Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
Virgin and Martyr
- Feast Day
- August 9
- Life
- 1891–1942
- Canonized
- 1998
- Order
- Order of Discalced Carmelites (OCD)
- Born
- Breslau, Province of Silesia, German Empire (modern Wroclaw, Poland)
Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was born Edith Stein at Breslau in Silesia on October 12, 1891, the youngest of eleven children of an observant Jewish family of timber merchants. Her father died when she was two, and she was raised by her devout mother. By her teenage years she had drifted from the practice of Judaism into self-described atheism. She studied philosophy, psychology, and history at the universities of Breslau, Gottingen, and Freiburg, where she became the most important pupil and assistant of the philosopher Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, taking her doctorate summa cum laude in 1916 with the dissertation On the Problem of Empathy.
In the summer of 1921, while a guest at the home of her friends Hedwig and Theodor Conrad-Martius, she read the Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila in a single night and at dawn declared, This is the truth. She was baptized at the parish church of Bergzabern on January 1, 1922. For the next dozen years she taught at the Dominican school in Speyer (1923-1931) and lectured at the Institute for Pedagogy in Munster (1932-1933), producing significant philosophical works (Finite and Eternal Being and The Science of the Cross, the latter a study of Saint John of the Cross composed in her last year).
The Nazi laws of April 1933 forced her dismissal from Munster as a Jew; on October 14, 1933, she entered the Discalced Carmel of Cologne, taking the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. After Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938) she was transferred for safety to the Carmel of Echt in the Netherlands on December 31, 1938. After the German occupation of the Netherlands and the Catholic bishops' joint pastoral letter of July 26, 1942, condemning Nazi anti-Semitism, the SS retaliated by arresting Catholics of Jewish descent. Edith Stein and her sister Rosa, also a Carmelite tertiary, were arrested at Echt on August 2, 1942, transported through camps at Amersfoort and Westerbork, and gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 9, 1942.
Pope Saint John Paul II beatified her at Cologne on May 1, 1987, and canonized her in Saint Peter's Square on October 11, 1998. On October 1, 1999, by the Apostolic Letter Spes aedificandi, he proclaimed her co-patroness of Europe, together with Saints Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena.
In his canonization homily Pope John Paul II called Edith Stein an eminent daughter of Israel and a faithful daughter of the Church and saw in her, a Jewish convert who died in Auschwitz wearing the Carmelite habit, a symbol of the human and Christian dimensions of the unspeakable tragedy of the Shoah and a sign of reconciliation between Christians and Jews. Her writings, especially The Science of the Cross, make her a privileged witness to twentieth-century Carmelite mysticism and to the philosophical search for truth.
Patronages
Europe (co-patroness) · converts · loss of parents · martyrs · World Youth Day
Catholic Churches Named After Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
3 parishes on Catholic Church Times share Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)'s name. Find their Mass times, confession schedules, and adoration hours:
Sources