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Edith Stein is known for her scholarly work, as well as her lectures following her conversion, especially to women. Her lectures gave joyful and beautiful testimony to her faithful adherence to the teachings of the Church. Her writings vary in scope, from spiritual philosophy to simple biographies of saints, to warmly personal and affectionate letters.
Born October 12, 1891 in the city of Breslau, Poland, she was the youngest of 11 children. That year, the Day of Atonement, the most important religious holiday of the Hebrew calendar, which would be significant, in light of her sacrificial life as a Carmelite for the Church and for the Jewish people.
Although born into an observant Jewish family, she was an atheist by her teenage years, which deeply wounded her devout mother. Her university studies included psychology and philosophy, particularly phenomenology. But here, for the first time, she also encountered Catholicism, both through professors and fellow-students. Moved by the tragedies of World War I, in 1915 she became a nursing assistant and worked in an infectious Breslau diseases hospital. But she knew that her life was empty, for she remained, in her own words, “cold and unapproachable.” While working to arrange the papers of a friend who had been killed in the war, she was surprised to meet with, in those who mourned him, the spirit of Christian hope and submission to God’s will. She later wrote: “It was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power that it bestows on those who carry it. That was the moment my disbelief collapsed and Christ shone forth – in the mystery of the Cross.” But not until four years later, when she read the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, that she was baptized, January 1, 1922 into the Roman Catholic Church.
She desired at that very time to become a Discalced Carmelite nun, but was dissuaded by her spiritual directors, who said she was too new in the faith to take such a step. She then taught at a Dominican Sisters Catholic school of education in Speyer. But by 1933, the Nazi non-Aryan decrees were enforced, and she was forced to resign this position. She was at last admitted to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne in October of that year and received the religious habit of the Order as a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In 1938, she and her sister Rosa, by then also a convert and an extern sister (tertiaries of the Order, who would handle the community′s needs outside the monastery), were sent to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands, for their safety. Despite the Nazi invasion of that state in 1940, they remained undisturbed until they were arrested by the Nazis on August 2, 1942 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chamber on or about August 9, 1942.
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