Edith Stein

Life and Ministry

Edith Stein was born in 1891 in Breslau, the youngest of eleven children in an Orthodox Jewish family. Her father died when she was two; her mother raised the household and the family lumber business. Edith abandoned the practice of Judaism in her teens and went to study philosophy at Göttingen and Freiburg, where she became one of the closest students and assistants of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Her doctoral dissertation On the Problem of Empathy (1916) was awarded summa cum laude. In 1921 she read the Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila in a single night at the home of friends and was converted on the spot. She was baptized into the Catholic Church on January 1, 1922. She taught as a Catholic philosopher at a Dominican school for women in Speyer for ten years, lectured across Europe on the philosophical foundations of Christian feminism, and in 1933 — under increasing Nazi pressure that closed her academic posts — entered the Carmelite monastery at Cologne and took the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Circumstances of Death

When the Nuremberg laws made her position in Germany untenable for the Carmelites who sheltered her, she was transferred to the Carmel at Echt in the Netherlands in late 1938. Her older sister Rosa, also baptized, joined her there. After the German occupation of the Netherlands the Dutch Catholic bishops issued a public pastoral letter on July 26, 1942, denouncing the deportation of Dutch Jews. The German occupation authorities responded a week later with an order for the immediate arrest of all Catholics of Jewish ancestry in the Netherlands. Edith and Rosa Stein were taken from the Echt monastery by the SS on August 2, 1942, transported via Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and gassed on arrival on August 9, 1942. Witness testimony at Westerbork remembered her as the calm presence in the transit camp who attended to the children of frantic mothers, "like a Pieta without the Christ."

Legacy

Pope John Paul II beatified Edith Stein in 1987 and canonized her as a martyr of the Catholic Church in 1998 — a designation that Jewish observers contested at the time, since she was killed by the Nazis primarily on grounds of Jewish ancestry rather than for her Christian profession. The Vatican's argument was that the deportation order that took her was issued specifically in retaliation for the Dutch Catholic bishops' protest, making her death a direct consequence of the Catholic stand against the Holocaust. She was named a co-patroness of Europe by John Paul II in 1999 alongside Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. Her philosophical writings, especially On the Problem of Empathy and Finite and Eternal Being, are central to a continuing Catholic engagement with phenomenology.