here is a bizarre current of thought, among Catholics antagonistic to social justice, that says that such concerns detract from the call to holiness. The “SJWs,” they will declaim, “never talk about holiness. It’s all about social evil, never their own need for Christ.”
One reason this complaint strikes me as bizarre—it’s not just that it is so absurdly and demonstrably untrue—is that those who make it would never dream of saying that Catholics who attend the March on Life are neglecting holiness or their need for Jesus Christ. Isn’t ending abortion a social justice issue, too? The Church sure seems to think it is [Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church 155].
But there’s a larger point to be made here, which is that the saints—both declared and undeclared—never once speak of justice and holiness as though they are in conflict with each other. The very notion is uncatholic. You can not be holy unless you pursue justice: That idea runs through the entire Old Testament, and the entire New. Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Sophie Magdalena Scholl was born on May 9, 1921, in the Weimar Republic (in southern Germany). As a child she joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel (the League of German Girls), although her anti-fascist father disapproved. As she grew older, she wanted to be a kindergarten teacher and to study philosophy. Before she could be admitted to the program she wanted to enter, she had to serve for a time with the National Labor Service. Her faith (she was a Lutheran) became a respite from the harsh discipline. She read St. Augustine and wrote, “My soul is hungry.”
Later, at the University of Munich, she learned about the mass murder of Jews and the execution of POWs in Russia. And so she became active in the White Rose movement—a nonviolent resistence group that distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and posted anti-Nazi graffiti. Her brother, Hans, had already joined and she no longer wished to be passive.
“Down with Hitler!” and “Freedom!” the graffiti read.
The leaflets were powerful and did not put things nicely. “We will not be silent,” one said. “We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace.” (Scholl would have been unimpressed by demands for charity to fascists.)
The third leaflet reads:
Our current “state” is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we don’t need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don’t you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?
And the sixth reads:
Even the most dull-witted German has had his eyes opened by the terrible bloodbath, which, in the name of the freedom and honour of the German nation, they have unleashed upon Europe, and unleash anew each day. The German name will remain forever tarnished unless finally the German youth stands up, pursues both revenge and atonement, smites our tormentors, and founds a new intellectual Europe. Students! The German people look to us! The responsibility is ours: just as the power of the spirit broke the Napoleonic terror in 1813, so too will it break the terror of the National Socialists in 1943.
That same year, Scholl and her brother Hans were arrested by the Nazis and guillotined for treason. They died on February 22, 1943; but afterward, a copy of the sixth leaflet was smuggled into England, and the Allied Forces dropped millions of copies into Germany. They had retitled it “The Manifesto of the Students of Munich.”
In recent years there has been—for obvious reasons, perhaps—a renewal of interest in Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, and just last year the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising opened a cause for the beatification of Scholl’s fellow member Wili Graf.
The Lutheran Scholl would not qualify for beatification in the Catholic Church. But I say she is a saint; and it is not just for her anti-fascist resistance to Hitler (though that’s part of it), and not just for the fact that she was a martyr to that cause (though that’s part of it). But it’s because she spoke of her hunger for justice and her hunger for holiness in the same breath. For her, they were one and the same.
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail,” she said, “when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?
Scholl may have been thinking of Matthew 5:6: “Blessed are those who do hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Some translations, such as the Douay-Rheims, translate the verse to read, “blessed are those who do hunger and thirst for justice.” Both translations are correct because the Greek word δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosyne) means both. Righteousness, holiness, justice: these are all one and the same thing. The sense of the word, according to Mounce, is “doing what is in agreement with God’s standards”; “the state of being in a proper relationship with God.” You can call that righteousness, you can call that holiness, you can call that justice: It is all one.
For Scholl, righteousness can only prevail when people “give [themselves] up individually.” This is a very Catholic way of talking; it is the language of sacrifice. Pursuing political justice is a form of self-sacrifice in obedience to God. That is to say, it is holiness.
(Although she was raised Lutheran, Scholl was heavily influenced by Catholic friends and by Cardinal Newman’s theology of conscience.)
She was not content to define holiness down as though it meant only to kneel in a secret room and contemplate a crucifix while the boots stomp by unopposed. That, she said, is “the reductionist approach to life.”
If you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”
She would not “roll her spirit up into a tiny little ball” and pretend that that was holiness.
She chose her own way to burn.
The Nazis caught her, it is true, and they killed her, it is true, but they could not kill her inexpendible holiness or the cause for which she spent it. In Newsday in 1993, the playwright Lillian Groag spoke of the significance of the White Rose:
It is possibly the most spectacular moment of resistance that I can think of in the twentieth century … The fact that five little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.
“Such a fine, sunny day,” she said at the end, “and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
“I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best that I could do for my nation. I therefore do not regret my conduct and will bear the consequences that result from my conduct.”
“I shall cling to the rope God has thrown me in Jesus Christ, even if my numb hands can no longer feel it.”
“An end in terror is preferable to terror without end.”
“God, you are my refuge into eternity.”
St. Sophie Scholl, scourge of fascists, who chose your own way to burn, pray for us.
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