Edith Stein

Dates: October 12, 1891 - 1942

Occupation: philosopher; Roman Catholic saint; Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism; Carmelite nun

Known for: Holocaust victim; controversy over her beatification and canonization

Also Known as: Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Edith Stein was born in 1891 in Wreclaw, Poland, which was then Breslau, Prussia, to an orthodox Jewish family.

In school, Edith Stein was an excellent student who read widely. In 1904 she renounced Orthodox Judaism as her religion and announced that she was an atheist. As a teenager, she left school to stay with a married sister, but returned after eight months.

In 1911, Edith Stein entered the University of Breslau, where she discovered the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl in phenomenology. She went to the University at Göttingen where Husserl was teaching. Stein was one of the first women students to enroll at Göttingen.

In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Edith Stein volunteered at a military hospital, where she found inspiration for her philosophical work on the subject of empathy.

As a graduate student at the University of Freiburg in 1916, she began to teach philosophy, first as a graduate assistant to Edmund Husserl and then, after Freiburg awarded her a Ph.D., as a faculty member, still working with Husserl.

Edith Stein applied to the faculty at Göttingen, but they did not accept women professors. So in 1919 she began to teach at Breslau.

Edith Stein began to be interested in Roman Catholicism while studying at Göttingen, and her interest increased when she organized the papers of her friend Reinach who died in World War I. His references to religion, the New Testament, and Jesus intrigued her, and she began to read the New Testament and other Christian writings by the time she was teaching at Breslau.

On January 1, 1922, Edith Stein was baptized as a Roman Catholic. She began to teach at a Catholic girls convent school in Speyer, and translated the writings of Aquinas and Cardinal Newman. She was appointed a lecturer at the Educational Institute of Münster.

By 1931, Edith Stein had returned to philosophy, full-time. Then the Nazis came to power. In 1933, she was fired from her teaching position when the Nazis pushed out academics of Jewish heritage.

The next year, Edith Stein entered the Carmelite Convent at Cologne, where she took the name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. With the increasing power of the Nazis, however, her convent transferred her for safety to a convent in Holland, at Echt. There, she continued her work on phenomenology and St. John of the Cross.

On July 26, 1942, Hitler called for the arrest of all Roman Catholics not of Aryan descent. Edith Stein was caught by the Gestapo, arrested wearing her habit, with her sister, Rosa, also a Jewish convert to Christianity. They were transported to Auschwitz on August 7, 1942, and were killed within weeks in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Edith Stein's last words to Rosa were reported to be, "Come, we are going for our people."

After Her Death:

In 1955, in honor of Edith Stein, an organization of Roman Catholic converts in America was named for her, the Edith Stein Guild.

Edith Stein was beatified in 1987 by Pope John Paul II, and in 1998, on October 11, was canonized. In 1999, Edith Stein was named by the Pope as a patron saint of Europe, along with Brigid of Sweden and Catherine of Siena.

Controversy over Edith Stein's Sainthood:

There were protests to the beatification and canonization of Edith Stein. Her last words were interpreted as a reassertion at the last of her Jewish identity, and her death came as a result of her Jewish heritage, not as a Roman Catholic. Further, with criticism that the Roman Catholic church did not act to protect Jews or oppose Hitler, canonizing this Jewish victim of the Holocaust seemed to many to be ignoring the history of Catholic inaction and even anti-Semitism.

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