August 9th – St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was proclaimed a patron saint of Europe in 1999. Along with Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden, she was chosen by Pope John Paul II “to emphasize the important role that women have had and have in the ecclesial and civil history of the continent down to our days.” Each of these women was “connected in a special way with the Continent’s history” and St Teresa in particular was described by John Paul II as “a symbol of the dramas in Europe in our time”.

Born in 1891 to a Jewish family in Breslau, Edith Stein was a suffragette in university, a philosopher and teacher, and a nurse in the First World War. Although she had given up the practice of her Jewish religion at the age of 14, her study of phenomenology and her continual search for truth led to a realization that there is an objective reality that is the ground of all reality and makes all things knowable. So she came to recognize the reality of God. Based on her philosophical writings on ‘The Problem of Empathy’, John Paul II notes that Edith Stein saw that “this reality [of God] must be heeded and grasped above all in the human being, by virtue of that capacity for empathy, a word dear to her which enables one in some way to appropriate the lived experience of the other”. Thus she began to read the experiences of God as related by Christians and especially the mystics. One evening Edith picked up the autobiography of St Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. She recounts: “When I had finished the book, I said to myself: this is the truth.” Thus she came to faith in Christ and asked to be baptised in 1922.

St Teresa’s search for truth and meaning, which led her through philosophy, to a discovery of the experience of God as expressed in the lives of great European Christians is instructive for us today, for European society seems to have forgotten its Christian heritage and seeks to divorce itself from the Christian experience of its past. In doing so, it can no longer empathise with its forebears and risks becoming uprooted, without an identity.

Conversely, Edith Stein not only empathised with the religious experience of great European saints but also remained rooted in her Jewish identity. She never saw her conversion to Christ as a rejection of her Jewish heritage and indeed she said that she “did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God”. Although she went on to become a Carmelite nun, her Jewish roots never left her and indeed she suffered the Holocaust with her people. Her recorded last words, to her sister, when the Gestapo came to take them from her convent to Auschwitz on 2 August 1942 were: “come, we are going for our people” Already in 1933, when the Nazis took over Germany, Edith had written that “[Jesus’] Cross… was now being laid upon the Jewish people” and as a Catholic Jewess she felt that she was able to bring the suffering of the Jews to the Cross in a special way. She wrote: “I felt that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody’s behalf”.

St Teresa’s understanding of the Cross was profound, and her last work, left unfinished by her arrest in 1942, was entitled “Kreuzeswissenschaft” (The Science of the Cross). Clinging to the Cross as our only hope, she knew that “those who are joined to Christ… will unflinchingly persevere even in the dark night of subjectively feeling remote from and abandoned by God… Getting to resurrection glory with the Son of Man, through suffering and death, is also the way for each one of us and for all mankind.”

Lawrence Lew OP