St. Edith Stein

St. Edith Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who became a Catholic, entered the Carmelite order as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and was murdered at Auschwitz on or about 9 August 1942. She was born in Breslau, now Wrocław in Poland, on 12 October 1891, took her doctorate under Edmund Husserl at Freiburg in 1916, was baptised on 1 January 1922, and entered the Carmel of Cologne in 1933 after Nazi racial laws ended her academic career. Pope John Paul II canonised her on 11 October 1998 and named her a co-patroness of Europe the following year.

Her canonisation was contested, and the objection deserves a straight answer rather than a silence: she was arrested because she was Jewish, in a round-up that was explicit retaliation against the Dutch Catholic bishops for condemning the deportations. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the sections below set out how the Church and her Jewish critics have each read them.

1. The Seeker of Truth

Edith Stein was a brilliant German Jewish philosopher and utter atheist. She sought truth through phenomenology (fancy word for "figuring out what is real"). One night, she picked up the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, read it in one sitting, and said, "This is the truth." Boom. Atheism gone.

Her own account is more gradual than the anecdote suggests. She described deliberately giving up prayer as a teenager, and then spending years among philosophers, several of whom became Christians, before the night in the summer of 1921 when she picked up the book. What the anecdote gets right is that she was a person for whom an intellectual conviction had immediate practical consequences. She asked for a catechism the next day.

2. Carmelite Convert

She converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She continued her philosophical work, bridging phenomenology and Thomism, and writing on the dignity of women.

Eleven years separate the two halves of that sentence. She was baptised on 1 January 1922 and wanted to enter Carmel at once; her spiritual advisers told her to wait and to teach, and she did, for a decade. She entered the Carmel of Cologne on 14 October 1933, was clothed in April 1934, and made her solemn profession in 1938. The name she took, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was chosen deliberately, and she explained that the cross in it was not an ornament.

3. Auschwitz

As a Jewish convert, she was a target of the Nazis. She was arrested in the Netherlands in retaliation for the Dutch bishops' letter condemning racism. As she was taken away, she told her sister Rosa, "Come, let us go for our people." She walked to her death with the calm of a queen. She died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1942.

The dates are exact enough to state. The pastoral letter of the Dutch bishops protesting the deportation of Jews was read in Catholic churches across the Netherlands on Sunday 26 July 1942. On 2 August the occupying authorities arrested Catholics of Jewish descent across the country, Edith and Rosa Stein among them. They were taken through Amersfoort and Westerbork and deported east. They were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, most probably on 9 August 1942.

4. Breslau and the Family She Came From

Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children in an observant Jewish family in Breslau, a large German city in Silesia that is now Wrocław in Poland. She was born on 12 October 1891, which that year fell on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a coincidence her mother treasured and she remembered.

Her father died when she was two. Her mother, Auguste Stein, took over the family timber business and ran it successfully while raising the children, and she was a devout Jew who kept the household observant. Edith's decision to be baptised in 1922 wounded her mother deeply, and Edith did not pretend otherwise. She went to synagogue with her mother after her conversion, and she prayed the psalms in her cell as a Carmelite in the knowledge that they were her mother's prayers.

She never described her baptism as leaving the Jewish people. Her consistent position, in her writing and in her final words to her sister, was that she remained a daughter of Israel and that this was why she belonged where she was going.

5. Phenomenology, Husserl and the Door That Was Shut

Edith Stein studied at Breslau and then followed Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, first to Göttingen and then to Freiburg. Phenomenology set out to describe experience exactly as it presents itself, before any theory is imposed on it, and Stein was one of the ablest people in the movement.

She took her doctorate in 1916 with the highest distinction, on the problem of empathy: how one conscious person comes to know another as a person rather than as an object. She then worked for two years as Husserl's assistant, which meant deciphering and editing his notoriously difficult manuscripts.

She was never allowed a university post. Her attempt at habilitation, the qualification required to teach, was blocked because she was a woman, and later Nazi law closed the question entirely. One of the strongest philosophers of her generation spent her career teaching schoolgirls and giving public lectures, and she did that work seriously rather than resentfully.

Her later philosophical work attempted to put phenomenology and the scholastic tradition of Thomas Aquinas into genuine conversation. Her major book on that question, Finite and Eternal Being, was written in Carmel and could not be published in Germany because of who she was.

6. The Night She Read Teresa of Ávila

In the summer of 1921 Stein was staying at the home of her friend and fellow philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius in Bergzabern. She took the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila from the shelf and read it through the night. Her recorded reaction on closing it was that this is the truth.

What she had been reading was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun's plain first-person account of prayer, written for her confessors, full of practical detail and self-criticism. For a phenomenologist trained to take a first-person description of experience seriously as evidence, it was exactly the right book. A trained describer of consciousness met a supremely honest describer of prayer.

She bought a missal and a catechism, was baptised on 1 January 1922, and took Teresa as her baptismal name. Our page on St. Teresa of Ávila covers the woman whose book did this.

7. Speyer, Teaching and Her Writing on Women

From 1923 to 1931 Stein taught at the Dominican girls' school and teacher training college of St. Magdalena in Speyer. She lived close to the sisters, prayed with them, translated the letters and journals of John Henry Newman, and later translated Thomas Aquinas's De Veritate into German. Translating Aquinas is how she learned scholastic philosophy from the inside.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s she became a well-known lecturer on the education and vocation of women, speaking across Germany and beyond. Her position was that women should be trained for whatever work they are actually suited to, including the professions and the academy, and that the differences between men and women are real and are not a ranking. She argued this in Catholic settings that were not uniformly receptive, and she argued it as a woman who had been shut out of a career she was qualified for.

In 1932 she took a post at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster. She was dismissed in 1933 under the racial legislation of the new government. That dismissal is what freed her to do what she had wanted to do since 1922.

8. The 1933 Letter to Pope Pius XI

In April 1933, within months of the Nazi seizure of power and while she was still a laywoman, Edith Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI. She asked him to issue an encyclical on the persecution of the Jews, and she told him that the silence would be held against the Church.

The letter was released by the Vatican archives in 2003 and its text is public. She received an acknowledgment through the Secretariat of State and a papal blessing, and no encyclical of the kind she asked for was issued.

The letter is important for two reasons. It shows that a private German Catholic saw clearly in the spring of 1933 what was coming, which removes the excuse that nobody could have known. And it removes any suggestion that Edith Stein was politically naive about the Church she had joined. She joined it with her eyes open and she pressed it, in writing, at the top.

9. Cologne, Echt and The Science of the Cross

Stein entered the Carmel of Cologne on 14 October 1933, at forty-two. Carmel is a strictly enclosed contemplative order, and her superiors gave her time to write, which is how the Church has her philosophical work at all.

After the pogrom of November 1938 it became clear that her presence endangered the Cologne community. On 31 December 1938 she crossed into the Netherlands to the Carmel at Echt. Her sister Rosa, who had also become Catholic, followed and lived at the convent as an extern sister.

At Echt she wrote Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross, a study of St. John of the Cross written for the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. She was working on it when the police came. It was left unfinished, and it has been published as it stood. A book about the cross by a woman writing at Echt in 1942 is not a literary exercise, and she knew exactly what she was describing. Our page on St. John of the Cross covers the writer she was interpreting.

10. What Happened on 2 August 1942

The sequence matters, because it is the basis of everything later argued about her death.

Through 1942 the deportation of Jews from the occupied Netherlands accelerated. The Dutch churches protested. A joint protest telegram was sent, and the Catholic bishops went further: on Sunday 26 July 1942 a pastoral letter condemning the deportations was read from Catholic pulpits across the country, against explicit German warnings not to publish it.

The retaliation was specific. On 2 August 1942 the occupying authorities arrested Catholics of Jewish descent throughout the Netherlands, a category that had until then been partially exempted. Edith and Rosa Stein were taken from the Carmel at Echt that afternoon. Survivors at the Westerbork transit camp later described Stein moving among the women and caring for the children, whose mothers were unable to function.

They were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and killed, most probably on 9 August 1942. There is no grave. Her feast is kept on 9 August.

11. Canonisation, and the Debate About Her Martyrdom

Pope John Paul II beatified Edith Stein in Cologne on 1 May 1987, canonised her in Rome on 11 October 1998, and on 1 October 1999 declared her a co-patroness of Europe alongside St. Bridget of Sweden and St. Catherine of Siena. Her feast day is 9 August.

She was declared a martyr, and the declaration was criticised, principally by Jewish scholars and organisations. The objection has real force and can be stated in one sentence: she was murdered because she was a Jew, under a racial law that took no interest whatever in her baptism, along with six million others who were not canonised, and calling her a Christian martyr risks turning the murder of Jews into a Christian story.

The Church's answer rests on the trigger. The arrest of 2 August 1942 stood apart from the general deportation programme. It was a reprisal aimed at a specific group, Catholics of Jewish descent, carried out because the Catholic bishops had publicly denounced the deportations. On that reading the Church's protest is what brought her to the train, and she died in hatred of the faith as well as in the hatred of her people.

Both of those statements can be held together, and the honest position is to hold them. She was murdered as a Jew. She was arrested in reprisal for a Catholic protest. She herself did not separate the two: what she said to her sister as they were taken was that they were going for their people. The Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate repudiated antisemitism and affirmed the Church's bond with the Jewish people, and any Catholic account of Edith Stein that uses her to soften the record of Christian antisemitism has misused her.

12. Why the Church Holds Her Up

The Church holds her up for the pursuit of truth carried to the point where it costs something.

She spent her early adulthood on a single question, which was how one person can genuinely know another as a person. She followed the answer out of atheism, into the Church, out of a career, into an enclosed convent, and into a cattle truck. At no stage did she treat a conclusion as something to be held at a distance from her life.

She is also held up for the way she took the cross as her name and then received it. The Christian claim about suffering is that an evil endured can be joined to the suffering of Christ and made fruitful, which is what Paul means when he writes of completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of the body, the Church (Colossians 1:24). Stein offered herself in exactly those terms before the war, in writing, for her people. Our page on suffering and the Christian response to it works through what that does and does not mean.

And she is held up as a bridge that the Church needs and has not always wanted. A Jewish woman, a philosopher, a Carmelite, murdered in the Shoah, who insisted to the end that she had not stopped being a daughter of Israel.

13. What to Take From Edith Stein

Follow the argument where it goes. She read one book honestly and let it cost her a family relationship, a career and eventually her life. Most people meet a conclusion they do not want and negotiate. She did not.

Do the smaller work well. Barred from a university chair, she taught schoolgirls for eight years and translated Aquinas in the evenings. The work she is remembered for came out of the consolation prize.

Say something while it still costs something. She wrote to the pope in April 1933, not in 1945.

Do not stand at a distance from your own people. Whatever else her last recorded words mean, they mean that she refused to be counted as an exception.

14. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Edith Stein?

St. Edith Stein was a German Jewish philosopher who became a Catholic and then a Carmelite nun under the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was born in Breslau on 12 October 1891, took her doctorate under Edmund Husserl at Freiburg in 1916, was baptised on 1 January 1922, entered the Carmel of Cologne in 1933, and was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau on or about 9 August 1942.

Why did Edith Stein convert to Catholicism?

She dated the decisive moment to a night in the summer of 1921 when she read the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila straight through at a friend's house in Bergzabern and concluded that it was the truth. As a phenomenologist trained to take first-person descriptions of experience seriously, she found a sixteenth-century nun's plain and self-critical account of prayer to be evidence. She was baptised on 1 January 1922 and took Teresa as her baptismal name.

Why was Edith Stein arrested and killed?

On 26 July 1942 the Dutch Catholic bishops had a pastoral letter condemning the deportation of Jews read from pulpits across the Netherlands, against German warnings. In reprisal, on 2 August 1942 the occupying authorities arrested Catholics of Jewish descent throughout the country, including Edith Stein and her sister Rosa at the Carmel of Echt. They were deported and killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, most probably on 9 August 1942.

Why was her canonisation controversial?

She was declared a martyr, and Jewish scholars and organisations objected that she was murdered because she was a Jew, under a racial law indifferent to her baptism, alongside six million others, so that calling her a Christian martyr risks absorbing the murder of Jews into a Christian story. The Church's answer is that the arrest of 2 August 1942 was a specific reprisal for the Catholic bishops' protest. Both facts are true and an honest account holds them together.

When is St. Edith Stein's feast day?

Her feast day is 9 August, the most likely date of her death at Auschwitz in 1942. Pope John Paul II beatified her on 1 May 1987, canonised her on 11 October 1998, and on 1 October 1999 declared her a co-patroness of Europe alongside St. Bridget of Sweden and St. Catherine of Siena.