Irena Sendler, a Catholic Woman of Extraordinary Valor

Sunday was Holocaust Memorial Day, and this is also a time when the good name of the Catholic Church is under a withering attack owing to criminal acts perpetrated by a small number of abusive priests upon helpless children. Although there are those in the Vatican who would blame the "New York Jewish lobby" for creating this scandal (they seem not to care that columnist Maureen Dowd was raised as a Catholic, and Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of The New York Times Company, was raised as an Episcopalian), and there are those in the Jewish community who have reacted rightfully with furor over this slander, this is exactly the time to remember Irena Sendler, a Catholic woman of extraordinary valor, who saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto from certain death.

Irena, born in 1910, joined the Żegota resistance in Poland, and owing to her work with the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, she was able to enter the ghetto to check for signs of typhus. Irena smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto in crates, boxes and suitcases and hid them with Polish families and Catholic convents and rectories. She made lists of the children's former and assumed names and promised that after the war they would be returned to their families.

Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, she was tortured and left for dead in the woods with broken limbs. Irena was forced to go into hiding until the end of the war, but immediately thereafter sought to reunite the Jewish children whom she saved with those of their parents who remained alive (90% of Polish Jewry was exterminated by the Nazis).

According to the Jewish Talmud, "To save one life is as if you have saved the world." If such is the case, Irena saved an entire "universe", and in 1965 she was named by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, as a Righteous among the Nations.

In 2007, at the age of 97, she was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize; however, as we all know today, following its recent award to President Obama, who has systematically ignored violations of human rights in the Congo, Iran, China, Tibet, Syria and Darfur, this prize has lost its luster.

I stand in awe of Irena, who passed away in May 2008, and pray that one day she will be declared a saint by her church. Meanwhile, she stands as a symbol of transcendent humanity, enduring faith, immeasurable courage and irrepressible love in these troubled times.