Edith Stein

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Edith Stein bigraphy, stories - Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Edith Stein : biography

October 12, 1891 – August 9, 1942

Edith Stein, also Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, informally also known as Saint Edith Stein (born: October 12, 1891 – died: August 9, 1942), was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and nun, regarded as a martyr and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Born into an observant Jewish family she was atheist by her teenage years; moved by the war tragedies, in 1915 she took lessons to become nursing assistant, and worked in an hospital for outbreak prevention; Edith was baptized on January 1, 1922 into the Roman Catholic Church.

Although Edith Stein had wished to enter Carmel since 1922, she was deterred from this by her spiritual leaders, canon Joseph Schwind and archabbot Raphael Walzer OSB who wished her to act in the world as a teacher and speaker for the education of women. Having been forced to quit her teaching position as a result of the Aryan Clause, which was central to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, she entered the Discalced Carmelite Order Monastery of Cologne in October 1933, taking the name Teresia Benedicta of the Cross. She received the habit of the Discalced Carmelites as a novice in April, 1934. Although she moved from Germany to a Carmelite convent in the town of Echt, the Netherlands, in solidarity with her sister who had failed previously in obtaining a place in an Swiss convent to avoid Nazi persecution, in 1942 she was arrested and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she died in the gas chamber. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1998.

Stein is one of the six patron saints of Europe, together with Saint Benedict of Nursia, Saints Cyril and Methodius, Saint Bridget of Sweden and Saint Catherine of Siena.

Life

Stein was born in Breslau, in the German Empire’s Prussian Province of Silesia, into an observant Jewish family. Born on October 12, 1891, she was a very gifted child who enjoyed learning. She greatly admired her mother’s strong faith. By her teenage years, however, Edith had become an atheist.

In 1916 Stein received a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Göttingen with a dissertation under Edmund Husserl, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On the Problem of Empathy). She then became a member of the faculty in Freiburg. In the previous year she had worked with Martin Heidegger in editing Husserl’s papers for publication, Heidegger being appointed similarly as a teaching assistant to Husserl at Freiburg in October 1916. But because she was a woman Husserl did not support her submission to the University of Freiburg of her habilitational thesis (a prerequisite for an academic chair)Theresia Wobbe, « Sollte die akademische laufbahn für Frauen geöffnet werden. Edmund Husserl und Edith Stein », in Edith-Stein-Jahrbuch tome 2, p. 370, 1996. and her other thesis ("Psychische Kausalität" [Psychic Causality] at the University of Göttingen in 1919) was likewise rejected.

While Stein had earlier contacts with Roman Catholicism, it was her reading of the autobiography of the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila during summer holidays in Bergzabern in 1921 that caused her conversion. Baptized on January 1, 1922, she gave up her assistantship with Husserl to teach at the Dominican nuns’ schools school in Speyer from 1923 to 1931. While there, she translated Thomas Aquinas’ De Veritate (On Truth) into German and familiarized herself with Roman 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, in the same month that Heidegger gave a speech to Husserl on his 70th birthday. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at 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."

Stein’s letter received no answer, and it is not known for sure whether Pius XI ever even read it. However, in 1937, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical written in German, Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety), in which he criticized Nazism, listed breaches of the Concordat signed between Germany and the Church in 1933, and condemned antisemitism.