Saint Edith Stein

Edith Stein, religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce OCD; also known as St. Edith Stein or St. Teresia Benedicta of the Cross (12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church, and she is one of six co-patron saints of Europe.

She was born into an observant Jewish family, but had become an atheist 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 there.

From reading the works of the reformer of the Carmelite Order, Teresa of Ávila, she was drawn to the Catholic 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 mentors. She then taught at a Catholic 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 postulant to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne on 15th October, on the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila, and received the religious habitas a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Teresia Benedicta of the Cross. In 1938, she and her sister Rosa, by then also a convert and an extern sister (tertiaries 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. Despite the Nazi invasion of that state in 1940, they remained undisturbed until they were arrested by the Nazis on 2 August 1942 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chamber on 9 August 1942.

Eintrag im »Gedenkbuch« des Bundesarchivs:

Stein, Edith Theresia Hedwig geboren am 12. Oktober 1891 in Breslau / - / Schlesien wohnhaft in Münster i. Westf. und Köln

Inhaftierung: 02. August 1942 - 04. August 1942, Amersfoort, Lager 04. August 1942 - 07. August 1942, Westerbork, Sammellager

Emigration: 31. Dezember 1938, Niederlande

Deportation: ab Westerbork 07. August 1942, Auschwitz, Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager

Todesdatum: 09. August 1942 Todesort: Auschwitz, Vernichtungslager Schicksal: für tot erklärt

cf.: https://www.joodsmonument.nl/en/page/219796/edith-teresia-hedwig-stein

Wikipedia Bio

In 1998 Edith Stein was declared a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.

Edith Stein is the only Jewish-born person to be honored for sainthood in modern times.

A prominent German-Jewish intellectual who converted to Catholicism in 1922, at 30, and joined the Carmelite order as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Stein was gassed by the Nazis at Auschwitz 20 years later.

The future saint was born on Yom Kippur—Oct. 12, 1891—the youngest of seven children, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland).

Her father, Siegfried Stein, who ran a lumber yard, died in 1893, and her mother, Auguste, took over the business. Mathematician, Richard Courant, was her cousin and his first wife the mathematician Nelly Neumann was her friend.

"Pale and anemic," as Stein described herself in an unfinished memoir, young Edith was bookish and compassionate. "One could entrust to her all one's troubles and secrets," wrote her sister Erna, a physician, after her death.

Stein studied history and philosophy at three German universities—with time out as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I—and became one of the first women in Germany to receive a Ph.D.

In 1922, Stein, an agnostic, converted to Catholicism, purportedly after reading a biography of the 16th-century Carmelite mystic St. Teresa of Avila. She never explained her choice, but Erna's daughter Susanne Batzdorff, 75, says, "Her conversion followed hard upon some romantic disappointments." In any event, Stein's decision was not well-received at home. "My grandmother [Stein's mother] was devastated," says Batzdorff.

Stein taught at a Catholic school until 1933, when the Nazis banned her, and all others of Jewish parentage, from holding public posts. It was then that she joined the Carmelite order in Cologne.

Batzdorff, then 12, asked her aunt why she was drifting further from Judaism while German Jews were being persecuted. "She said, 'Don't think I'm trying to run away from the fate of the Jewish people.' I thought about it much, much later, because the fate of the Jewish people did catch up with her in the end." (Thousands of Catholic priests and nuns also died in the Holocaust.) Stein entered Cologne's Mary of Peace cloister at 42, an advanced age for a novice. "She was loved very much," recalls Sister Margareta, 87, the only living member of the order to have known her. "She never pushed herself on you, but she would teach you if you asked."

She lived in a tiny room and spent her days writing scholarly essays. But in 1938, after the pogrom called Kristallnacht, the order transferred her to Echt, Holland.

Stein's sister Rosa sought sanctuary with her, and they lived safely until, on Aug. 2, 1942, the Gestapo arrived at the convent. Edith and Rosa, alone, were deported to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.

When the Nazis came for her, Stein left the only insight into her state of mind. "Come," she told Rosa. "Let us go for our people." A week later they were led to the gas chamber. "To us, it's clear she was killed because she was of Jewish origin," says Batzdorff. Still, with her aunt on the cusp of canonization, she can't suppress a certain wonder: "As I always say, it's not every Jewish family that has a saint in their midst."

The process for sainthood began in March 1987, when 2-year-old Teresia Benedicta McCarthy of Brockton, Mass., lay comatose in a Boston hospital, dying of liver failure hours after swallowing a potentially lethal dose of Tylenol. That was when Benedicta's father, Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a Roman Catholic priest in the Eastern rite (in some cases the church ordains married men), frantically called friends and relatives, asking them to pray to Stein. Father McCarthy and his wife had named the youngest of their 13 children, born 42 years to the day after Stein died, in her memory.
At first, as they prayed, the little girl slipped closer to death. But four days after she swallowed the pills, a mystified doctor wrote on her chart, "This child has made a remarkable recovery." Four days later she went home. "She was carrying a balloon," says her father. "She was healed."

On April 8, after a decade of study, debate and testimony by medical experts, the Vatican declared that the recovery of Benedicta McCarthy, now 12, was a miracle attributable to Edith Stein's intercession. The ruling is the final step before Pope John Paul II (at a time not yet known) canonizes Stein, whom he proclaimed "beatified" 10 years ago, calling her "a daughter of Israel who remained faithful, as a Jew, to the Jewish people and, as a Catholic, to our crucified Lord Jesus Christ."

His assessment underscores a minor controversy. Though Stein is being sainted as a Christian martyr—the church asserts that Stein, then a nun in Holland, was killed in retaliation for criticism of the Nazis by Dutch bishops—many Jews disagree. "She had been registered [as a Jew], she had been told to wear the yellow star," says James Baaden, 38, an American rabbinical student now writing a biography of Stein. "The Nazis proceeded with her exactly as they intended to with all Jews."
Full Article

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Victim of the German Holocaust.

Edith Stein (October 12, 1891 – August 9, 1942) was a German-Jewish philosopher, a Carmelite nun, martyr, and saint of the Catholic Church, who died at Auschwitz. In 1922, she converted to Christianity, was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church and was received into the Discalced Carmelite Order in 1934. She was canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (her Carmelite monastic name) by Pope John Paul II in 1998; however, she is still often referred to, and churches named for her as, "Saint Edith Stein".

Edith Stein was the proud daughter of a German Jewish family.

After a spectacular academic career with a summa cum laude doctoral degree she became the principal associate of Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology.

In 1922 she became a Roman Catholic.

In 1933 she became a cloistered Carmelite Nun.

In 1942 the Nazis took her from her convent in the Netherlands and deported her to Auschwitz where she and her sister Rosa perished in the gas chambers.

In 1998 she was declared a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.

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Jewish Dynasties

Works of Edith Stein

https://www.karmelitinnen-koeln.de/edith-stein-archiv-kk/gesamtausgabe

Edith Stein, Ordensname Teresia Benedicta a Cruce OCD, oder Teresia Benedicta vom Kreuz (12. Oktober 1891 in Breslau - 9. August 1942 im KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau), war eine deutsche Philosophin und Frauenrechtlerin jüdischer Herkunft. Edith Stein wurde 1922 durch die Taufe in die katholische Kirche aufgenommen und 1933 Unbeschuhte Karmelitin. In der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus wurde sie „als Jüdin und Christin“ zum Opfer des Holocaust. Sie wird in der katholischen Kirche als Heilige und Märtyrin der Kirche verehrt. Teilen der evangelischen Kirche gilt sie als Glaubenszeugin. Papst Johannes Paul II. sprach Teresia Benedicta vom Kreuz am 1. Mai 1987 selig und am 11. Oktober 1998 heilig. Ihr römisch-katholischer und evangelischer Gedenktag ist der 9. August. Sie gilt als Brückenbauerin zwischen Christen und Juden.