Aleteia: Meet the Only Nun Sentenced to Death by a Nazi Court

Defiant Sister Maria Restituta hung crucifixes on the walls of her hospital, and wouldn't take them down

LARRY PETERSON APRIL 12, 2016

Source: Aleteia

Sister Maria Restituta began Lent of 1942 under arrest. She was taken on Ash Wednesday. Her crime: “hanging crucifixes.” She was sentenced to death. The following year, on Tuesday of Holy Week, she was executed.

May 1, 1894, was a happy day for Anton and Marie Kafka. Marie had just given birth to her sixth child and mom and daughter were both doing fine. The proud parents named their new baby girl Helena. Devout Catholics, Anton and Marie had Helena baptized into the faith only 13 days after her birth.

The ceremony took place in the Church of the Assumption, in the town of Husovice, located in Austria. Before Helena reached her second birthday, the family had settled in the city of Vienna.

Helena was a good student and worked hard. She received her First Holy Communion in St. Brigitta Church during May of 1905 and was confirmed in the same church a year later. After eight years of school she spent another year in housekeeping school and, by the age of 15, was working as a servant, a cook, and being trained as a nurse.

At age 19, she became an assistant nurse at Lainz City Hospital. This was Helena’s first contact with the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity and she was immediately moved to become a sister herself, and on October 23, 1915, became Sister Maria Restituta. She made her final vows a year later and began working as a nurse.

By the end of World War I, Sister Restituta was the lead surgical nurse at Modling Hospital in Vienna. She had never heard of Adolf Hitler and could never have imagined that one day, because of this man, her beloved nation would be annexed into the German Republic.

On March 12, 1938, the Austrian Nazi Party pulled off a successful coup d’etat taking control of the government. The unforeseen and unimagined had come to pass, and Hitler now controlled the once proud Austrian nation.

Sister Restituta was very outspoken in her opposition to the Nazi regime. When a new wing to the hospital was built she hung a crucifix in each of the new rooms. The Nazis demanded that they be removed. Sister Restituta was told she would be dismissed if she did not comply.

She refused. The crucifixes remained on the walls.

One of the doctors on staff, a fanatical Nazi, would have none of it. He denounced her to the Party and on Ash Wednesday, 1942, she was arrested by the Gestapo as she came out of the operating room. The charges against her included, “hanging crucifixes, and writing a poem that mocked Hitler.”

The Nazis promptly sentenced her to death by the guillotine for “favouring the enemy and conspiracy to commit high treason.” They offered her freedom if she would abandon the Franciscans she loved so much. She adamantly refused. Although many nuns lost their lives in the extermination camps, Sister Restituta would be the only Catholic nun ever charged, tried, and sentenced to death by a Nazi court.

An appeal for clemency went as far as the desk of Hitler’s personal secretary and Nazi Party Chancellor, Martin Bormann. His response was that her execution “would provide effective intimidation for others who might want to resist the Nazis.” Sister Maria Restituta spent her final days in prison caring for the sick. Because of her love for the crucifix — or rather, the One who was died upon it — she was beheaded on March 30, 1943.

The day she died happened to be Tuesday of Holy Week. She was 48 years old.

Pope John Paul II visited Vienna in 1998 and there beatified Helena Kafka, the girl whose destiny was service. She was declared Blessed Maria Restituta. She had learned how to serve others extremely well. But the One she served best of all was her Savior. She gave Him her life.

Blessed Marie Restituta, please pray for us.

Larry Peterson is a Christian author, writer and blogger who has written hundreds of columns on various topics. His books include the novel The Priest and the Peaches and the children’s book Slippery Willie’s Stupid, Ugly Shoes. His latest book, The Demons of Abadon, will become available during the spring of 2016. He has three kids and six grandchildren, and they all live within three miles of each other in Florida.

Catholic Herald: BBC admits it underestimated the Church’s opposition to Hitler

By Dan Hitchens for Catholic Herald
posted Friday, 9 Dec 2016

BBC Broadcasting House in Portland Place, London (PA)

The BBC conceded it was false to describe the Church as being 'silent' in the face of Nazism

The BBC’s internal watchdog has found that a programme wrongly accused the Catholic Church of “silence” about the Holocaust.

After Pope Francis’s visit to Auschwitz in July, BBC One’s 6pm news bulletin carried a report which stated: “Silence was the response of the Catholic Church when Nazi Germany demonised Jewish people and then attempted to eradicate Jews from Europe.”

In response, the cross-bench peer Lord Alton of Liverpool and Fr Leo Chamberlain, the former headmaster of Ampleforth, made an official complaint.

Nearly six months later, the BBC’s editorial complaints unit has now concluded that the item was unfair. According to the unit, the BBC reporter “did not give due weight to public statements by successive popes or the efforts made on the instructions of Pius XII to rescue Jews from Nazi persecution, and perpetuated a view which is at odds with the balance of evidence.”

Pope Pius XII, who was the pontiff during World War II, has been accused of silent acquiescence to the Holocaust, most famously by a 1999 book, Hitler’s Pope, which sparked a major controversy among historians. Its author, John Cornwell, has since backed down on some of his claims.

In a blog post criticising the BBC report, Lord Alton pointed out that several historians had praised Pius’s achievements in the fight against Nazism. The peer quoted Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish historian and Israeli diplomat, as saying that Pius XII “was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.”

Through its diplomatic network, the Holy See under Pius XII helped Jews to travel safely out of Eastern Europe. It also issued baptismal certificates to Hungarian Jews to help them escape. Thousands of Jews were also sheltered in the Vatican itself.

Lord Alton quoted the Jewish Chronicle’s praise of Pius (“Such actions will always be remembered”) and Albert Einstein’s remark in 1940 that “only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth … I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

Aleteia: Last Priest from Dachau Concentration Camp Dies at 102

Father Hermann Scheipers survived Nazis and communists in long career

Aleteia by John Burger
June 14, 2016

ERIC SCHWAB/Getty Images

The last Catholic priest to have been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp has died at age 102.

Father Hermann Scheipers was a young priest in 1940 when he was arrested by the Nazis and taken to the camp, near Munich. Dachau had a large population of priests: some 95% of the 2,720 clergymen imprisoned there were Catholic.

Father Scheipers died June 2 in Ochtrup in Münsterland, the same town where he was born on July 24, 1913.

His work among young people, soon after his ordination, drew the attention of the Nazis. An obituary at KNA, a German Catholic news agency, translated by Mark de Vries, noted:

Because he was sympathetic with Polish forced laborers, celebrated Mass with them and heard their confessions, he was arrested [in] October of 1940 and brought to Dachau five months later. His file, which he came across by chance, states the true reason for his arrest: “Scheipers is a fanatical proponent of the Catholic Church and thus likely to cause unrest among the population.”

He wore the number 24255 on his prison uniform.

Father Scheipers recalled the way the camp commander welcomed him and his fellow inmates: “You are without honor, without help and without rights. Here, you can either work or perish.”

The sign over the entrance to the prisoner camp famously read, “Arbeit macht frei,” or “Work will make you free.”

Catholic Herald: Swedish Sister who hid Jews from the Nazis is to be canonised

Source: Catholic Herald
by Mark Greaves
posted Friday, 18 Dec 2015

Blessed Mary Elizabeth is a Righteous Among the Nations

Blessed Mary Elizabeth saved the lives of more than 60 people

A Swedish Sister who hid Jews from the Nazis during the Second World is to be canonised next year.

Blessed Mary Elizabeth Hesselblad, who refounded the Bridgettines and worked to restore the order in Italy and Sweden, saved the lives of over 60 people by hiding them at the motherhouse in Rome.

Pope Francis approved a miracle attributed to her intercession earlier this week, paving the way for her to be proclaimed a saint.

The Swede, a convert from Lutheranism, was mother superior at the motherhouse in Piazza Farnese during the Second World War.

The hiding of dozens of people at the motherhouse was recounted by an Italian Jew, Piero Piperno, as part of his testimony on behalf of another Bridgettine, Brighton-born Mother Mary Richard Beauchamp Hambrough, whose Cause was opened five years ago.

Mr Piperno told the Times newspaper: “We were three families, 13 in all. We stayed in three rooms, all the men in one, except an uncle who slept in a dark, small room with no windows, and another two for the women. In the beginning we all ate in one room by ourselves.”

For six months –until the Allies liberated Rome – the Piperno family hid in the convent, at every moment fearing potential arrest.

The nuns did not discriminate between the people they helped, he said, and took in Fascist refugees as well as Jews.

He said: “Something which bothered me back then, but which I now understand, was that the nuns that helped us also helped Fascist families. There was great solidarity because everybody was suffering and everybody finally realised we were all in the same boat. “

Blessed Mary Elizabeth, who Yad Vashem has named as a Righteous among the Nations, was beatified by St John Paul II in 2000.

She was born Sweden in 1870 and baptised into the Reform Church. In 1886 she migrated to the United States to earn money for her family back home.

After working as a nurse, she converted to Catholicism in 1902.

Moving to Rome, she dedicated her life and her religious order to prayer and work for the attainment of Christian unity.

She refounded the Order of the Most Holy Saviour of St Bridget, better known as the Bridgettines.

Mother Riccarda later succeeded her as mother superior at the order’s Rome motherhouse.

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