Today, August 9th, we
celebrate the feast of Saint Teresa
Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein, a Jew who turned Christian and then
entered a convent. The Nazis hunted her down, found her and shipped her to one
of the concentration camps with other Jews headed for the gas chambers or to
being starved to death over time, subjected to hard labor when hardly able to
stand. Not doing the required physical
labor because of physical weakness or illness, any prisoner could be shot on
the spot.
Cruelty of the nature orchestrated by Hitler continues to
this day by Isis and many others, known and unknown to us. Much of humankind’s
inhumanity toward men and women—adults,
adolescents and children--of any race is not totally known today any more than the common citizen knew what Hitler, their leader, was doing to Jews in his day. The ordinary citizen only knew that Jews
disappeared and were no more.
Cruelty to humans—the
crucifixion of Jesus-- continues in our back alleys where one gang member does
not hesitate to “crucify” another gang member. Cruelty happens by police
takedowns and “executions” and by retaliatory actions on the part of citizens
toward police officers. Inhumane actions towards infants in the womb happen
behind closed doors in some of our abortion clinics. Abuse of children also happens
behind the closed doors of some of our homes, where men or women whose minds
are poisoned by the abuse of alcohol and/or other drugs or who are addicted to
anger plunge into murderous rages. The
same action occurs to young women jogging in beautiful parks and overtaken by a
person whose mind is being driven by irrational impulses. Humankind’s cruelty toward other human beings
is rampant, as well, in the world’s war zones , in the industries of drug
traffickers, human traffickers and those who force the young into slave labor.
As God looks upon the
earth today, He sees what I described above.
He weeps! He prays! And He says to us: “The days are coming… when I will make a new
covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah [with the world of
today and all who live in it]. It will
not be like the covenant I made with their fathers: the day I took them by the
hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they broke my covenant, and
I had to show myself their master, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that
I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will
place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God,
and they shall be my people….All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says
the Lord, for I will forgive their evil doing and remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah
31: 31-34).
This is as true today as back in the days when God made that
promise to the house of Israel and the house of Judah!
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