The Jewess Who Conquered Europe

Today is her feast day throughout Europe. The Order of Discalced Carmelites announced it. Edith Stein, whose fate was both exhilarating and terrible, was celebrated: a Jew, a philosopher, a convert to Christianity, a “reborn” Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, killed by the Nazis, proclaimed a saint and martyr, and finally one of the six heavenly protectors of the Old Continent.

With her in the heavens are Benedict of Nursia, Cyril and Methodius, Bridget of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena. According to the ranking established by the Church, Benedict is the principal patron. The others share the spiritual role as co-patrons.

In her biography, August 9th is an important date: it commemorates her death in the Auschwitz concentration camp and is a liturgical memorial.

Education and Philosophical Research

The significant stages of her life are summarized by the Vatican. In 1911, the young woman graduated from high school and began studying German and psychology at the University of Breslau (then in Germany, now Poland). Two years later, in Göttingen, Germany, she attended lectures by Edmund Husserl, philosopher and “father” of Phenomenology. She defended her thesis on “The Problem of Empathy” (supervised by Husserl) and in 1916 she graduated in philosophy “summa cum laude,” becoming a professor’s assistant and, later, a professor of scientific pedagogy (and more). One change after another.

From loss of faith to conversion

Her spirit, too, experienced a rollercoaster of events. Edith Stein was born in 1891 in Breslau to a Jewish family, the youngest of eleven children. She was not yet 24 months old when her father died. She would later describe those years in one of her writings: “In full consciousness and of free choice, I stopped praying.”

A convinced atheist, in the summer of 1921, a revelation struck. One evening—the Holy See recalls—she went to the home of a disciple of Husserl and found the autobiography of Teresa of Avila (a 16th-century Spanish mystic, also a nun of the Discalced Carmelites) in the library. She read it all night, and “when I closed the book, I said to myself: this is the truth.”

On January 1, 1922, Edith was baptized. In 1933, she presented herself to the prioress of the Carmelite nuns in Cologne and entered the convent. A year later, she took the habit: she took the name of Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Nazi terror and martyrdom at Auschwitz

These were times of new life, but also times in which the Nazi threat transformed into terror. According to the reconstruction reported by the Vatican, the Mother Superior in Cologne did everything she could to ensure Sister Teresa’s safety. On New Year’s Eve 1938, he took her across the border into the Netherlands to take refuge in the convent of Echt.

But it was to no avail. In 1942, the Gestapo came to arrest her and her sister Rosa, also a Jew who had converted to Christianity and was a Discalced Carmelite tertiary. On August 7, both were among the 987 Jews sent to Auschwitz, two days after her death.

The Words of John Paul II

In October 1998, during the Mass for Edith Stein’s canonization, John Paul II celebrated her figure with particular attention. “In our time,” he said, “truth is often confused with the opinion of the majority. Furthermore, there is a widespread belief that truth must be used even against love, or vice versa. But truth and love need each other. Sister Teresa Benedicta,” he concluded, “is a witness to this.”

A modern saint among the patron saints of Europe

Finally, a curiosity. Of the six patrons, the first—Benedict—was declared by Paul VI in 1964. The others, from 1980 to 1999, were declared by Pope Wojtyła. All members of the sextet lived within a handful of centuries, except Edith Stein, who was decidedly more recent.

“Placing alongside medieval saints the sanctity of Edith Stein, a German convert to Jewry, a scholar of modern philosophy and philosopher, and then a mystic,” the historian argues in “Light and Darkness in the Middle Ages” (Sismel, 2014), “seems to us to be a great intuition on the part of John Paul II. In the turmoil that characterizes our age,” he concludes, “we can perhaps imagine a woman coming to the aid of Christians’ uncertainties and errors, their lack of faith, their pessimism about humanity and history.”