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In the Roman Catholic Church, beatification is a declaration by the Pope that the deceased is in a state of bliss, constituting the first step towards canonisation and permitting public veneration. While their beatification is admiral for Catholics, I discovered the personal histories of Dr. Edith Stein and Ruppert Mayer commendable, especially during the Nazi Germany period.
Dr. Edith Stein (or, Saint Teresia Benedicta a Cruce OCD; also known as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross or Saint Edith Stein; 12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Christianity and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She was canonised as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church in 1987; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.
She and 243 fellow Catholics of Jewish origin were arrested by the Gestapo in the Netherlands on 2 August 1942. They were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they were murdered in a gas chamber on 9 August 1942.
Rupert Mayer, S.J. (23 January 1876 – 1 November 1945) was a German Jesuit priest and a leading figure of the Catholic resistance to Nazism in Munich.
From 1914, Mayer volunteered as a chaplain in the First World War. He was initially assigned to a camp hospital; but was later made a Field Captain and sent to the fronts in France, Poland and Romania as chaplain to a division of soldiers. His bravery was legendary and he was held in great esteem by the soldiers.[6] When there was fighting at the front, Fr. Mayer would be found himself crawling along the ground from one soldier to the next talking to them, and administering the Sacraments to them. In December 1915, Fr. Mayer was the first chaplain to win the Iron Cross for bravery in recognition of his work with the soldiers at the front. In December 1916, he lost his left leg after it was injured in a grenade attack. He returned to Munich to convalesce and was referred to as the "Limping Priest".
In January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he began to close church-affiliated schools and started a campaign to discredit the religious orders in Germany. Mayer spoke out against this persecution from the pulpit of St. Michael's in downtown Munich and because he was a powerful influence in the city, the Nazis could not tolerate such a force to oppose them.
On 16 May 1937, the Gestapo ordered Mayer to stop speaking in public which he obeyed, but he continued to preach in church.Mayer spoke out against anti-Catholic baiting campaigns and fought against Nazi church policy. Since he believed that a Catholic could not be a National Socialist, conflict inevitably arose between him and the Nazis. He preached that Man must obey God more than men. His protests against the Nazis landed him several times in Landsberg prison. Mayer resolutely spoke out against the Nazi régime's evil in his lectures and sermons.
On 5 June 1937, he was arrested and found himself in "protective custody" in Stadelheim Prison for six weeks. When he became the target of defamatory attacks on the part of the Nazis, his Jesuit superiors allowed him to return to the pulpit to defend himself against slanders that the Nazis made during his silence. He was re-arrested and served a sentence of five months.
Mayer was arrested again 3 November 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp under the Kanzelparagraphen, a series of 19th-century laws that forbade the clergy to make political statements. He was released from there on the condition of a broad ban on preaching. The sixty-three-year old priest developed heart problems, From late 1944, he was interned in Ettal Monastery, mainly because the Nazis were afraid that he would die in the concentration camp, and thus become a martyr. He remained there until liberated by the US forces in May 1945.
Source: Wikipedia
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