Edith Stein

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Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Martyr
Born	October 12, 1891, Breslau, German Empire
Died	August 9, 1942, Auschwitz concentration camp, Nazi-occupied Poland
Venerated in	Roman Catholicism
Beatified	May 1, 1987, Cologne, Germany by Pope John Paul II
Canonized	October 11, 1998 by Pope John Paul II
Feast	August 9
Attributes	Yellow Star of David
Patronage	Europe; loss of parents; martyrs; World Youth Day^[1]
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Edith Stein (October 12, 1891 – August 9, 1942) was a philosopher, a Carmelite nun, martyr, and saint of the Catholic Church, who died at Auschwitz. In 1922, she converted to Christianity in 1922, was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church and was received into the Discalced Carmelite Order in 1934. She was canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (her Carmelite monastic name) by Pope John Paul II in 1998; however, she is still often referred to, and churches named for her as, "Saint Edith Stein".

1 Life
2 Writings
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Life

Stein was born in Breslau, in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia, into an Orthodox Jewish family.

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 Stein had earlier contacts with Catholicism, it was her reading the autobiography of the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila on a holiday in Göttingen 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 from 1922 to 1932. While there she translated into Thomas Aquinas' De Veritate (On Truth) into German 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 monastery 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.

Relief of Edith Stein

To avoid the growing Nazi threat, her order transferred Stein to the Carmelite monastery 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, Stein 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 a retaliatory response on July 26, 1942, the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts, who had previously been spared. Stein 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 named in tribute to Stein in Darmstadt, Germany,^[2] as well as one in Hengelo, the Netherlands.^[3] The University of Tübingen has a women's dormitory named for her as well.^[4]

Some Jewish groups^{[citation needed]} have challenged the beatification of Edith Stein. They point out that 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, for them, open to debate. 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.

James P. Carroll points out that Stein was to be beatified as a confessor (which required two confirmed miracles), but that was changed to "martyr" (which only requires one). Carroll further states that the miracle attributed to Stein was in fact the result of medicine alone, and medical testimony exists to confirm that statement.^[5]

However, many Catholic theologians hold that the canonization of a saint is an exercise of the infallible magisterium of the Church (it is considered a 'dogmatic fact' that the canonized person is in heaven), and therefore, even if inconsistencies in the process leading up to the papal definition of canonization are uncovered, the definition itself is still regarded by many Catholic theologians as irreformable.^[6]

In 2008, her bust is to be introduced to the Walhalla temple in Regensburg.

[edit] Writings

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
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