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Jan. 18, 2005 Edith Stein, the daughter of Jewish parents Siegfried Stein and Auguste Courant, was born October 12, 1891 in Breslau, Germany, today known as Wroclaw, Poland. Before World War I, she studied at the Universities of Breslau and Goettingen, and after the war, at the University of Freiburg, where she received her Doctor of Philosophy degree summa cum laude. Later she became an assistant of Edmund Husserl, a philosopher and the mentor of Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Edith had given up Judaism at an early age, and, inspired by reading a biography of St. Teresa of Avila, opted to convert to Roman Catholicism, being baptized on January 1, 1922. In the coming years she distinguished herself as a lay author, translator and lecturer, but with the rise of the Nazis, her activities became more circumscribed, so she became a postulant nun, joining the Order of Discalced Carmelites, at the convent in Cologne, and taking her final vows in 1935, under the name of Sister Teresia Benedicta. On December 31, 1938, because of heightened pressure from the Nazis, she crossed secretly into Holland, entering the convent at Echt, where she would write the last of her 17 books. On August 2, 1942, she was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Auschwitz, where it is alleged she died in the gas chambers on August 9, 1942, though holocaust revisionists question it. At the very least, she was never heard of again. On August 9, 1981, Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a married American man with ten children, was ordained as a Catholic priest in Damascus, Syria by Patriarch Maximos Hakim. Since his ordination took place on the anniversary of the death of Edith Stein, Father McCarthy, of Newton, Massachusetts, began to take a keen interest in the philosophy and writings of the Jewish nun, naming his next daughter Terisia Benedicta in her honor. On the occasion of the absence of the elder McCarthys from their home, their teenage children, now in charge of the household, came down with the flu, resorting to Tylenol as a remedy. Little Terisia Benedicta, now 2, was taken to the hospital on March 20, 1987, having ingested a large overdose of Tylenol, which she thought was candy. She was suffering spasms and loss of consciousness. The amount of the medicament in her bloodstreams was 16 times toxic levels, and it looked as if a liver transplantation might be necessary, but no liver compatible with her age and size was to be found. On the 21st, McCarthy led his friends and acquaintances in a crusade of prayer. On the 24th, the child had made a remarkable recovery. After nine years of study, the Medical Board of The Congregation of the Cause of Saints voted, in February, 1997, that the child's recovery had been a miracle, with Harvard Medical School's Dr. Kleinman testifying that there was no scientific explanation for the phenomenon. On February 16, 1998, the decree of canonization of Sister Terisia Benedicta of the Cross was entered in the Acta Apostolica Sedis, the official record of the Vatican. One of the two miracles required for sainthood was the recovery of Terisia McCarthy from her Tylenol overdose by the posthumous miraculous intervention of Sister Terisia Benedicta. In other words, the Vatican is claiming that the nun, dead 45 years, heard the prayers of the priest and his circle, and cured the girl in Massachusetts. This was one of the miracles she needed to be canonized. It takes a lot of gall! ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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