On Sunday, 9 August, it is the Feast Day of
Teresa Benedicta of the Cross or as she was before becoming a Carmelite: Edith
Stein. Edith Stein was born in Breslau
in the then Prussian province of Silesia, the daughter of strict Jewish parents
who ran a business buying and selling wood.
The day she was born was the Jewish feast of Yom Kippur or the Day of
Atonement. Although brought up as a
practising Jew Edith Stein had lost her faith by her teens and described
herself as an atheist.
Edith was a very gifted pupil and always had
an enquiring mind and this led to her being accepted as a student at the
University of Breslau.
Though her father died while
she was young, her widowed mother was determined to give her children a
thorough education and consequently sent Edith to study at the University of Breslau and then the University of Göttingen where, with the aid of her mentor
Edmund Husserl she received a doctorate in 1916. During her university years Edith had the
occasional contact with Catholics but had never had any serious interest in
their faith. This was to change while
she was on holiday with friends in the Rhineland, near the town of Landau on
the German/French border. He she started
to read the autobiography of Teresa of Jesus or Teresa of Avila as she is
better known.
Edith was so impressed by the
life of the Spanish mystic she started to take instruction in Catholicism and
this started a process which was to lead to her baptism and entry into full
communion with the Catholic Church on 1st January 1922. Despite an initial wish to enter religious
life her spiritual advisers told her to wait.
She went to the Cathedral town of Speyer and began to teach at the
Dominican School there from 1923 - 1931.
But her academic work didn’t stop and she translated Thomas Aquinas’
book on Truth, something which Edith searched for all her life. In 1933 the Nazi party came to power in
Germany and their anti-Semitic laws forced her to give up her career. It was at this stage that Edith Stein felt
it was time for her to follow her vocation and she applied for entry into the
discalced Carmelite convent in Cologne taking the name Teresa Benedicta a Cruce. In the convent Teresa continued to write and
published her book “Finite and Eternal Being”.
However, with every work she published the risk of her coming to the
attention of the Nazis increased and so her Prioress moved both her and her
sister Rosa to the convent of Echt in Holland.
Although she continued with her work as an academic it is in Echt that
she began to enter more and more into the Carmelite way of life becoming more
and more devout and taking joy in the silence and prayerful following of Christ
as her namesake Teresa of Avila would have wanted. This increased as the restriction of writing
and publishing by any Jew became more and stricter until in the end it was
totally banned. But Teresa of the Cross
didn’t stop teaching but instead turned to instructing the sisters in Latin and
Philosophy. In 1940 the Nazis occupied
Holland but even before this Teresa realised that she would never be safe and
would not survive the war. She asked
her Prioress for permission to “offer herself to the heart of Jesus as a
sacrifice of atonement for true peace”.
After the Nazi occupation he sisters wrote that Teresa had started to
prepare herself for life in a German concentration camp by “enduring cold and
hunger”.
On 2nd August 1942
the long feared knock came on the convent door and Teresa Benedicta a Cruce was
arrested by the Gestapo along with her sister Rosa Stein who was an extern
sister in Echt; they were sent to Amersfoort and Westerbork two Dutch camps
prior to their deportation on 7th August 1942 to Auschwitz. As they left the convent in Echt she said to
her sister “come Rosa, let us go for our people”. The transport went through the town of
Speyer and during a halt there Edith managed to scribble a note and throw it
out of the wagon. It was found by the
station master who read “We are going east” and signed Edith Stein. All of the 987 Jewish deportees died with
Edith and her sister Rosa in mass gas chambers on 9th August 1942.
St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross pray for us
