Pope Points to Saints who Conquered 'Hell on Earth' of Nazi Camps

(09 Aug 09 - RV) Edith Stein, Maximilian Kolbe, Pope Pontian and Lawrence, all saints and all martyrs for the faith.


They are a sign of the “true face of God and the true face of man” said Pope Benedict XVI Sunday, as for a second week in a row he drew from upcoming feast days of saints for his Angelus reflection, delivered in the tiny enclosed courtyard of the Papal Summer Palace in Castel Gandolfo.
This week the Pope wanted to concentrate on the stark difference between "Christian humanism" and "atheistic humanism".


Pope Benedict said saints are witnesses of “this antithesis which spans history, but that with the contemporary nihilism, has come to a crucial point".


And so he cited in particular the World War II martyrs Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein.
Edith Stein was “born in the Jewish faith and was won over by Christ in adulthood, she became a Carmelite nun and sealed her life with martyrdom”. St. Maximilian Kolbe, is a “son of Poland and St. Francis of Assisi”. Both are martyrs killed in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

"The Nazi concentration camp – noted Pope Benedict - as every death camp, can be considered an extreme symbol of evil, of the hell that comes to earth when man forgets God, and when He is replaced, usurping from Him the right to decide what is good and what is evil, to give life or to take life. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not confined to the death camp. It is rather the culmination of an extensive and widespread reality of often nebulous boundaries. "


This reality is precisely the antithesis that became clear at the end of the second millennium, "the opposition between atheistic humanism and Christian humanism, between holiness and nihilism”.

"On the one hand - continued the pope - there are philosophies and ideologies, but also on an increasing scale ways of thinking and acting, which extol the freedom of man as the only principle, as an alternative to God, and thus transform man into a god, whose system behaviour is of an arbitrary nature. On the other hand, we note the saints, who, practicing the gospel of love, make reason of their hope, they show the true face of God who is Love, and at the same time, the true face of man, created in image and likeness of God. "


From them we can learn, concluded Pope Benedict “especially our priests, evangelical heroism that inspires us, without fear, to give our life for the salvation of souls. Love conquers death!”.