Edith Stein

Edith Stein was born into a German Jewish family in 1891. She was the youngest of 11 children and was born on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Hebrew calendar.

       Edith was a precocious child who enjoyed learning. Her mother encouraged critical thinking. She greatly admired her mother's strong religious faith but, by her teenage years, Edith had become an atheist.

       Edith was, at heart, a radical, one who goes to the radix, the roots. She rejected God because she saw little evidence that most believers, whether Jew or Christian, really believed. So she became a nursing assistant in 1915 in response to the tragedies of World War I.

      She then began a glittering academic career in philosophy, teaching, lecturing, writing and translating. She was soon celebrated as a philosopher and author.

      Her studies necessitated that she read the works of Christian intellectuals, so Edith read the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, the reformer of the Carmelite Order. It became a favourite yet made her feel the need for irreversible change. She converted to Christianity and was baptised as a Catholic on 1 January 1922. Almost immediately she felt the call to become a nun.

      In 1933 the Nazis took control of the German universities and blocked Edith, as a Jew, from teaching. They forced her to wear a Star of David and made her abandon her teaching position, thereby forcing her to make more life-changing decisions. To her mother’s dismay, she become a Carmelite nun in Cologne. She became a novice in April 1934 and took the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

      As a Carmelite she wrote Life in a Jewish Family and The Science of the Cross: a study of Saint John of the Cross. Her life became a deliberate offering of holiness and self-giving. In 1938, she and her sister Rosa, by then also a convert, were sent for safety to the Carmelite monastery in Echt in the Netherlands, for their safety. Despite the Nazi invasion of Holland in 1940, Edith and Rosa remained undisturbed.

      But Edith’s own Cross lay ahead of her. The Dutch bishops issued a short pastoral letter protesting at the deportation of the Jews and the expulsion of Jewish children from Catholic schools. The Nazis retaliated by arresting all Catholics of Jewish extraction and sent them to Auschwitz. Edith and Rosa died in the gas chamber on 9 August 1942. Edith was canonised on 11 October 1998.
      She left a wide legacy. First, in championing the women in the Bible, she helped kick-start Christian feminism: as she said, ‘The intrinsic value of women consists essentially in [their] exceptional receptivity for God’s work in the soul’.
      Second, she helped adapt Carmelite spirituality, which was previously regarded negatively as ‘medieval’, to make it relevant to modern forms of life. 

For more information and quotes, go to:

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein

       https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edith_Stein

       https://www.franciscanmedia.org/the-life-and-legacy-of-edith-stein