St. Edith Stein





Born to Jewish parents in 1891 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclow, Poland), Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children. Her father passed away while Edith was still a toddler, leaving her mother to raise the seven living children on her own. Edith rejected her mother's faith, considering herself an athiest by the time she was thirteen. Despite this, she always held her mother in very high esteem, and cared deeply about how her life choices would affect her mother.

She was highly intelligent and became one of the first women to study in the universities of Germany. While studying philosophy at the University of Gottingen, she began to be more open to the possibility that religious experience had a valid place in human life. At age 29, while vacationing with friends, she picked up a copy of the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. She read it in one evening, and decided to pursue further study of Catholicism. She was baptized on New Year's Day, 1922. She wanted to immediately enter the cloistered order of Carmelites, however her spiritual directors advised against it. They felt that she had much to offer the world in terms of her scholarship in the academic world.

It was during this time period that Dr. Stein wrote and spoke extensively on the role of women in the world. Unlike many feminists, she embraced the idea that men and women are fundamentally different. "She did not argue that biology is destiny, but that the physical differences between men and women profoundly mark their personalities. . . . There are two ways of being human, as man, or as woman." The two are different, right down to their souls. Stein sees women's vocation as being both spousal and maternal. While such a vocation can lend itself to life as a wife and mother, Stein did not stop there. She considered this the vocation of all women. Women are called to "help other persons develop to their fullest potential. . . Woman's concern for the good of persons must extend to all those whose lives touch hers in some ways."1 While she did hold mothers in high esteem, she felt that women had much to offer in both the professional and private world. "She brushed aside St. Paul's views on women keeping silent in churches, arguing that this might be local regulation, but it was not divine law; she contested statements in canon law which precluded women from taking any part in the sacred offices of the Church, pointing out that there were deaconesses in the early Church."2

Due to Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and the increasing persecution of Jews, Dr. Stein's academic career came to a rapid close and it became clear that the time was right for her to finally enter the Carmelite convent. She took the name, Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and made her final vows in April of 1935. Her mother was crushed by Edith's decision. Coming as it did during a time of Jewish persecution by Christians made it seem even more inexplicable. Her mother died in 1936. Fearful that her presence at the German convent would put the sisters in danger, she requested a transfer to a convent in Holland. Sr. Teresa was captured by the Nazis in Holland on August 2, 1942 and was killed in Auschwitz one week later. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 11, 1998.

From a Pentecost Novena by Edith Stein

Who are you, sweet light, that fills me
And illumines the darkness of my heart?
You lead me like a mother’s hand,
And should you let go of me,
I would not know how to take another step.
You are the space
That embraces my being and buries it in yourself.
Away from you it sinks into the abyss
Of nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.
You, nearer to me than my most interior
And still impalpable and intangible
And beyond any name:
Holy Spirit eternal love!

1 Laura Garcia, "Edith Stein - Convert, Nun, Martyr" Crisis 15, no 6 (June 1997): 32-35. Reprinted on http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0001.html

2 Kathleen Jones, Women Saints: Lives of Faith and Courage, New York: Orbis Books, 1999, 35.

Other resources:
http://www.ewtn.com/faith/edith_stein.htm
http://www.praiseofglory.com/pentedithstein.htm




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