Holy Childhood Association

ST. EDITH STEIN

St. Edith Stein is one of the newest saints in the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II canonized her in 1998-just 3 1/2 years ago.

Missionaries are people who are sent on a journey. We are sent at the time of our Baptism. So we are missionaries on a journey to bring Jesus' love to others.

St. Edith Stein's whole life was a journey and she brought God's love to others. In this way she was a missionary. She was born in Germany in 1891 in a Jewish Orthodox family, the youngest of eleven children. Before she was two years old he father died suddenly, leaving her mother to raise the children and run the family business. Edith thought of her mother as the strong woman of the Bible (Proverbs 31). By the time she was a teenager Edith no longer practiced her Jewish faith but she continued to admire her mother's openness to God. She went to a university to study philosophy and did so well that she was invited to be a professor there. At the university she came in contact with several Christians who influenced her to a great degree. In 1921 she took a journey to visit some friends. She happened to see a book about the life of St. Teresa of Avila and was so intrigued by it that she finished it right away, saying, "This is the Truth." The next morning she bought a missal and a catechism and began a new type of journey-that of studying the Catholic faith. She was baptized on New Year's Day in 1922. This upset her Jewish mother very much. For the next eight years Edith taught in a Dominican School for girls. But she continued her scholarly work and in 1932 returned to teach at the university; however she was dismissed from there a short time later because of the Nazis persecution of the Jews. (Although Catholic, she was still a Jew.)

This brought another turn in Edith's journey. The loss of her job gave her time to pursue her desire to become a Carmelite nun. Despite her mother's strong displeasure with this choice, Edith said goodbye to her family and, in 1934, became Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a cloistered Carmelite nun in the city of Cologne. But by the end of 1938 an all out war against the Jews broke out. Edith believed that her presence in the convent endangered her Sisters, so she allowed herself to be smuggled out of the country to a convent in Holland, where they were happy to receive her. This is where she wrote her last book: The Science of the Cross. This was another journey for Edith but she was soon to have another-almost her last one. In 1940 the Nazis occupied Holland. Even though Edith was a cloistered sister, she was forced to wear a yellow Star of David on her habit. The Dutch bishops issued a pastoral denouncing the persecution of the Jews. This enraged the Nazis even more. They arrested all Jewish Catholics, including Edith and her sister Rosa. As they left on the journey to the detention camp, Edith said to her sister, "Come Rosa, we are going (on a journey) for our people." After a brief time in the detention camp in Holland, Edith followed the same route as millions of other holocaust victims: the wretched journey by sealed cattle train boxcar in inhuman conditions, finally arriving at Auschwitz. Her last journey was to the gas chamber where she died August 9, 1942.

Pope John Paul II beatified Edith Stein as a saint in May of 1987 and canonized her in October of 1998. Her feast day is August 9. She is the patroness of Europe, of martyrs, and of people named Edith.