Edith Stein

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
Martyr
Born	October 12, 1891, Breslau, Germany
Died	August 9, 1942, Auschwitz concentration camp, Nazi Occupied Poland
Venerated in	Catholic Church
Beatified	May 1, 1987, Cologne, Germany
Canonized	October 11, 1998
Feast	August 9
Attribute	Yellow Star of David
Patronage	Europe; orphans, martyrs

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (October 12, 1891 - August 9, 1942), born Edith Stein, was a German Saint, philosopher, a Carmelite nun, and martyr who died at Auschwitz. She was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia (then in Germany), into an Orthodox Jewish family. She was known after her reception into the Carmelite Order as Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and canonized under the latter name in 1998, by Pope John Paul II.

In 1904 she renounced her Judaic faith and became an atheist. At the University of Göttingen, she became a student of Edmund Husserl, whom she followed to the University of Freiburg as his assistant. In 1916, she received her doctorate of philosophy there with a dissertation under Husserl, "On The Problem of Empathy". She then became a member of the faculty in Freiburg.

While she had earlier contacts with Catholicism, it was her reading the autobiography of the mystic St. Theresa of Avila on a holiday in 1921 that caused her 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 Thomas Aquinas' De veritate (On Truth) and familiarized herself with Catholic philosophy in general. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster, but anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign the post in 1933.

She entered the Carmelite convent at Cologne in 1934 and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. There she wrote her metaphysical book Endliches und ewiges Sein which tries to combine the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl.

To avoid the growing Nazi threat, her order transferred her to the Carmelite convent at Echt in the Netherlands. There she wrote Studie über Joannes a Cruce: Kreuzeswissenschaft ("The Science of the Cross: Studies on John of the Cross").

However, she was not safe in the Netherlands—the Dutch Bishops' Conference had a public statement read in all the churches of the country on July 20, 1942, condemning Nazi racism. In response, on July 26, 1942 Adolf Hitler ordered the arrest of Jewish converts (who had previously been spared) there. Edith and her sister Rosa, also a convert, were captured and shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chambers on August 9, 1942.

Today, there is a school to tribute Edith Stein in Darmstadt, Germany [1], as well as one in Hengelo, the Netherlands [2].

Some Jewish groups, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, have challenged the beatification of Edith Stein. As they point out, a martyr is, according to Catholic doctrine, someone who died for his or her religion; whether Stein was killed for her Jewish ethnicity, her faith or both is open to debate. Detractors go on to suggest that Stein's memory is being used in a ploy to draw attention away from the Church's recently alleged indifference to the Holocaust by subtly suggesting that Catholics suffered as harshly as the Jews did under the reign of the Nazis.

However Simon Wiesenthal himself estimated that in addition to the 6 million Jews, there were also 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Nazi death camps; and many of those were Polish and Ukrainian Catholics such as Maximilian Kolbe. For example, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates over two million Gentile victims from Poland alone [3].

The position of the Catholic Church in this matter is that Edith Stein also died because of the Dutch hierarchy's public condemnation of Nazi racism in 1942. In other words, that she died to uphold the moral position of the Church, and is thus a martyr.

The Writings of Edith Stein

Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1986
On the Problem of Empathy, Translated by Waltraut Stein 1989
Essays on Woman, translated by Freda Mary Oben, 1996
On the Problem of Empathy, translated by Waltraut Stein, 1989
The Hidden Life, translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1993
The Science of the Cross, Translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1998

Knowledge and Faith
Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt to an Ascent to the Meaning of Being
Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities
Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942

The Writings of Edith Stein

See also