Edith Stein
| Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross | |
|---|---|
| Martyr | |
| Born | October 12, 1891 in Breslau, German Empire |
| Died | August 9, 1942 in Auschwitz concentration camp, Nazi-occupied Poland |
| Venerated in | Roman Catholicism |
| Beatified | May 1, 1987, Cologne, Germany |
| Canonized | October 11, 1998 |
| Feast | August 9 |
| Attributes | Yellow Star of David |
| Patronage | Europe; loss of parents; martyrs; World Youth Day[1] |
Edith Stein (October 12, 1891 – August 9, 1942) was a 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."
Life
Stein was born in Breslau, in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia, into an Orthodox Jewish family. Her father died when Edith was a toddler, leaving her mother a widow with seven children to raise In her teenage years, Edith stopped observing the Orthodox tradition and considered herself an atheist. However, she reportedly continued to admire her mother’s personal standards inspired by her faith in God.
A brilliant student, Stein was one of the first German women admitted to university studies. At the University of Göttingen, she became a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of the philosophical school of phenomenology, whom she followed to the University of Freiburg as his assistant. Her philosophical studies led her to question her atheism, and she was further influenced by several Jewish friends who had converted to Christianity. 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.
Conversion
While Stein had earlier contacts with Catholicism, it was her reading the autobiography of the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila on a holiday in Göttingen in 1921 that caused her conversion. Stein, then 29, was vacationing with friends when she happened read pick up the book by the founder of the Carmelite Order, reading it in one sitting. She decided to buy a missal and a copy of the Catholic catechism the next day and was baptized the following January. She hoped to enter the Carmelites immediately, but her advisers counseled against this on the grounds that her entering the Carmelite cloister so soon after her conversion would be cruel to her Jewish family. They also realized that her skills and training as a speaker and writer could be put to good use in a more public setting.
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. Her spiritual director, Abbot Raphael Walzer, wrote of her “tender, even maternal, solicitude for others," describing her as "plain and direct with ordinary people, learned with the scholars, a fellow-seeker with those searching for the truth."
While there, she translated Thomas Aquinas' De Veritate (On Truth) into German and familiarized herself with Catholic philosophy in general. Stein soon became a leading voice of Catholic women in Germany and wrote significants works reconciling the traditional Catholic view of women with modern times. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster. By 1933, when Hitler came to power, she was already well known among the German intelligentsia, but anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign her teaching post.
Increasingly concerned about the hatred directed toward Jews by the Hitler regime, she sought to influence the Pope to issue a special encyclical against anti-Semitism. Her request for an audience, however, was not granted. In a private 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. — Edith Stein, Letter to Pope Pius XI. | ” |
Cloister and martrydom
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 seek to combine the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl.
She entered the Carmelite monastery at Cologne in 1934 and took the name Teresa of the Cross. There she wrote her metaphysical book "Endliches und Ewiges Sein," which tries to combine the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl. She remained there for five years, participating in the life of the community while continuing her writing. However, after the Nazi regime organized the anti-Jewish kristallnacht riots of November 9 1938, the convent secretly transferred her to the Carmelite monastery at Echt in the Netherlands. There she wrote Studie über Joannes a Cruce: Kreuzeswissenschaft ("The Science of the Cross: Studies on John of the Cross").
However, Stein was not safe in the Netherlands as Holland soon fell to the Nazis. Plans were made to move them to Switzerland, but events were moving too quickly to prevent disaster. When the Dutch Bishops' Conference had a public statement read in all the churches of the country on July 20, 1942, condemning Nazi racism, the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, retaliated by ordering the arrest of all Jewish converts to Catholicism on July 26, 1942. On August 2, Stein was transported by cattle train to the death camp of Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers August 9. Stein and her sister Rosa, also a convert, died there as well.
Today, there is a school named in tribute to Stein in Darmstadt, Germany,[2] as well as one in Hengelo, the Netherlands.[3] The University of Tübingen has a women's dormitory named for her as well.[4]
Canonization
Stein was beatified on May 1, 1987. Originally, she was to be beatified as a confessor, which requires two confirmed miracles, but this was changed to "martyr," which only requires one.[5]
Some Jewish groups initially challenged the beatification, pointing out that a martyr is, according to Catholic doctrine, someone who died for his or her religion, but Stein died because she was a Jew, not a Catholic. Some also felt her beatification represented an attempt to glorify Jews who convert to Christianity and denigrated the authentic Jewish experience in the holocaust. Other Jews came to see her as a bridge between Catholics and Jews, in that Stein had been an outspoken supporter of Jewish rights, even daring to write the Pope to urge him to take a stand in for the Jewish cause.
The position of the Catholic Church was that Edith Stein also died because of the Dutch hierarchy's public condemnation of Nazi racism in 1942—in other words, that she died to uphold the moral position of the Church, and is thus a martyr. By the time of her canonization by Pope John Paul II on October 11, 1998, much of the opposition to her sainthood had dissipated.
Writings on women
Beyond her significance as a saint and martyr, Edith Stein contributed important intellectual works in the fields of philosophy, women's studies, theology, and education. In all of these, she approached her subject intentionally and self consciously as a woman.
Most of her writing on women come from the period between her conversion and her entry into the Carmelite community. Stein believed that women needed to be educated not only as human beings, but also specifically as women. She rejected the feminist view the differences between men and women are societally determined, rather than inborn. However, she did not insist that university women study a significantly different curriculum from men. Rather, she hoped that university teachers would develop a greater awareness of womens issues and learn to connect their subjects with the particular concerns of their female students.
She also wrote extensively on the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. She agreed with the Thomist view that Thomas the person, the body, and the soul form a unity. In this view the body is essential, not simply a vehicle for the soul. Woman, she argued, possesses a unique soul, spiritually distinct from that of man. It follows that women's education should differ in some ways from men's. At the same time, she was clear in insisting that men are not superior to women.
In her view, women naturally tend to focus on what is "human." They thus give relationships a higher priority than factors that men tend to emphasize, such as prestige, employment, achievement, and reputation. She viewed motherhood as women's special and universal calling for women. Likewise, the role of wife is also a calling for women, involving sharing another's intimate life and deepest needs, as well as everyday concerns. This calling to companionship also manifests in other relationships outside the family, as in the case of single women, including those called to a religious life of celibacy.
As a professional woman an educator, however, she rejected the traditional notion that women should be limited to the role of homemakers. She thus welcomed the gains of that had been won for twentieth century women in terms of workplace rights, voting, and other areas of growing equality with men. She strongly encouraged women to become politically active.
Legacy
As both a Catholic martyr and a Jewish victim of the Nazi holocaust, Edith Stein stands as a bridge uniting the two traditions. Paradoxically, as a Catholic convert from Judaism, she also represents the fears of the Jewish community—which does not actively seek converts—that assimilation will succeed in doing what the Nazis could not, diminish the Jewish people to the point that the cease to exist as distinct people.
In addition to her life as a saint and martyr, Stein left a corpus of significant literary works dealing with philosophy, mysticism, education, and especially women's issues.
Pope John Paul II—known to have studied Stein's works on women—echoed her teachings when her urged women to “teach others that human relations are authentic if they are open to accepting the other person: a person who is recognized and loved because of the dignity which comes from being a person and not from other considerations, such as usefulness, strength, intelligence, beauty or health.”
On May 1, 1987, Edith Stein was beatified by Pope John Paul II. She was canonized on Oct. 11, 1998. In 2008, her bust was scheduled to be introduced to the Walhalla temple in Regensburg.
At Louvain, Belgium, the Archivum Carmelitanum Edith Stein was established for the study and publication of her works.
Writings
- Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1986
- On the Problem of Empathy, Translated by Waltraut Stein 1989
- Essays on Womans sins, translated by Freda Mary Oben, 1996
- The Hidden Life, translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1993
- The Science of the Cross, Translated by Josephine Koeppel, 1998
- Knowledge and Faith
- Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt to an Ascent to the Meaning of Being
- Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities
- Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- ↑ "Patron Saints Index: Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross" Accessed 26 January 2007.
- ↑ Edith Stein Schule
- ↑ Hogeschool Edith Stein
- ↑ Edith Stein-Studentinnen-Wohnheim
- ↑ Carroll, James. Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews — A History, New York: Mariner, 2002 ISBN 9780618219087
See also
External links
Credits
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