SAINT: St Edith Stein – 9 August

By Catherine Sheehan

St Edith Stein, also known as St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross OCD, was a woman who desired above all to discover the truth. A philosopher and a Carmelite nun, her entire earthly life was spent pursuing the truth about life and about God, until it was tragically extinguished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz during the Second World War.

The youngest of 11 children, Edith was born into a devout Jewish family in Breslau, Germany, on 12 October 1891, the day of Yom Kippur, also known as the Feast of Atonement.

Edith was very bright and did exceptionally well at school, however, she had become an agnostic by the time she was 14.

She later said, “I consciously decided, of my own volition, to give up praying.”

She continued her search for truth however and went on to study philosophy under German-Austrian philosopher Edmund Husserl at the University of Gottingen and later worked as his assistant. She was particularly interested in phenomenology and wrote her doctoral thesis on ‘The Problem of Empathy’.

One day in mid-1921 Edith picked up a copy of St Teresa of Avila’s autobiography and began to read it. She was so captivated by it that she couldn’t put it down and continued reading it all through the night. She later wrote, “When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth.”

Edith was baptised a Catholic less than a year later, on 1 January 1922.

“I had given up practising my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God,” she said.

Edith entered the Carmelite Convent in Cologne on 14 October 1933 and took the religious name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Referring to the rise of Nazism in Germany, she later wrote: “I understood the cross as the destiny of God’s people, which was beginning to be apparent at the time (1933). I felt that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody’s behalf.”

As a Jewish woman living in Germany, Edith knew her life was in danger as the Nazis continued their campaign of terror. In 1939 she wrote: “Even now I accept the death God has prepare for me in complete submission and with joy as being his most holy will for me.”

The Nazis arrested Edith on 2 August 1942 along with her sister Rosa. She said to her sister, “Come, we are going for our people.”

Edith and Rosa were taken to Auschwitz concentration camp where they gassed on 9 August.

When he canonised Edith in 1998, St John Paul II said, “The mystery of the Cross gradually enveloped her whole life, spurring her to the point of making the supreme sacrifice.”

“May the new saint be an example to us in our commitment to serve freedom, in our search for the truth.”