Edith Stein: true daughter of Israel.

It is uncanny how the Church is provided with the saints she needs when she needs them. Or it's not, when you think of it, at all uncanny, just another way in which God provides for his often intractable flock. In our overtly emotional and psychological age, when the connection between love and suffering is misunderstood or denied, and the notion of the cross often regarded as indicative of a borderline psychosis, who better to be raised to the altar as a masterpiece of God's grace than a martyr who identified herself so clearly with Christ crucified that she is known now as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross?

Edith Stein, killed at Auschwitz death camp on August 9, 1942 and canonized in Rome October 11, 1998, stands as a contradiction to our often blood-crazed age in other ways as well. At a time when muddled thinking and ignorance of metaphysics is endemic, we have in Edith Stein a woman of impeccable philosophical lucidity; at a time when a false feminism would have us believe women are no different from men, Edith Stein's luminous writings on the true nature and vocation of woman, and the witness of her own professional life, provide invaluable antidotes to this noxious fallacy.

At a time when truth is regarded as a personal caprice and cynicism marks public discourse, the gallant ferocity of Edith Stein's undaunted search for the truth can give fresh hope to the jaded and despondent.

And at a time of timorous and apologetic interfaith dialogue, we find a woman whose journey to the Catholic Church gave her a greater understanding and love of her Jewish heritage, a love which culminated in her offering to God her own life for the Jewish people. Of her baptism, Edith wrote: "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."

Science of the cross

Since Edith Stein embraced the cross, it seems fitting to remember her life and witness at this time in the liturgical year when we recall Our Lord's passion and death. The question put to him by Pontius Pilate, who we suspect was not entirely sincere, was a question which Edith Stein spent years of her life trying to answer: "What is truth?"

As John Paul II said of Edith in his canonization homily: "Eventually she was rewarded: she seized the truth. Or better: she was seized by it. Then she discovered that truth had a name: Jesus Christ. From that moment on the incarnate Word was her One and All." As Edith Stein herself had said, "All my search for truth has been a prayer to God."

And her life particularly reveals the intimate relationship between freedom and truth; truth and love; love and the Cross. The Pope observes that the new saint says to all of us: "Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth. One without the other becomes a destructive lie."

Whoever truly loves, the Pope added, "does not stop at the prospect of suffering, but accepts suffering in common with the one he loves."

"...Edith Stein stands out as a beacon which casts its light amid the terrible darkness which has marred this century. In the martyr St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, so many differences meet and are resolved in peace."

The pontiff urged Catholics to especially remember all victims of the Nazi holocaust, on Edith Stein's feast day, August 9.

The life of a saint

Who then was this woman whom Catholics are now urged to venerate? She was born October 12, 1891, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), the youngest of 11 children of Stephan Stein and his wife Auguste, nee Courant, seven of whom lived to adulthood. Her father died when she was almost two, and her mother took over the family lumber business, which prospered under her shrewd management. Edith was the favourite child, not only because she was graced with a lively temperament and keen intellect, but because she was born on the Day of Atonement, a fact of great significance to the devout Frau Stein, who faithfully attended synagogue and strictly adhered to the prescribed 24-hour-fast on this most important of Jewish High Holy Days.

Edith quickly showed her independent character, declaring herself an atheist at age 14, and giving up prayer--although, out of deference to her mother, she continued to attend synagogue while living at home. She also dropped out of school for a brief period at 13 and went to live with her sister Else in Hamburg. According to Edith Stein scholar Dr Freda Mary Oben, Edith had been subjected to the anti-semitism of a teacher who persistently refused to grant her the top marks she deserved.

Her love of learning soon drove her back to studies. Edith, easily obtaining the necessary prerequisites for university entrance, studied at the University of Breslau, briefly considering psychology as her specialization. Once she encountered philosophy, however, there was no turning back, and at age 20 she transferred to Gottingen University to study with phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. He was the acknowledged leader of that philosophical school which, as the name suggests, abstracts concepts from the rigorously faithful observation of phenomena, a return to "real things".

Internal turbulence

At Gottingen, Edith Stein thrived in the midst of a lively intellectual group, many of whom made up the Gottingen Philosophical Society. One of these was Max Scheler, a lapsed Catholic who was nevertheless convinced of the truths of the Catholic faith, and who had been instrumental in the conversion of another member of the society (who had departed by the time Edith arrived), Dietrich von Hildebrand. The charismatic Scheler influenced Edith as well; his eloquence compelled her to concede the validity of religious phenomena.

While for the most part Edith enjoyed philosophical harmony, her preliminary doctoral work on the problem of empathy, undertaken at the age of 21, became at one point almost unendurable. She wrote, "This struggle for clarity was an agonizing process that left me no peace, day or night... As time went on I worked myself up into a real state of despair. For the first time in my life I was facing something that I could not enforce with my willpower...All this brought me to a point where life itself seemed unbearable. I often told myself that the whole business made no sense at all. Even if I failed to get a doctorate, I surely had enough for the state boards; and, though being a great philosopher might be beyond me, in all likelihood being a useful teacher was still a possibility. But reasoning was of no avail. I could no longer cross the street without wishing I would be run over by some vehicle. And when we went on an excursion, I hoped I would fall off a cliff and not return alive."

What brought Edith Out of this internal turmoil was, it seems, kindly and incisive direction from an older philosopher Adolf Reinach, and her own drive and perseverance. She completed the first draft of her dissertation in 1914, and successfully defended her thesis to obtain a doctorate summa cum laude at the age of 26.

En route, she volitionally interrupted her studies to nurse for five months in a typhoid hospital during the Great War. Her trenchant, candid and witty observations of wartime nursing duty fill many pages of her revealing and often poignant autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family (which Edith began in 1937 in an attempt to offset the growing anti-semitism in Germany by presenting an account of "the humanity of the Jews"). Many of her male confreres went off to the trenches, and Edith thought it only fair that she, too, bear in some way the burden of war.

Some of these comrades never returned from battle, including mentor and friend Adolf Reinach. When he fell in Flanders in 1917, Edith went to put his papers in order and comfort his young widow. To her relief and surprise, she discovered a serenely composed woman who relied for consolation on her Christian faith (the Reinachs were converts to Lutheranism). Edith wrote, "It was then that I first encountered the Cross and the divine strength which it inspires in those who bear it. For the first time I saw before my very eyes the Church, born of Christ's redemptive suffering, victorious over the sting of death. It was the moment in which my unbelief was shattered, Judaism impaled, and Christ shone out upon me, Christ in the mystery of the cross."

Despite this encounter, however, Edith did not yet experience conversion. She worked as Dr. Husserl's assistant until 1918, when she decided to pursue independent research. The professorship she wanted, however, was denied her because she was a woman. In 1921 came the decisive moment, when she was staying at the home of Hedwig and Theodore Conrad-Martius in Bergzabern, both recent converts to Protestantism. Left to herself for a couple of days, Edith picked up the Autobiography of St Teresa. She couldn't put it down, read on through the night, and at the end declared, "This is the truth."

After thorough study of the catechism, Edith presented herself to the parish priest asking to be baptized. When he demurred, she challenged him to test her knowledge of the faith; he was amazed at her grasp of the essentials of Catholicism. She was baptized on January 1, 1922.

Edith's first impulse was to return home and straightforwardly tell her mother she was Catholic. Her mother cried--for the first time that Edith could remember. But while she deplored Edith's decision, neither could Frau Stein repudiate her daughter. As noted by a family acquaintance: "I'm convinced that what overpowered Frau Stein was the transformation she observed in Edith Stein that seemed to make a supernatural force radiate from her entire being. Being a God-fearing woman, she was able to feel, though not to comprehend, the holiness emanating from her daughter. For all her deadly anguish, she knew that she was powerless against the mystery of grace."

Active life in Speyer

Edith wanted badly wanted enter Carmel (as the cloistered convents of the discalced Carmelites, the order reformed by St. Teresa of Avila in the 16th century are called) but her spiritual directors advised against it, citing in part the hardship it would cause her mother. Moreover, they thought that Edith could accomplish much good in the world. Her next years did prove extremely fruitful; Edith taught German and history at a Dominican convent school for girls in Speyer, lectured extensively, became well known and in demand as a lecturer on women's development, and translated works of Cardinal Newman and St. Thomas Aquinas. Edith wrote of this period: "During the time immediately before and quite some time after my conversion I... thought that leading a religious life meant giving up all earthly things and having one's mind fixed on divine things only. Gradually, however, I learned that other things are expected of us in this world....I even believe that the deeper someone is drawn to God, the more he has to 'get beyond himself' in this sense, that is, go into the world and carry divine life into it."

Edith left Speyer in 1931 to devote herself fulltime to writing, specifically her work on a synthesis of the scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas and phenomenology, and to seek a professorship at a university. But while she was accepted at the Institute of Pedagogy Studies at the University of Muenster in 1932, her contract terminated merely a year later, after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933 and the Aryan Laws were passed in April of that year.

A few months before she lost her teaching position, Edith had requested a private audience with Pope Pius XI, intending to ask him to write an encyclical to stem the growing tide of anti-Semitism. Her request for an audience was denied, and she was only able to write the Pope (who later did issue an encyclical condemning Nazi racism, Mit Brennender Sorge, which was read in German churches on Passion Sunday 1937).

To Carmel at last

Being relieved of her teaching position allowed Edith at last to fulfil her desire to enter Carmel. She was now under the direction of Abbot Wernzer from the Benedictine Abbey at Beuron, who had advised against her entry on the grounds that it would be too difficult for her mother, and the importance of, in her own words, "my own contribution to Catholic life." With the latter objection circumscribed by Nazi persecution, Abbot Wernzer gave his consent.

But the former objection still remained. Edith went home to break the news to her mother that she was going to live with the nuns at Cologne. The conversation between mother and daughter, returning from synagogue October 12, the day before Edith left for Carmel, is recorded as follows:

Frau Stein: "Wasn't that a good homily?"

"Yes."

"Then is it possible for a Jew to be pious?"

"Certainly, if that's all one knows."

At which the mother cried out, "Why did you have to get to know him? I'm not saying he wasn't a good man. But why did he have to go and make himself God?"

Despite the anguish caused by her mother, Edith Stein "ran to Carmel, singing for joy, like a child to its mother's arms, never doubting her almost blind enthusiasm for even an instant," wrote Abbot Wernzer. "It reminded me of the way St Benedict speaks of our journey to God, 'Now we must go and do the things that will profit us forever."'

At age 43, Edith Stein was a mere novice, and demonstrated difficulty with the least domestic task, but bore these shortcomings with great cheer. She wrote of the cloistered life, "My impression was that this was a life which had been absolutely transformed by the love of God, down to the last detail. I simply can't imagine anything greater." She made her first profession of vows in April, 1935, a joyous occasion even though none of her brothers or sisters were present, and her mother characteristically still refused to acknowledge Edith's weekly letters. The name Edith chose was Teresia Benedicta a Cruce: Teresa, Blessed of the Cross.

Edith Stein continued her academic work, achieving remarkable feats within the constraints of convent life, with only two hours of free time each day. Under the direction of her superiors, she finished her definitive philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being, in 1936. She had just sent it off when she heard of her mother's death in Breslau, after a long illness, on the feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross, September 14, the same day Edith renewed her vows.

While Frau Stein had actually paid a "secret" visit to a Carmel under construction in her area the year before, and since then had written a few notes to Edith, she had never explicitly reconciled herself to Edith's conversion and vocation. Edith wrote of her mother, "My Mother held on to her faith to the last moment. But as her faith and her firm trust in her God...were the last thing that was still alive in the throes of her death, I am confident that she will have met a very merciful judge and that she is now my most faithful helper, so that I can reach the goal as well."

During Christmas of 1936 Edith's older sister Rosa, who had longed to be baptized but delayed because of her mother, entered the Catholic Church.

Nazi domination of Europe

Meanwhile, the political situation in Germany worsened. Edith Stein remained keenly aware of her own connection with the Jews. She had willingly offered her own life as an oblation or sacrifice for her people, writing of an incident during Mass in 1933, "I spoke to the Saviour to tell him that I realized it was his Cross that was now being laid on the Jewish people, that the few who understood this had the responsibility of carrying it in the name of all, and that I myself was willing to do this, if he could only show me how. I left the service with the inner conviction that I had been heard, but uncertain as ever as to what 'carrying the Cross' would mean for me."

She saw more clearly than most what was coming. Perhaps others saw as well, but chose not to face it. Many took the position that voting was useless in the April 10, 1938, plebiscite, since the Nazis would undoubtedly orchestrate the result, but Edith Stein, abandoning her usual serenity, passionately urged people not to give up and to vote against Hitler.

November 8, 1938, was the night now referred to as Kristallnacht (night of glass) when the SS terrorised Jewish people throughout Germany, beating them and driving them from their homes, confiscating their property, smashing and burning their shops and synagogues. From henceforth, Jews were no long considered German citizens; they were deprived of possessions and property.

On New Year's Eve, Edith Stein was smuggled across the border into Holland, to the Carmelite Convent in Echt in the Province of Limburg. It was at Echt that the future martyr penned her will, on June 9, 1939: "Even now I accept the death that God has prepared for me in complete submission and with joy as being his most holy will for me. I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death for his honour and glorification, for all desires of the most holy hearts of Jesus and Mary and Holy Church,...for the atonement of the unbelief of the Jewish people and for this: that the Lord may be accepted by His own people and that His Kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and for world peace, and finally for my relatives both Living and dead, and all those whom God has given me: that none of them may perish."

Members of the Stein family applied to emigrate, with Else, Erna, and Arno successfully able to leave the country. Paul and Frieda Stein's applications were turned down, and they later died in the camps. Rosa arrived, after many adventures, at the Carmel in Echt in 1940; earlier that year, Hitler had invaded the Netherlands. Edith Stein applied to a Carmel in Switzerland which would have accepted only her but not Rosa, and she refused, but still seemed hopeful another refuge would be found. She worked, in the meantime, on The Science of the Cross, a treatise on St John of the Cross. While it had been undertaken at the request of the superior of the Echt convent for the 400th anniversary of the death of this great Carmelite founder, it was the fruit of many years of meditation by Edith Stein on the Cross.

Road to Calvary

Edith Stein's own personal road to Calvary began when the Dutch bishops issued a pastoral letter protesting the deportation of Dutch Jews to camps in the east. While the Reichskommissar had promised exemption from deportation for Christian Jews if the churches held their peace, the Archbishop of Utrecht ordered that the pastoral letter be read from every church pulpit throughout the country on July 26, 1942.

In retaliation, the Nazis continued to ship Jews to the death camps but now also rounded up every Catholic who had even one-eighth Jewish blood. In a report dated July 30, the commandant of the security police, William Harster, wrote: "Since the Catholic bishops have interfered in something that does not concern them, deportation of all Catholic Jews will be speeded up and completed within the coming week. No appeals for clemency will be considered....I suggest an investigation be conducted regarding the possible nationalization of some of the larger Catholic charitable institutions...."

On August 2, 1942, the SS came for Edith and Rosa Stein. They were given five minutes to pack. Outside, people congregated to protest this action, and Rosa became disoriented. Accounts tell us that Edith took her arm and said, "Come, Rosa, we are going for our people."

Various testimonies and reports have been pieced together to reveal the next few days in the life of Edith Stein and her sister. They were taken to a concentration camp at Amersfoort, where they and other arrested religious were treated brutally. From here they were transported to Westerbork, a central detention camp in Northern Holland. Here as elsewhere, fellow captives were impressed by the demeanour of Edith Stein, who retained an air of serenity and calm. One account relates that "there was a spirit of indescribable misery in the camp; the new prisoners, especially, suffered from extreme anxiety. Edith Stein went among the women like an angel, comforting, helping, and consoling them. Many of the mothers were on the brink of insanity and had sat moaning for days, without giving any thought to their children. Edith Stein immediately set about taking care of these little ones. She washed them, combed their hair, and tried to make sure they were fed and cared for."

She and Rosa, thanks to the kindness of the Dutch police, were able to receive two men who had come in response to a telegram to Echt, requesting blankets and food. But that was the last connection to Echt; in the middle of the night of August 7, the two Stein sisters along with thousands of other Jews were transported to Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp situated in eastern Poland.

There is an account by a stationmaster at Schifferstadt, who recalls a woman in dark clothing asking him if he knew the family of Dean Schwind (Edith's first spiritual director), and who asked him to convey Edith Stein's greetings and to tell the family that she was on her way "to the east."

Another testimony comes from a Hans Wiener, waiting on a platform at Breslau. The train carrying the prisoners pulled in on August 7 and he remembers a woman dressed like a nun appearing at the door who said, "This is my home, I'll never see it again." And she said, "We are going to our death."

Records show that of that transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau, no one survived. All were taken immediately on arrival to the gas chambers. The day of Edith Stein's death was, it is believed, August 9, 1942.

The author is the managing editor of Catholic Insight. She attended the canonization of Edith Stein in Rome last October, 1998.