In the Footsteps of Saint Edith Stein
By Beverly Stevens
She was an intellectual German Jew and a Carmelite nun. She was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Today, she is a Catholic saint. But who was this astounding woman, really? Saint Edith Stein!
he story of Edith Stein begins on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, 1891
when she was born the youngest of eleven children of a Jewish timber merchant in Breslau, Germany. By the time she was two her father died, leaving her devout, hard-working mother to struggle alone. The prevailing secularism in German intellectual culture in the early 20th Century, however, meant that the young Edith and her siblings would lose their mother’s faith in God.
At the age of 14 "I consciously decided, of my own volition, to give up praying," Edith wrote, years later. Later, as a brilliant university student and a radical suffragette with a keen interest in philosophy, Edith studied at Gottingen University under the renowned Professor Edmund Husserl. Husserl denied Kant’s assertion that all reality is subjective; his view had the unintended effect of leading many of his pupils to Christianity.
Eyewitness to Death
Edith later entered to a nursing program, though, and soon found herself in an Austrian field hospital in the midst of the typhus epidemic of the First World War. She assisted in an operating theater and witnessed young people dying. It was too much for her.
Even before the war ended, she fled the battlefield, following Husserl to the University at Freiburg, and in 1917 gaining her doctorate summa cum laude on "The Problem of Empathy." In her dissertation she wrote: "There have been people who believed that a sudden change had occurred within them and that this was a result of God's grace."
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