Portal:Catholic Church/Patron Archive/August 9 2007

Edith Stein or Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (her Carmelite monastic name)(October 12, 1891 – August 9, 1942) was a German philosopher, a Carmelite nun, martyr, and saint of the Catholic Church, who died at Auschwitz. Stein was born in Breslau, in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia, into an Orthodox Jewish family.

At the University of Göttingen, she became a student of Edmund Husserl, whom she followed to the University of Freiburg as his assistant. In 1916, she received her doctorate of philosophy there with a dissertation under Husserl, "On The Problem of Empathy." She then became a member of the faculty in Freiburg.

It was her reading the autobiography of the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila on a holiday in Göttingen in 1921 that caused her conversion. Baptized on January 1, 1922, she gave up her assistantship with Husserl to teach at a Dominican girls' school in Speyer from 1922 to 1932. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster, but anti-Semitic 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."

She entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery at Cologne in 1934 and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. There she wrote her metaphysical book "Endliches und Ewiges Sein," which tries to combine the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl.

To avoid the growing Nazi threat, her order transferred Stein to the Carmelite monastery at Echt in the Netherlands.

The Dutch Bishops' Conference had a public statement read in all the churches of the country on July 20, 1942, condemning Nazi racism. In a retaliatory response on July 26, all Jewish converts, who had previously been spared, were arrested. Stein and her sister Rosa, also a convert, were captured and shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chambers on August 9, 1942.

Attributes: Yellow Star of David

Patronage: Europe; loss of parents; martyrs; World Youth

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