Saint of the Week: Edith Stein / St. Teresa Benedicta
8/13/2025
St. Teresa Benedicta (nee Edith Stein)
Philosopher, Monastic, Martyr
1891 – 1942
Edith Stein (Teresia Benedicta a Cruce OCD; 12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942), was a German Jewish philosopher who was born in Breslau (Wroclaw, Poland today), converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church. Born into an observant Jewish family, she was an atheist by her teenage years. In April 1913, she arrived in Göttingen and, by the end of the summer decided to study philosophy degree Edmund Husserl, a proponent of phenomenology (the study of consciousness & objects of direct experience). When World War I interrupted her studies in 1914, she volunteered as a Red Cross nurse in an infectious diseases hospital at Märisch-Weisskirchen. In 1916, however, she moved with Hussrerl to Freiburg to complete her dissertation, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On the Problem of Empathy), earning her PhD, summa cum laude. Because she was female, however, Husserl did not endorse her habilitational thesis (a prerequisite for an academic chair) to the University of Freiburg in 1918. After reading the works of Carmelite reformer St. Teresa of Ávila, she was drawn to Catholicism and was baptized as a Roman Catholic faith on 1 Jan 1922. She intended to become a Discalced Carmelite nun, but spiritual mentors dissuaded her from doing so. She, therefore, taught at a Catholic school in Speyer until April 1933 when, unable to present an "Aryan certificate" which the newly empowered Nazi government required of civil servants as part of its Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, she had to resign her position. She was admitted to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne by October. When she was accepted as a novitiate in April 1934, she took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In 1938, she and her sister Rosa, by then also a convert and tertiary member of the Order, were sent to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands, for their safety. But she was not safe there either. When, on 20 July 1942, the Dutch Bishops' Conference issued a public statement condemning Nazi racism, the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts who had previously been spared. On 2 August 1942, the Nazi SS arrested Teresa, her sister & 243 other baptized former Jews who were living in the Netherlands. In the early hours of 7 August 1942, this group were among 987 Jews who were also deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nazi retribution was swift; on 9 August that Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, her sister Rosa, and many others in her group were herded into a gas chamber and murdered. Pope John Paul II beatified Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in 1987 and canonized her 12 years later.
