Edith Stein was born in Breslau on 12 October 1891, the youngest of eleven children in an observant Jewish family. That day was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a fact that made her especially dear to her devout mother. Her father, a timber merchant, died before she turned two. Her mother, strong in faith and will, raised the family and ran the business, yet could not keep a living faith alive in all her children. In full consciousness and free choice, Edith stopped praying and became an agnostic.
She completed her secondary studies brilliantly in 1911 and began university work in German studies and history at Breslau, though her true passion was philosophy. She also engaged the women's question and joined the Prussian Association for Women's Suffrage; later she would say she had been a radical feminist as a student, then sought purely objective solutions. In 1913 she went to Göttingen to study under Edmund Husserl, becoming his disciple and assistant. Phenomenology's "return to the things themselves" drew several of his students toward Christian faith. There she also met Max Scheler, who first turned her attention toward Catholicism.
In January 1915 she passed the state examination with distinction. When the First World War broke out she wrote, "Now I no longer have a life of my own." She trained as a nurse and served in an Austrian military hospital, caring for typhus patients and assisting in the operating room, seeing young men die. After the hospital closed in 1916 she followed Husserl to Freiburg im Breisgau and in 1917 earned her doctorate summa cum laude with the dissertation On the Problem of Empathy.
A simple scene marked her: in the Frankfurt cathedral she watched a woman with a shopping basket enter the empty church for a brief, intimate prayer—something she had never seen in synagogue or Protestant services, and never forgot. Deeper still was her visit to the widow of her friend Adolf Reinach, killed in Flanders in November 1917. The Reinachs had become Evangelical Christians. Expecting desolation, Edith met a believer sustained by the Cross: "This was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it… It was the moment when my unbelief collapsed and Christ shone forth." She later wrote that what was not in her plans was in God's, and that her whole life, down to the least detail, lay in divine Providence.
In autumn 1918 she left Husserl's assistantship to work independently. She longed for a university habilitation, then nearly impossible for a woman; Husserl praised her highly, yet later her Jewish origin also barred the way. Back in Breslau she wrote, read the New Testament, Kierkegaard, and the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, sensing that such a book must be lived, not merely read.
In the summer of 1921, staying with Hedwig Conrad-Martius at Bergzabern, she found the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila and read it through the night. Closing the book she said, "This is the truth." Looking back she would write, "My longing for truth was a single prayer." On 1 January 1922, the feast of the Circumcision of the Lord, she was baptized, wearing the white wedding dress of her godmother Hedwig Conrad-Martius. She felt herself again truly a daughter of Israel, now belonging to the lineage of Christ. At Candlemas she was confirmed by the Bishop of Speyer. She went home and told her mother, "Mama, I am a Catholic." Both wept.
She desired Carmel at once, but her spiritual directors—the Vicar General of Speyer and Father Erich Przywara, SJ—held her back. Until Easter 1931 she taught German and history at the Dominican sisters' school in Speyer. At the urging of Archabbot Raphael Walzer of Beuron she traveled widely giving lectures, especially on women's vocation, learning that the more one is drawn to God, the more one must go out to the world to bring a divine reason for living. She translated Newman and Aquinas's De veritate, wrote her own philosophical works in the service of God, and drew strength from the Benedictine abbey of Beuron at the great feasts.
After 1931 she again sought habilitation in vain and shaped her study of Aquinas, Potency and Act. The Nazi rise to power and the 1933 Aryan paragraph forced her from teaching. On 14 October 1933 she entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery of Cologne; she received the habit in April 1934 as Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce—Teresa in memory of the Ávila reformer, Benedicta in honor of Saint Benedict—and made temporary vows on 21 April 1935 and perpetual vows on 21 April 1938. She understood her vocation under the sign of the Cross and the destiny of God's people.
In 1938, for safety, she and her sister Rosa—also a convert and an extern sister—were transferred to the Carmel of Echt in the Netherlands. There she continued to write, including her study of Saint John of the Cross, The Science of the Cross. After the Dutch bishops' pastoral letter of 26 July 1942 protesting the persecution of Jews, the Gestapo arrested baptized Catholics of Jewish origin on 2 August. Edith and Rosa were taken. On 9 August 1942 they were murdered in the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Pope John Paul II beatified her in Cologne in 1987 and canonized her in Rome on 11 October 1998, holding her up as an eminent daughter of Israel and faithful daughter of the Church, a martyr who had no boast except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. She is venerated as one of the patron saints of Europe.
May Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross obtain for us the courage to seek truth unto the Cross and to offer our lives in love for God and for His people.
