Science and Faith Are Not Mutually Incompatible

Albert Einstein honored Georges Lemaitre, the priest, physicist and mathematician whose Big Bang Theory is now the scientifically accepted origin of the universe.

March 11, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

In 2016, an issue of the former Catholic newspaper Our Sunday Visitor profiled some eye-opening research in an article entitled “Young People Are Leaving the Faith: Here’s Why” (August 27, 2016). It was an analysis of two national studies conducted by The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) to provide insight into the reasons why a third of “millennials” who were raised Catholic reject the faith of their parents as young adults.

In the CARA studies, “Millennials” are defined as those born in 1982 or later. The majority of the young adults who responded with comments on the research indicated that they left their faith for science, concluding that Catholicism cannot be reconciled with science at the high school and university level. They report finding little in the Catholic presentation of faith that challenges that view. The OSV  summary included a sampling of the responses behind their decisions:

“As I learn more about the world around me and understand things that I once did not, I find the thought of an all-powerful being to be less and less believable.”

“Catholic beliefs aren’t based on fact… nothing can be disproved, but it certainly shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

“I realized that religion is in complete contradiction with the rational and scientific world, and to continue to subscribe to a religion would be hypocritical.”

“As I started to enjoy math and science more, I realized the discrepancy between religion and science… Catholicism especially did seem to clash fairly well.”

“[Faith] no longer fits into what I understand of the universe.”

These responses reflect a pattern of thought familiar to many parents of young adult Catholics and others concerned about the dismal conclusions of the CARA research. This is also one of the most common pleas I hear on a global scale from parents and grandparents and other readers of this blog.

I must seem to be an enigma to those who have left our faith or are pondering doing so. Judging from my posts of the last ten years, though it was never intended to be so, I seem to devote almost equal time to both faith and science. For example, we have recently collected in one place a number of posts dedicated to the understanding of Sacred Scripture. We called this collection, “The Bible Speaks.” Apparently it speaks quite loudly. There are presently some 43 titles in that collection, and some have broken records among the readership of this blog.

But there is a similar phenomenon that has been taking place in more recent years. I have also written several posts about science and especially the sciences of cosmology, astronomy and particle physics. One of my friends here who comes to the library where I work has asked me for copies of posts over the last few years. He recently complained of feeling a sense of whiplash, bouncing between science and religion, but he said he finds both to be fascinating. To demonstrate this phenomenon one recent post has broken all records in numbers of readers and especially in numbers of readers who come to it again and again, and who share it. That post is “Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?” It seems that many people believed that he did, but I have made a case for the opposite. What strikes me most about that post is the unfathomable number of educational institutions of higher learning that are also sharing it and recommending it.

The same has held true for another recent post that blends principles of both science and faith entitled “The Higgs Boson God Particle: All Things Visible and Invisible.” Our Editor has observed and commented on the high number of academic institutions that have also been visiting religious titles on this blog. Some of these institutions are dedicated to scientific research, and yet here they are suddenly delving into the mysteries of Catholic faith. And yet no one is denouncing anything. They seem to come here to observe and to learn, not to refute.

True Believers

I have some firsthand experience with the challenging questions posed by science for the faith of younger Catholics. A decade ago at one university, the son of a reader of this blog, a science major, sent me a letter filled with questions. The previous summer, his mother had emailed him with a link to one of my forays into the science of cosmology entitled, “Science and Faith and the Big Bang Theory of Creation.” In his letter to me the student wrote that he pretty much just dismissed the post as irrelevant without having read it. He read his mother’s email, but didn’t bother clicking on the link until two months later. The student wrote that he grew up in a devout family that accepted Catholic teachings about the world and universe without question. He attended Catholic schools until switching to a public high school, then abandoned his faith in adolescence because his interest in science made faith seem irrelevant.

He believed, or rather was led to believe, that science and religion are mutually incompatible, unable to coexist in a person of science. “The bias fed to me in academia,” he wrote in a much later letter, “was that science is the new source of all faith, and to be taken seriously as a scientist requires setting aside the faith of my parents in this new world order.” And thus ended his identity as a Catholic. It is a troubling story given that for every convert entering the Catholic faith in America in recent years, more than six others left.

The exit of millennials is not at all for the reasons typically put forward by older Catholics who become disenchanted with their Church. In the CARA study, Catholic scandal and the Latin Mass are barely touched upon as influential reasons. And the millennials are not leaving to embrace some other faith. They now constitute the fastest growing expression of religious belief in America — the “Nones,” who self-identify with no religious affiliation at all. A decade ago in “A Crisis of Faith, Not of Worship,” a soul-stirring post at The Catholic Thing, (Aug. 24, 2016) Father Mark A. Pilon made this point well:

“The real underlying problem is simple: it’s a massive loss of faith… About thirty years ago, a reliable survey revealed that only about 30 percent of Catholics believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist any longer. Why didn’t the bishops call an emergency meeting to reflect on this loss of faith, as they did in 2002 to deal with sexual abuse? … The highest priority has to be this basic question: What caused this massive loss of faith, and how do we work to resurrect that lost faith?”

These are very relevant questions, but some have already begun to change. In early 2025 I wrote a post entitled “On the Great Biblical Adventure, the Truth Will Make You Free.” Something happened over the preceding year that signaled a great cultural change toward openness to religion and especially biblical studies. Book publishers have observed that Bible sales greatly increased by double digits toward the end of 2024. A lot of factors were proposed as contributing to this, including the election of 2024, the assassination attempts on the leading U.S. presidential candidate at that time, and later the assassination of Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. These were inflection points causing broad swaths of America and elsewhere in the free world to pause and reassess where we are and where we are going. The biblical interest and its resulting growth of interest in faith also has continued to this day. For those who have suggested that Catholic leaders need to take advantage of this trend, a good start would be to moderate “climate change” as an example of our highest priority while abandoning other priorities, such as respect for life. Our hierarchy might also want to reconsider its revulsion for the Traditional Latin Mass and for those who find spiritual comfort in it, many of whom are younger Catholics. And a prohibition against kneeling to receive the True Presence of Christ is simply mind-boggling for true believers. We cannot welcome back a generation of young believers by browbeating them to abandon the evidence for their belief.

The Folly of Leaving Faith Behind for Science

The answer to the suspected disconnect between science and faith is not as simple as seeking relevancy by replacing faith with science. True believers in both find not only “common ground” but windows to the universe that will leave the believer in awe. The student who had been writing to me, for example, is now on his way back. As time wore on, his mother asked him what he thought about the post she sent him. He scurried to find “Science and Faith and the Big Bang Theory of Creation” buried in his inbox, and then he actually read it.

He later wrote that he was “bowled over” by it, and that it turned on its head the entire scientific orthodoxy that had been fed to him claiming that only freedom from religion could legitimately engage him with the world of science. Science with a bias against faith experience prevented him from seeing the bigger picture.

This student had many questions. First and foremost among them was this: “How is it that you, a person obviously well versed in science, could endure such injustice and still also believe in God?” It was a good question, but the answer requires something other than science’s doubts about faith. A better beginning question was the one I posed in return: “How is it that you, a science major in an American university, never before heard or read that the scientist now considered to be the Father of The Big Bang and Modern Cosmology was a Belgian astrophysicist who was also a Catholic priest?”

That question generated several letters over the last two years, suggesting BTSW posts that he has read and reread and shown to other science majors at his school. Before I get into that, however, I want to describe another development that I read some years ago by Beckie Strum in The Wall Street Journal: “U.S. Loses Top School Ranking to U.K.’s Oxford” (WSJ, Sept. 22, 2016).

For the first time, a university outside the United States was ranked the best university in the world, unseating the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as number one. The U.K.’s Oxford University, the oldest college in the English speaking world, founded in the year 1096, took the top spot in the World University Rankings. Oxford knocked CalTech down to second place, MIT to fifth, and Harvard to sixth bin 2016. At this writing, Oxford has retained that place of primacy for a decade.

Oxford is also host to something missing from more narrowly focused American universities. Oxford is home to a research center called the Ian Ramsey Center for Science & Religion. Its Research Director at the time was Father Andrew Pinsent, a Catholic priest and particle physicist who was formerly on the science team at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research.

Father Andrew Pinsent holds a Ph.D. in particle physics from Oxford, a Ph.D. in philosophy from St. Louis University, and advanced degrees in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He is a member of the United Kingdom Institute of Physics and the Vatican Conference for Scientists, and presently serves on the faculty and formation staff of a major U.S. seminary.

Father Pinsent has also been a guest writer at this blog. His post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang” was the final leverage that my university friend and correspondent needed to accept the fact that something essential has been missing from his education and exposure in both science and religion. The fact that his science education did not include the story of Georges Lemaitre — the astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and Catholic priest who changed the mind of Albert Einstein on the nature and origin of the universe — told him that it was science, and not faith, that deprived him of a wider world view.

This is a story that has been covered and uncovered at Beyond These Stone Walls  in a series of science posts that has run parallel to our collection on Sacred Scripture. Reading these, and especially exploring Father Pinsent’s work, has opened my friend’s eyes as a young Catholic scientist, but it was a part of Father Andrew Pinsent’s guest post that more fully opened my own eyes when he wrote:

“What is to be done to help raise the profile of people like Fr Georges Lemaitre? Among Catholics with some kind of popular outreach, Fr Gordon MacRae, through his widely-read blog Beyond These Stone Walls, has done more than almost anyone I know in recent years to draw attention to Fr Lemaitre. Inspired in part by Fr Gordon’s work, my colleagues and I in England have put together a series of posters called the “Catholic Knowledge Network.”

— Fr Andrew Pinsent, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang”

I think I have come to understand Father Georges Lemaitre’s science whose footprint in the history of modern cosmology is parallel to that of Albert Einstein. They were colleagues who became friends, primarily through Einstein’s great respect for Fr Lemaitre’s gifted mathematical and scientific mind. After a lecture about his theory of relativity at a European university in the 1930s, Einstein was approached by a science writer who asked him whether he thought anyone in the audience really comprehended his work. Einstein’s simple answer was “Lemaitre, certainly. As for the rest…”

The scientific dogma of the age was that the universe was static, eternal, and unchanging. Einstein also embraced this view, but it dismissed the beliefs of established religion that the universe was created from nothing.

However, Georges Lemaitre and Russian mathematician Aleksander Friedmann had more faith in Einstein’s mathematics than other scientists of their time. At first, Einstein payed little attention when they used his own equations to conclude that the universe is not static but expanding, and its rate of expansion is increasing when all established science said the opposite.

It was the American astronomer, Edwin Hubble (in whose honor the Hubble Space Telescope is named) who in 1929 discovered physical evidence that Lemaitre is right, that the universe is in fact expanding. Two years later in 1931, Father Georges Lemaitre concluded that the universe began “On a day without yesterday,” 13.8 billion years ago, with the explosion of a primordial atom from which space, time, and matter were created.

The idea was ridiculed, and “The Big Bang” was a pejorative term some scientists used to taunt the physicist priest. But he was right, and he turned science on its head with this revelation that has since been demonstrated with the discovery of cosmic background radiation emanating from The Big Bang.

Einstein, who first disagreed, ended up applauding the idea as “The most beautiful explanation of creation I have ever heard.” It was a bigger bang for science than even Einstein realized. It took the language of mathematics to comprehend that it points to what faith always told us: a universe arising out of nothing.

I think I finally came to some rudimentary understanding of the science behind this through the language of mathematics. For this I owe thanks to Robyn Arianrhod, and her book, Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics (Oxford University Press 2005):

“In 1932, Lemaitre sowed the seeds of the Big Bang theory when he suggested that the universe had started as an explosion of a ‘primeval atom’ that… continued expanding from that explosive beginning. Some of the world’s most ancient creation myths have also imagined the world exploding from some sort of cosmic seed…”

“In 1970, English physicists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose showed that Einstein’s equations predicted the universe had expanded not from a tiny piece of matter located in an otherwise empty cosmos, but from a single point in four-dimensional spacetime. This meant that the Big Bang was not an ordinary explosion which took place at a specific three-dimensional location at a given time on the cosmic stage, but that Space and time themselves were actually created in the explosion, along with all matter and energy. Before this point … there was no time and no space. No geometry, no matter, nothing. The universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.”

— Einstein’s Heroes, p. 187

“The universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.” Take a moment to ponder that conclusion of science and it will sound a lot like a tenet of faith. Science, mathematics, and faith all open a window to the universe onto the same panoramic vista. And the awe this truth evokes is at one and the same time the comprehension of science and the inspiration of faith.

And as for my student-friend’s first question about the mystery of suffering in the light of faith, I can only gather up some prescientific humility to echo God against the protest of Job:

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?… Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?”

— Job 38: 4, 31

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post.

You might also like these other posts from Beyond These Stone Walls about the great adventure of science and faith:

On the Great Biblical Adventure, the Truth Will Make You Free

Science and Faith and the Big Bang Theory of Creation

The Higgs Boson God Particle: All Things Visible and Invisible

Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — Edith Stein — are honored this week as martyrs of charity and sacrifice.

In a post some years ago I invited our readers to join my friend Pornchai Moontri and me in a personal Consecration to Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s dual movements: the Militia of the Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross. Our Consecration took place at Mass on the night of August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption, and the day after Saint Maximilian’s Feast Day. Visit the website of the Militia of the Immaculata for instructions for enrolling in the Militia Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross.

We’re very moved by the number of people who have pledged to join us in this Consecration. The invitation remains always open.

Consecration as members of Saint Maximilian’s M.I. or Knights at the Foot of the Cross does not mean I plan to take on any more suffering or that I will never again complain. It does not even mean that I accept with open arms whatever crosses I bear and embrace them.

A person who is unjustly imprisoned must do all in his power to reverse that plight just as a person with cancer must do everything possible to be restored to health. Consecration does not mean we will simply acquiesce to suffering and look for more. It means we embrace the suffering of Christ, and offer our own as a share in it. In the end, I know I cannot empty myself, as Christ did, but I can perhaps attain the attitude of “Simon of Cyrene: Compelled to Carry the Cross,” of which my own is but a splinter.

I have written in the past that history has a tendency to treat its events lightly. The centuries have made Saint Patrick, for example, a sort of whimsical figure. History has distorted the fact that he became the saint he is after great personal suffering. Patrick was kidnapped by Irish raiders at the age of 16, forced from his home and family, taken across the Irish Sea and forced into slavery.

The life and death of Saint Maximilian are still too recent to be subjected to the colored glasses through which we often view history and sainthood. As with nearly all the saints — and with some of us who simply struggle to believe — great suffering was imposed on Maximilian Kolbe and he responded in a way that revealed a Christ-centered rather than self-centered life. What happened to Father Maximilian Kolbe must not be removed from what the Germans would call his “sitz im leben,” the “setting in life” of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. As evil as they were, they were the forges in which Maximilian cast off self and took on the person of Christ.

Scene from the 1978 mini-series “Holocaust”

“And the Winner Is . . .”

Do you remember the television “mini-series” productions of the 1970s and 1980s? After the great success of bringing Alex Haley’s “Roots” to the screen, several other forays into history were aired in our living rooms. One of them was a superb and compelling series entitled “Holocaust” that debuted on NBC on April 16, 1978. It was a brilliant and powerful example of television’s potential.

“Holocaust” won several Emmy Awards for NBC in 1978 for outstanding Limited Series, Best Director (Marvin Chomsky), Best Screenplay (Gerald Green), Best Actor (Michael Moriarty), Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and a number of Supporting Actor and other awards. As a historical narrative, however, “Holocaust” was deeply disturbing and shook an otherwise comfortable generation all too inclined to want to forget and move on. That was a complaint during the famous Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946.

Just two years after the Allied Invasion of Germany and Poland ended the war and exposed the Death Camps, writers complained that Americans had lost interest and were not reading about the Nuremberg Trials. The aftermath of war revealed the sheer evil of the Nazi Final Solution, and it was more than most of us could bear to look at — so many did not look.

As I wrote in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich,” there are some who would have you believe that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the 20th Century. Viewing “Holocaust” (the miniseries) would quickly shatter any such revisionist history. Its first episode was so graphic in its depiction of Nazi oppression, and caused me so much anguish, that I struggled with whether to watch the rest.

I was 25 years old when it first aired, and finishing senior year at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school in New Hampshire. I was a double major in philosophy and psychology, and was in the middle of writing my psychology thesis on the relationship between trauma and depression when “Holocaust” kept me awake all night.

The morning after that first episode, I sought out a friend, an elderly Benedictine monk on campus who recommended the series to me. I thought he might tell me to turn my television off, but I was wrong. “This happened in my lifetime,” he said. “We cannot run from it. So don’t look away. Stare straight into its heart of darkness, and never forget what you see.”

He was right, and his words were eerily similar to those of biographer, George Weigel, who wrote of Pope John Paul II and his interest in Saint Maximilian Kolbe in Witness to Hope (HarperCollins, 1999):

Maximilian Kolbe . . . was the ‘saint of the abyss’ — the man who looked into the modern heart of darkness and remained faithful to Christ by sacrificing his life for another in the Auschwitz starvation bunker while helping his cellmates die with dignity and hope.

— Witness to Hope, p. 447

That was what the Holocaust was: “the modern heart of darkness.” I have been a student of the Holocaust since, but I am no closer to understanding it than I was on that sleepless night in 1978. As I asked in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich”:

“How did a society come to stand behind the hateful rhetoric of one man and his political machine? How did masses of people become convinced that any ideology of the state was worth the horror unfolding before their eyes?”

We have all been reading about the breakdown of faith in Europe, and about how decades-old scandals are now being used to justify the abandonment of Catholicism in European culture. This is not a new phenomenon. This madness engulfed Europe just eighty years ago, and before it was over, six million of our spiritual ancestors were deprived of liberty, and then life, for being Jews.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” exterminated fully two-thirds of the Jewish men, women, and children of Europe — and millions of others who either stood in his way or spoke the truth. Among those imprisoned and murdered were close to 12,000 Catholic priests and thousands more women religious and other Catholics. The determination to rid Europe of the Judeo-Christian faith did not begin with claims of sexual abuse, and this is not the first time such claims were used to further that agenda.

The Great Lie and Revealed Truth

This of all weeks keeps me riveted on the Holocaust.  It was in this week that two of my dearest spiritual friends were murdered a year apart at Auschwitz by that madman, Hitler, and his monstrous Third Reich.  Father Maximilian Kolbe traded his life for that of a fellow prisoner on August 14, 1941, and Edith Stein — who became Carmelite Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — was dragged from a cattle train and murdered along with her sister, Rosa, immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

We must not forget this line from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Vol. 1, Ch.10, 1925): “The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” In order for a lie to disseminate and prevail, the truth must be controlled. In 1933, the Third Reich imposed the “Editor’s Law” in Germany requiring that editors and publishers join the Third Reich’s Literary Chamber or cease publishing. In 1933 there were over 400 Catholic newspapers and magazines published in Germany. By 1935 there were none.

The Nazi law was imposed in each country invaded by the Reich. In Poland, Father Maximilian was one of many priests sent to prison for his continued writings, but time in prison did not teach him the lesson intended by the Nazis. He was imprisoned again, and he would not emerge alive from his second sentence at Auschwitz. He was not alone in this. Nearly 12,000 priests were sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

“Come, Let Us Go For Our People.”

Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children in a devout Jewish family in Germany. She was born on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on October 12, l891. As a young woman, Edith broke her mother’s heart by abandoning her Jewish faith in adolescent rebellion. She was also brilliant, and it was difficult to win an argument with her using reason and logic. She was a master of both.

Edith received her doctorate in philosophy under the noted phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, and taught at a German university when the Nazis came to power in 1933. During this time of upheaval, Edith converted to Catholicism after stumbling across the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. “This is the truth,” Edith declared after reading it through in one sleepless night. A few years after her conversion, Edith Stein entered a Carmelite convent in Germany taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Blessed by the Cross).

March 27, 1939 was Passion Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. In response to a declaration of Adolf Hitler that the Jews would bring about their own extinction, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross wrote a private note to her Carmelite superior. She offered herself in prayer as expiation against the Anti-Christ who had cast all of Europe into a spiritual stranglehold. In her letter to her superior, Sister Teresa offered herself as expiation for the Church, for the Jews, for her native Germany, and for world peace.

As the Nazi horror overtook Europe, Sister Teresa grew fearful that she was placing her entire convent at risk because of her Jewish roots. Edith was then assigned to a Carmelite Convent in Holland. Her sister, Rosa, who also converted to Catholicism, joined her there as a postulant.

Catholics in France, Belgium, Holland and throughout Europe organized to rescue tens of thousands of Jewish children from deportation to the Death Camps. Philip Friedman, in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (The Jewish Publication Society, 1980) commended the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands for their public protest about the Nazi deportation of Jews from Holland. In retaliation for those bishops’ actions, however, even Jews who had converted to Catholicism were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz.

A 2010 book by Paul Hamans — Edith Stein and Companions: On the Way to Auschwitz — details the horror of that day. Hundreds of Catholic Jews were arrested in Holland in retaliation for the bishops’ open rebellion, and most were never seen again. This information stands in stark contrast to the often heard revisionist history that Pope Pius XII “collaborated” with the Nazis through his “silence.” He was credited by the chief rabbi of Rome, Eugenio Zolli, with having personally saved over 860,000 Jews and preventing untold numbers of deaths.

The last words heard from Sister Teresa as she was forced aboard a cattle car packed with victims were spoken to her sister, Rosa, “Come, let us go for our people.” On August 9, 1942, Sister Teresa emerged from the cramped human horror of that cattle train into the Auschwitz Death Camp to face The Sorting.

Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel described The Sorting:

“How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, never to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukranian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can’t do it. And because I’m a writer and teacher, I don’t understand how Europe’s most cultured nation could have done that.”

That August 9th, Edith Stein went no further into the depths of Auschwitz than The Sorting. Some SS officer glared at this brilliant 50-year-old nun in the tattered remains of her Carmelite habit, and declared that she was not fit for work. This woman who had worked every day of her life, who taught philosophy to Germany’s graduate students, who scrubbed convent floors each night, was determined to be “unfit for work” by a Nazi officer who knew it was a death sentence.

Edith and Rosa were taken directly to a cottage along with 113 others, packed in, the doors sealed, and they were gassed to death. Their remains, like those of Maximilian Kolbe a year earlier, went unceremoniously up in smoke to drift through the sky above Auschwitz. And Europe thinks it would be better off now without faith!

“Thus the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the Cross. (Simeon’s) prophecy announced the Passion, the fight between light and darkness that already showed itself before the crib … The star of Bethlehem shines in the night of sin. The shadow of the Cross falls on the light that shines from the crib. This light is extinguished in the darkness that is Good Friday, but it rises all the more brilliantly in the sun of grace on the morning of the Resurrection.

“The way of the incarnate Son of God leads through the Cross and Passion to the glory of the Resurrection. In His company the way of everyone of us, indeed of all humanity, leads through suffering and death to this same glorious goal.”

— Edith Stein/Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross