Edith Stein
Edith Stein was a German philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. Edith Stein was murdered in the gas chamber at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp on 9 August 1942, and is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.
Stein was born into an observant German Jewish family, but had become an agnostic by her teenage years. Moved by the tragedies of World War I, in 1915, she took lessons to become a nursing assistant and worked in an infectious diseases hospital. After completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1916, she obtained an assistantship to Edmund Husserl there.
From reading the life of the reformer of the Carmelites, Teresa of Ávila, Stein was drawn to the Christian faith. She was baptized on 1 January 1922 into the Catholic Church. At that point, she wanted to become a Discalced Carmelite nun but was dissuaded by her spiritual mentor, the archabbot of Beuron, Raphael Walzer OSB. She then taught at a Jewish school of education in Speyer. As a result of the requirement of an "Aryan certificate" for civil servants promulgated by the Nazi government in April 1933 as part of its Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, she had to quit her teaching position.
Edith Stein was admitted as a student to the study of religion to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne on 25 November, on the first vespers of the feast of Saint Teresa of Ávila, and received the religious habit as a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce. She made her temporary vows on 21 April 1935, and her perpetual vows on 21 April 1938.
The same year, Teresa Benedicta a Cruce and her biological sister Rosa, by then also a convert and an extern, were sent to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands, for their safety. In response to the pastoral letter from the Dutch bishops on 26 July 1942, in which they made the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis a central theme, all baptized Catholics of Jewish origin were arrested by the Gestapo on the following Sunday, 2 August 1942. They were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and were murdered in the Birkenau gas chambers on 9 August 1942.
Early life
Edith Stein was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, into an observant Jewish family. She was the youngest of 11 children and was born on Yom Kippur, an important Jewish festival of the Hebrew calendar; these facts combined to make her a favorite of her mother. She was a very gifted child who enjoyed learning, in a home where her mother encouraged critical thinking, and she greatly admired her mother's unwavering religious faith. By her teenage years, however, Stein had become an agnostic.Though her father died while she was young, her widowed mother was determined to give her children a thorough education and consequently sent Edith to study at the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Breslau. At age 19, Stein moved with her family to Breslau to a house bought by her mother, which she later described in her Autobiography. Today, Edith Stein House hosts a museum dedicated to the history of the Stein family.
Academic career
In April 1913, Stein arrived at the University of Göttingen in order to study for the summer semester with Edmund Husserl. By the end of the summer, she had decided to pursue her doctoral degree in philosophy under Husserl and chose empathy as her thesis topic. Her studies were interrupted in July 1914 because of the outbreak of World War I. She then served as a volunteer wartime Red Cross nurse in an uninfectious diseases hospital at Mährisch Weißkirchen from 7 April to 1 September 1915. In 1916, Stein moved to the University of Freiburg in order to complete her dissertation on Empathy. Shortly before receiving her degree from Freiburg she agreed to become Husserl's assistant there. In this role, she differed with Husserl on important issues and made unique contributions to phenomenology as a whole. Her dissertation entitled Das Einfühlungsproblem in seiner historischen Entwicklung und in phänomenologischer Betrachtung was awarded a doctorate in philosophy with the summa cum laude honor. Stein then became a member of the faculty at Freiburg, where she worked until 1918 as a teaching assistant to Husserl, who had transferred to that institution. The University of Göttingen rejected her habilitation thesis in 1919. Although Stein passed her doctoral examination with distinction, her attempts to habilitate failed due to the fact that Stein was a woman.Her rejected habilitation thesis, Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften, was published in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1922. She is categorized as a realistic phenomenologist.
While Stein had earlier contacts with Catholicism, it was her reading of the autobiography of the mystic Teresa of Ávila during summer holidays in Bad Bergzabern in 1921 that prompted her conversion and eventually the desire to seek the life of a Discalced Carmelite. Baptized on 1 January 1922, and dissuaded by her spiritual advisers from immediately seeking entry to the enclosed and hidden life of a Carmelite nun, Stein obtained a position to teach at the Dominican nuns' school in Speyer from 1923 to 1931. While there, Stein translated Thomas Aquinas' De Veritate into German, familiarized herself with Catholic philosophy in general and tried to bridge the phenomenology of her former teacher, Husserl, to Thomism. She visited Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg in April 1929, the same month that Heidegger gave a speech to Husserl on his 70th birthday. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Catholic Church-affiliated Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, but antisemitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign the post in 1933. In a letter to Pope Pius XI, she denounced the Nazi regime and asked the Pope to openly denounce the regime "to put a stop to this abuse of Christ's name."
Her letter received no answer, and it is not known for certain whether the Pope ever saw it. However, in 1937 the Pope issued an encyclical written in German, Mit brennender Sorge, in which he criticized Nazism, listed violations of the Concordat between Germany and the Church of 1933, and condemned antisemitism.
Discalced Carmelite nun and martyr
Stein entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery St. Maria vom Frieden in Cologne-Lindenthal in October 1933 and took the religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce. In Cologne she wrote her metaphysical book Endliches und ewiges Sein, which attempted to combine the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Husserl.To avoid the growing Nazi threat, the order transferred Edith and her sister, Rosa, who was also a convert and an extern sister of the Carmel, to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands. There she wrote Studie über Joannes a Cruce: Kreuzeswissenschaft. In her testament of 9 June 1939 she wrote:
Stein's move to Echt prompted her to be more devout and even more observant of the Carmelite rule. After having her teaching position revoked by the implementation of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Stein quickly eased back into the role of instructor at the convent in Echt, teaching both fellow sisters and students within the community Latin and philosophy.
Even prior to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Stein believed that she would not survive the war, going so far as to write to the prioress to request her permission to "allow to offer self to the heart of Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement for true peace" and she also wrote a will. Her fellow sisters would later recount how Stein began "quietly training herself for life in a concentration camp, by enduring cold and hunger" after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940.
Ultimately, she would not be safe in the Netherlands. The Dutch Bishops' Conference had a public statement condemning Nazi racism read in all churches across the nation on 20 July 1942. In a retaliatory response on 26 July 1942 the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts who had previously been spared. Along with two hundred and forty-three baptized Jews who were living in the Netherlands, Teresa Benedicta a Cruce was arrested by the SS on 2 August 1942. She and her sister Rosa were imprisoned at the concentration camps of Amersfoort and Westerbork before they were deported to Auschwitz. A Dutch official at Westerbork was so impressed by her sense of faith and her calm disposition, so he offered her an escape plan. Stein vehemently refused his assistance, stating: "If somebody intervened at this point and took away chance to share in the fate of brothers and sisters, that would be utter annihilation."
On 7 August 1942, early in the morning, 987 Jews were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was probably on 9 August that Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, her sister Rosa, and many more Jewish people were killed in a gas chamber at Birkenau.