Sure Way

Edith Stein (1891–1942) was born into an observant Jewish family. She became an atheist as a teenager, but at the age of thirty encountered the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila, converted to Catholicism, and took vows as a Carmelite nun. Because of her Jewish ancestry she was executed at Auschwitz by the Nazis in August 1942. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1998.Carolyn Beard is a minister and PhD candidate in religion at the University of Toronto. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Divinity School, her research on Edith Stein’s political resistance has been published in Sojourners, The German Diplomat, and Edith Stein Jahrbuch.

Acclaim for Edith Stein:The love of Christ was the fire that inflamed the life of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Long before she realized it, she was caught by this fire. At the beginning she devoted herself to freedom. For a long time Edith Stein was a seeker. Her mind never tired of searching and her heart always yearned for hope. She traveled the arduous path of philosophy with passionate enthusiasm. Eventually she was rewarded: she seized the truth. Or better: she was seized by it. Then she discovered that truth had a name: Jesus Christ.—Pope John Paul II, from his Homily for the Canonization of Edith Stein, October 11, 1998Just as in the early church the martyrs died because they would not say ‘Caesar is Lord’ (they knew that this was what Jesus was), so with Edith Stein. . . . When she was summoned to the convent parlour by the SS commandant who was rounding up the Jews in the area. He greeted her with the words ‘Heil, Hitler’, and she greeted him with what she said to her sisters every morning of her life: ‘Laudetur Jesus Christus’ (‘Jesus Christ be praised’). There, you might say, are the two lordships in conflict in the 1930s; her response was once again in the form of a life making sense of a senseless and terrible world.—Rowan Williams, Luminaries: Twenty Lives That Illuminate the Christian WayStein's writings, both early and late, are not so much an invitation to agreement as they are an invitation to rethink in her company the issues with which she was concerned. And, since she generally and characteristically identified those issues that were and are philosophically crucial, this makes her a significantly more important thinker than she has often been taken to be.—Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922