Edith Stein

Edith Stein, after her reception into the Carmelite Order Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (1891-1942), canonized under the latter name in 1988, was a philosopher, feminist, Carmelite nun, and martyr who died at Auschwitz.

Stein was born October 12, 1891 in Breslau, Silesia, (Germany), now Wroclaw, Poland into an Orthodox Jewish family. In 1904 she renounced that faith and became an atheist. At the University of Göttingen, she became acquainted with Edmund Husserl and became interested in his philosophy. When Husserl moved to the University of Freiburg, he asked Edith Stein to join him there as his assistant and she received her doctorate of philosophy there. She wrote her dissertation under Husserl "On The Problem of Empathy" in 1917.

While she had earlier contacts with Roman Catholicism, it was her profound encounter with the autobiography of the mystic St. Theresa of Avila on a holiday in 1921 to Breslau that caused her swift conversion. Baptized on January 1, 1922, she gave up her assistantship with Husserl to teach at a Dominican girls' school in Speyer (1922-1932). While there she translated into German St Thomas Aquinas' De veritate (On Truth) and familiarized herself with Roman Catholic philosophy in general. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster, but, because of anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Nazi government, was forced to resign the post in 1933.

In 1934 she entered the Carmelite convent at Cologne, taking the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. There she completed her metaphysical work Endliches und ewiges Sein, an attempt to synthesize the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl.

In 1938, with the Nazi threat growing, she was transferred to the Carmelite convent at Echt in the Netherlands, where the German Carmelites assumed she might be safe. There she wrote her important treatise Studie uber Joannes a Cruce: Kreuzeswissenschaft ("The Science of the Cross: Studies on John of the Cross").

Removal from Germany, however, proved insufficient to ensure her safety. On July 26, 1942 Adolf Hitler ordered the arrest of all non-Aryan Roman Catholics. With her sister Rosa, also a convert, Edith Stein was seized by the Gestapo and shipped to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Survivors of the death camp testified that she helped all other sufferers with great compassion. On August 9, 1942 she was sent to the gas chamber, where she died with her sister.

On May 1, 1987 she was beatified by Pope John Paul II, who canonized her on October 11, 1998