St. Edith Stein - Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Aug. 9th)

Of the various Saints and Feast Days that we celebrate this week:

August 4th -- St. John Vianney, Priest

August 5th – The Dedication of the Basilica of St. Mary Major

August 6th -- The Transfiguration of the Lord.  

August 8th -- St. Dominic, Priest and Religious [2024]

August 9th -- St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), Virgin and Martyr 

August 10th -- NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME (Year C)

August 10th -- St. Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr

I’ve chosen to write about St. Edith Stein (her religious name St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross).

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross began her life as Edith Stein, born to an observant Jewish family in Breslau, Germany (today Wrocław in Poland) in 1891.  As a teenager and in the face of the sufferings of war (World War I was raging at the time), she became for a while an agnostic.  

At the university, she studied philosophy.  At the time, the rage in German philosophy was Phenomenology, which sought to study objectively the nature of subjective experience.  She became an assistant to Edmund Husserl, one of the founders of the movement.  She also knew Martin Heiddeger, who became this philosophical movement’s most famous proponent.  Her doctoral thesis was on the study of Empathy: “The Empathy Problem as it Developed Historically and Considered Phenomenologically.”

Reaching out to “the other,” she found the life of St. Theresa of Avila (feast day Oct 15th, and I wrote about her last year) particularly fascinating / meaningful to her.  She came to convert to Catholicism and was baptized into the faith in 1921.   

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler took power in Germany.  By the summer of 1933, Edith Stein, Jewish by race, was forced to leave her teaching post at the Catholic affiliated Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Munster.  At the time, she wrote a letter to then Pope Pius XI: 

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. 

Everything that happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself 'Christian'. For weeks, not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ's name. 

Is not this idolization of race and governmental power, which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? 

Isn't the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, of the most blessed Virgin and the apostles? 

Is not all this diametrically opposed to the conduct of our Lord and Savior, who, even on the cross, still prayed for his persecutors? 

And isn't this a black mark on the record of this Holy Year, which was intended to be a year of peace and reconciliation? 

We all, who are faithful children of the Church and who see the conditions in Germany with open eyes, fear the worst for the prestige of the Church if the silence continues any longer.

Her letter received no answer and it is uncertain if Pope Pius XI even saw or read the letter (written by arguably a “random” if perhaps rather well educated nun from a random convent in Germany) but in 1937, he wrote the Encyclical letter, Mit Brennender Sorgen (With Burning Concern) to Germany where he denounced many / most of the abuses that she expressed in her letter (though, the abuses that he wrote about were also clearly visible to all).  

In the fall of 1933, Edith Stein entered the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites (the religious congregation that St. Theresa of Avila founded) at   St. Maria vom Frieden (Our Lady of Peace) in Cologne, Germany.  She took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.  By the late 1930s, she and her sister Rosa, an "extern" to the Discalced Carmelites moved to the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Echt, Netherlands.

In May 1940, the Nazis invaded Holland.  On July 20, 1942, the Dutch Bishops' Conference had a public statement read out in all the Catholic churches condemning Nazi racism (an action that did not find equivalent _anywhere_ across Nazi occupied lands).  

In response, however, in the midst of the already mass deportation of Jews "East" from Holland (to the death camps they operated in occupied Poland), the Nazis simply ordered the arrest and deportation of all Jewish converts who had previously been spared.  

On August 7, 1942, Edith Stein / Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, along with her sister and 985 other Jews were deported on a train from Holland, arriving on August 9, 1942, in Auschwitz, Birkenau where presumably all of them were gassed.

Phenomenology: the objective study of subjective experience.

Edith Stein's focus was on Empathy.

Her hero was St. Theresa of Avila, a mystic with numerous visions of ecstasy.

She died  in this world along with 50-100 others in a two minute experience likened by many to a circle in Dante’s Inferno.

St. Theresa Benedicta, St. Edith Stein, keep praying for us.

Help us to EMPATHIZE WITH OTHERS and to never do this to ANYONE again.