In his insightful and now classic book about St Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton reflects on the cultural and religious importance of saints at certain points or epochs of history. Chesterton calls these heroes of holiness powerful “antidotes” against the moral, intellectual and spiritual diseases of their times. He writes:

“Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age.”

Chesterton extends this point with his memorable observation that each generation does not necessarily receive a saint that makes it comfortable, but saints who he says “the people need”.

It is also true that some of the people we recognise as saints were not only timely for their times but they are, as the German Catholic philosopher and writer Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977) named them, “classical” men and women.

What von Hildebrand means is that these people provide a living and noble example that is perennial. They are not plaster statues but people more alive than we are. Their personalities and their prophetic lives remain inspiring across time. This is especially true of the saints who face the mystery of profound evil by the astounding witness of their lives, and very often – as Chesterton suggests – by their martyrs’ deaths.

It is through the saints (both canonised and lower-case), as Pope Benedict XVI recognised, that the Church holds one of her most eloquent superpowers. She recognises and celebrates a type of family tree of goodness, love and beauty that can illuminate the darkness and confusion of our own times.

This week we can highlight two such people: St Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941) and St Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) (1891-1942). Both were consecrated religious: Fr Maximilian was a very active evangelising Conventual Franciscan Friar and Sister Teresa Benedicta was a philosopher and a contemplative mystic Carmelite nun.

Both are commemorated as martyrs (marked on the day on which they were killed) within a week of each other in August. Both were born within the borders of what is Poland today, and both were ruthlessly exterminated in the Auschwitz death factory along with whole generations of Jewish people and others. Both challenged the way the Church defines saints: St Maximilian because he volunteered to be starved to death in the place of a fellow Pole who was a husband and father; St Edith because she and her sister were gassed as Jewish Catholics.

Both saints were championed by Pope St John Paul II, especially because they provided deep witness to what he called “the culture of life” and the “civilisation of love”.

Saints Maximilian and Teresa Benedicta – in their lives leading up to their martyrdom –  wrote, published and taught extensively about authentic human flourishing and dignity, and both gave early and persistent warning of the anti-humanity and fatal falsity of 20th-century totalitarian ideologies.

St Teresa Benedicta was born into a devout Jewish family and her journey of faith brought her to agnosticism, then to a gentle philosophical personalism, then to an overwhelmingly vivid mystical relationship with Christ in the Catholic faith from which she never wavered.

She developed a way to synthesise the rich scriptural fidelity of her Jewish origins, with the intense attention of her years as a philosopher, including some years teaching women with her groundbreaking insights into the ontology of women and “feminine” vocation. Her last years brought her luminous mind and heart into engagement with the work of St Thomas Aquinas and the mystical theology of the Cross of Christ.

St Maximilian was a cradle Catholic who early in life had a mystical insight into the importance of consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary in overcoming the dark anti-Christian forces of his time. He obtained doctoral degrees in philosophy and theology. Despite his health being damaged by tuberculosis, Fr Maximilian applied his energies and mind to the task of creating an innovative publishing and broadcasting venture, which revolved around a devotional community and a junior seminar of Franciscan dedication at Niepokalanów near Warsaw.

Between 1930 and 1936, Kolbe took his publication and work to Shanghai, China and Nagasaki, Japan. In the latter he founded a Franciscan monastery as he did in India. The publishing house expanded its circulation of publications to a daily newspaper, the circulation of which was 137,000 for weekdays and over double for the weekend issue.

Both our stars of sanity met with the mechanised and murderous malice of Nazism, and both were exterminated with whole generations of Jewish people and others in Auschwitz. In a way they are twins in holiness, even though their vocational paths began in different ways.

The example, thought and faith of these two saints for the work and outlook of the Thomas More Centre cannot be underestimated, especially because they provide some foundational ideas for building formative friendships and communities.

St Teresa Benedicta, for instance, had a fine eye for observing the inner character of her dear friends. She ascribes to them important roles in her own journey of faith and maturity.

One outstanding experience involved her visit in 1918 to a tragically widowed wife and fellow academic, Anna Reinach. Anna’s husband Adolf had been a greatly admired and gifted member of the philosophical circle of friends in Göttingen. Expecting the widow to be fractured by grief, Edith found instead that Anna, a faithful Lutheran Christian, was offering consolation and calm to her husband’s many devastated friends.

Later in her life in her autobiography, Edith reflected on this experience and its significance in her pilgrimage of faith and into the Faith. She called it her first encounter with the Cross: “For the first time I was seeing with my very eyes the church, born from its Redeemer’s sufferings, triumphant over the sting of death. That was the moment my unbelief collapsed.”

Let us pray that the Thomas More Centre can build up such communities of light and grace.

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre