Stein, Saint Edith (1891-1942), was a German Roman Catholic nun and philosopher. She was one of the leading Catholic intellectuals of her time in Europe. Stein wrote several important theological works, including Finite and Eternal Being (completed in 1936) and The Science of the Cross (completed in 1942). She was declared a saint by the church in 1998.
Stein was born on Oct. 12, 1891, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) into a devout Jewish family. She showed an aptitude for learning at an early age and studied at the universities of Breslau and Gottingen. At Gottingen, she studied with the famous German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Stein abandoned her religious faith as a teen-ager, but she was drawn back and eventually converted to Catholicism. She was baptized on New Year’s Day 1922.
After her conversion, Stein devoted herself to teaching, writing, and translating. She built a reputation as an important scholar. She lost her teaching post due to the persecution of the Jews in Germany by the Nazis in the early 1930’s. She entered a convent in 1933 and became a Carmelite nun, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
As the persecution of the Jews intensified in Germany, Stein’s Jewish background put her and the other nuns in danger and she secretly moved to a convent in the Netherlands on Dec. 31, 1938. However, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940. Later, in response to the Dutch bishops’ criticism of the Nazis, all Catholics of Jewish background were arrested in the Netherlands. On Aug. 2, 1942, Stein was taken from the convent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. She died in the gas chambers there on August 9.
