Edith Stein

Edith Stein was born on 12 October 1891 in Breslau, then in the German Empire and now Wrocław in Poland, the youngest of eleven children of Siegfried Stein and Auguste Courant. Her father, a timber merchant, died when she was not yet two years old, and she was raised by her mother in an observant Jewish household. A gifted pupil, she attended the Victoria School in Breslau and later studied philosophy, psychology, and history at the University of Breslau and at Göttingen. In adolescence she ceased religious practice and regarded herself as an atheist. At Göttingen she became a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and in 1916 she received her doctorate at Freiburg with the dissertation Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On the Problem of Empathy). She served as Husserl’s assistant at Freiburg. During the First World War she volunteered with the Red Cross and worked in a military hospital in Mährisch-Weißkirchen.

Her conversion followed a prolonged intellectual and spiritual search among phenomenological and religious texts. A turning point came in the summer of 1921 at Bergzabern, when she spent a night reading the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila and afterward said she had found the truth. She was baptized in the Catholic Church on 1 January 1922 at Saint Martin’s in Bad Bergzabern and confirmed the following February. After baptism she taught German and history at the Dominican nuns’ school in Speyer, lectured, and wrote. She sought to bring Husserlian phenomenology into conversation with Thomism in works such as Potenz und Akt and the unfinished Endliches und ewiges Sein (Finite and Eternal Being). She also translated writings of John Henry Newman and Thomas Aquinas. Although she wished to enter Carmel soon after her baptism, her directors advised her to remain for a time in teaching and scholarship. In 1932–1933 she lectured at the Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster until National Socialist racial laws, because of her Jewish ancestry, forced her from public academic life.

On 14 October 1933 she entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery of Cologne-Lindenthal, taking the name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross). She made temporary profession in 1935 and perpetual profession in 1938. Her sister Rosa, who had also become a Catholic, later served the community as an extern sister. As persecution of Jews intensified after the November 1938 pogroms, Stein was transferred in December 1938 to the Carmel of Echt in the Netherlands. There she continued to write, including Kreuzeswissenschaft (The Science of the Cross), a study of John of the Cross left unfinished at her arrest. She also composed a will offering her life for her people and for peace.

After the Dutch Catholic bishops protested the deportation of Jews in July 1942, the German occupying authorities retaliated by arresting Jewish converts, including those in religious life. Edith Stein and Rosa were taken from the Echt Carmel on 2 August 1942, held at Amersfoort and Westerbork, and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were killed in the gas chamber there on 9 August 1942; their remains were cremated and have no known individual grave. Stein was beatified as a martyr on 1 May 1987 in Cologne and canonized on 11 October 1998 in Rome, both by Pope John Paul II. In 1999 the same pope named her, with Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, a co-patroness of Europe. Her feast is kept on 9 August.