Edith Stein (German: [ʃtaɪn]; religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross; 12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a German philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She was murdered in the gas chamber at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp on 9 August 1942, and is canonized as a martyr 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 (Teresia in remembrance of Teresa of Ávila, Benedicta in honour of Benedict of Nursia). 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 (tertiary of the order, who would handle the community's needs outside the monastery), 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 (according to police reports, 244 people) 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. Stein was beatified in 1987 and canonized in 1998 by Pope John Paul II.
Edith Stein was born in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), 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.
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 (The Empathy Problem as it Developed Historically and Considered Phenomenologically) 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 (Contributions to the Philosophical Foundations of Psychology and the Human Sciences), 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 (Of Truth) 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."
As a child of the Jewish people who, by the grace of God, for the past eleven years has also been a child of the Catholic Church, I dare to speak to the Father of Christianity about that which oppresses millions of Germans. For weeks we have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor. For years the leaders of National Socialism have been preaching hatred of the Jews ... But the responsibility must fall, after all, on those who brought them to this point and it also falls on those who keep silent in the face of such happenings.
Everything that happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself 'Christian'. For weeks not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ's name. Is not this idolization of race and governmental power which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? Isn't the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, of the most blessed Virgin and the apostles? Is not all this diametrically opposed to the conduct of our Lord and Savior, who, even on the cross, still prayed for his persecutors? And isn't this a black mark on the record of this Holy Year which was intended to be a year of peace and reconciliation? We all, who are faithful children of the Church and who see the conditions in Germany with open eyes, fear the worst for the prestige of the Church, if the silence continues any longer.