On the feast of St. Teresia Benedicta

August 9, 2010 at 8:07 am (Uncategorized)

Today is the feast of St. Edith Stein. It is very difficult to decide on just one thing to say about her, since – at the risk of sounding like an idiot – she’s my saint, and it’s hard for me to imagine anyone reading this site who wouldn’t say the same thing. She was an academic and philosopher in the contemporary world who found grace by doing academic things: famously, she converted after reading – from cover to cover in one sitting – the Autobiography of St. Teresa.  She gave as she received, and wrote luminous works which are themselves very apt to be conduits of grace to academics- I was first struck by her account of the theology of Pseudo- Dionysus (trans. by Rudolf Allers, which appeared a few decades back in The Thomist) and later by her book on John of the Cross (The Science of the Cross) which is particularly good at presenting the severity of John’s penance in a way that lets a contemporary reader see its beauty and reasonableness.

Though there are a hundred more significant things to say about her, one of the things that strikes me today about her life is that it gives a powerful lesson about the dominant anti – political fantasy that men fall prey to. It takes some back story to explain this: though St. Edith was murdered at Auschwitz, she was arrested in Holland, and the immediate occasion for the arrest was a Nazi reprisal against twelve Dutch bishops who insisted that they should publicly condemn Nazi persecution even though they were told in advance, by the Nazis themselves, that any such public condemnation would lead to reprisals against Catholics of Jewish descent in Holland. The life of Edith Stein and many others, in other words, was the price paid for the Bishops to speak out in condemnation. One can only imagine the sort of indignant condemnations that could have been leveled against the Bishops at the time: hadn’t they simply murdered their flock to congratulate themselves for their own righteousness? Every Catholic in Europe knew about this, of course, and Bishops begged Pius XII not to repeat what the Dutch Bishops did. He didn’t completely follow their advice, and he played with matches by publicly saying in a Christmas radio address in 1943 that people were being marched to death for no other reason than their race. But we all know how the story plays out now: Pius is condemned for failing to speak out. Setting aside the fact that the charge is false, to make it is an infallible sign of living in a political fantasy world that believes that there is no cost to attaining political goods. Pius, say his critics, should have just “spoken out”. It was certainly a political good to speak out against evil, but it never crosses anyone’s mind to ask if this good, in concrete situations, might come at a price that they themselves would not be willing to pay – or even if it came at a cost that would make them argue that it would be foolish to speak out at all. The reality of Pius’s situation is a marvelous and perfect example of political reality – that there are competing and incompatible goods, and it takes tremendous wisdom to decide between them and tremendous courage to make the decision and keep with it. The caricature of Pius’s situation is a marvelous and perfect example of political fantasy – there are goods that everyone but the morally vicious or the hopelessly stupid can easily see and which could be easily implemented if the vicious or stupid did not hold the reins of power (which they clearly do now, of course). All people at all times are tempted by this  fundamentally anti-political fantasy, but we have developed tools in recent years to fan this fantasy into white – hot intensity. The condemnation of Pius is part of a larger anti – political fantasy world that supports and is cultivated by Michael Moore films, conservative talk radio, media-driven ballot initiatives, bloggers that live off of promoting the two minutes hate over some media outrage of the week, a media-educated culture that is trained to react thoughtlessly and buy what they are told, etc. Some part of this is necessary and even desirable,  but it needs to be recognized as opposed to political prudence. Popular government makes the difficult demand of requiring leaders who are willing to be unpopular, since to actually do good things will come with costs that will make any leader hated both in his own time and frequently even in the judgment of history.