Under towering marble figures of the Jews who founded Christianity, Pope John Paul II on Sunday decreed the first Jewish-born saint of the modern era: Edith Stein, a nun killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
From now on, the pope said, Catholics should commemorate all the Holocaust's murdered Jews each year when they mark the day Stein died - Aug. 9."In the martyr Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross so many differences meet and are resolved in peace," John Paul, using the name Stein chose when she became a nun, told the thousands filling St. Peter's Square.
"The value of her testimony is to render ever stronger the bridge of mutual understanding between Christ-ians and Jews," he said, calling Stein an "eminent daughter of Israel and a faithful daughter of the church."
It was a day filled with remarkable gestures of reconciliation: The Roman Catholic Church putting all its ceremony, pomp and grandeur into a tribute to a woman of Jewish heritage. Relatives of Holocaust victims - Stein's family - sharing a dais with the leader of Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Stein is believed to be the first Jewish-born saint since the early days of the church, said the Rev. Simion Fernandez, who oversaw the process toward canonization. Incomplete records and the prevalence of conversions, voluntary and forced, make it impossible to verify the claim.
Stein was born into an Orthodox Jewish German family on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, in 1891. An atheist, she joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1922 and later became a Carmelite nun.
In 1942, Adolf Hitler's regime ordered all the converts in the Netherlands shipped to Auschwitz to punish the Dutch bishops for speaking out against it.
Stein was offered a chance to escape deportation, the pope said, but turned it down.
"Why should I be excluded?" he quoted her as saying.
"If I cannot share the fate of my brothers and sisters, my life is, in a certain way, destroyed."
"We remember all of them today with profound respect," said John Paul, whose voice stayed strong throughout the 21/2-hour ceremony.
"From now on, in celebrating the memory of our new saint, we also cannot forget the Shoah, which slowly worked at the elimination of a people, costing the lives of millions of Jewish brothers and sisters," he declared, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.
In Jerusalem, the Simon Wiesenthal Center protested Stein's canonization.
"She could in no way symbolize the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust because she chose to leave Judaism," said one center official, Ephraim Zuroff, calling the decision "a terrible mistake."
In naming Stein a saint, the church credits her with interceding almost a half-century after her death to save a toddler's life.
More than a decade ago, at 21/2, Teresia Benedicta McCarthy of Brockton, Mass., swallowed an overdose of Tylenol and suffered such severe liver damage that she was put on a priority list for a transplant. Then, overnight, she recovered.
Benedicta's doctor called the recovery miraculous, and the church agreed - saying the only explanation were the prayers that the McCarthys and their friends offered to Stein.