behalf of his predecessor, Pius XI, the 1933 concordat that guaranteed the rights of the Catholic Church to operate in Germany. What is less well-known is that four years later, horrified by what was happening in Germany – and monitored by Pacelli – the Vatican issued a papal teaching document or encyclical on the situation there. Called With Burning Anxiety, it was written in German, not the usual Latin, and read out in all Catholic Churches in Germany on Palm Sunday, 1937. It endorsed the Jewish scriptures as worthy of respect and condemned the exaltation of race – in other words the Nazi obsession with the Aryan race. This so infuriated the Nazis they tried to confiscate copies of the encyclical. While that document was published by Pius XI and probably authored by Pacelli, it was also probably influenced by the thinking of a Jewish woman, Edith Stein. Stein, a philosopher, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. Stein was later arrested and died in Auschwitz in 1942. Her extensive body of writing, including the substantial letter she wrote to Pius XI, warning of the Nazis’ desire to destroy the Jews and their idolising of race and power, as well as her thinking on Mary, survives. Stein saw Mary as the ideal woman, nurturing and sustaining others. A woman imitate Mary, not only in the home but in the workplace, Stein wrote, “conscious of where there is want and where help is needed, intervening and regulating as far as it is possible….Then will she, like a good spirit, spread blessing everywhere.”A good spirit that spreads blessings everywhere – that is an aspiration inspired by one Jewish woman writing of another and one I cherish on the feast of the Assumption.