Reading: St. Teresa Benedicta

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross  (Edith Stein)  [1]

           St Teresa Benedicta was born Edith Stein at Breslau, then in Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), on October 12, 1891, the eleventh child of a Jewish family. Her mother was especially devout. As a schoolgirl and as a student Edith herself was a convinced atheist whose belief that there was no God nevertheless became her way to faith. When she was fifteen she decided never to pray again. But she was always in search of truth and subjected every issue to an intense intellectual scrutiny. As she recalled later,  ”My quest for truth was my only prayer.”

                   At the University of Gottingen, Edith was also impressed by the ideas of Max Scheler. He encouraged Edith to share his interest in the eliciting of ultimate, eternal and religious values as a prime philosophical task. He introduced her to the importance of contemporary Catholic thought. Edith wrote: “Suddenly the barriers of my rationalist prejudices, which I had never doubted as they developed in me, were lifted to reveal the world of faith.”

          She found the autobiography of St Teresa of Avila in a friend’s house and read it in a single sitting. As she closed the book, she told herself “This is the truth!” She as baptized a Catholic on January 1, 1922. She was acutely aware of how this hurt her mother and later accompanied her to the synagogue and read the psalms with her. But Edith did not see her adoption of Christianity as a rejection of the Jewish people.

          She was already drawn to the Carmelites, but it was ten years before she entered the Order. She taught philosophy at Speyer and Munster and consciously led her students along the way of knowledge to Christ. After her conscientious study of Thomism, and her grounding in phenomenology and in varieties of mystical thought, she herself became a profound thinker and mystic. Her writings testify to her constant exploration of the notions of love and sacrifice as concomitants of knowledge.

          Edith finally joined the Carmelites at Cologne on October 12, 1933, after Hitler had been voted into power and become chancellor of Germany. She told her superior: “Human action cannot help us but only the sufferings of Christ. My aspiration is to share them.” She made her final profession in 1938. In one of her letters she compared herself to Queen Esther in exile at the Persian court. “I believe that the Lord has called me on behalf of all my people.”     (over)

          Again and again Sr Teresa Benedicta referred to her increasing understanding of the destiny of the people of Israel in the light of the Cross and her personal sense of her task of expiation. She became convinced that “my people’s destiny is also my own”. In one of her prayers she says that she knows that it is the Cross of Christ that the Jewish people must bear and that anyone who realizes this must willingly agree to bear it on behalf of all: “I wanted to bear it. All he had to do was to show me how.”

          Sr Teresa left Cologne to protect her sisters in religion from Nazi persecution and went to the Carmelite house at Echt, in the Netherlands, determined to share the sufferings of Christ.

          Unlike the bishops of other countries occupied by the Germans, where the policy of racial murder was generally enforced, the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands issued a pastoral letter protesting against the deportations. In response the Germans ordered that Christians of Jewish descent or converted from Judaism and resident in the Netherlands should be rounded up and dispatched for “resettlement”. Accordingly, Sr Teresa, together with her sister Rosa, who had also taken refuge with the Echt Carmelites, was arrested on August 2, 1942. As they left the convent, Edith took her sister’s hand and said: “Come on – we are on our way to our own people.” She was murdered on August 9, 1942 in the gas chambers of the German extermination camp at Auschwitz, Poland.  She was beatified by Pope John Paul II at Cologne on May 1, 1987 and canonized by him in 1998.

[1] Butler’s Lives of the Saints – New Full Edition –  August – Burns & Oates – The Liturgical Press – Collegeville, MN – 1998 – pg 75f