A Martyr of Reconciliation

Eleven years ago in the Cologne-Mungersdorf stadium in Germany Pope John Paul II beatified Edith Stein, whose Carmelite religious name was Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. The event was particularly special. Teresa Benedicta, or Edith Stein, belonged to the Hebrew people and was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 51 in 1942, as a Christian. After the due process, the same Holy Father declared her a saint of the Church on October 11, 1998.

Teresa Benedicta can be remembered for many things. Among them, because she was a brilliant intellectual who, belonging to the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl, whose assistant she was, drew closer and closer to the perennial philosophy of Thomism. This development of her thought had already begun to be appreciated more clearly in her work entitled The Phenomenology of Husserl and the Philosophy of Saint Thomas, written in 1929. Her philosophy opens up an exciting horizon. Her works on woman according to nature and grace constitute a fundamental landmark in the process of the recuperation of authentic feminine dignity. Her writings of mystical character reveal the flight of a person who is elevated by grace to the heights of contemplation.

Decisive among the rich and varied dimensions of her existence was without a doubt her connection with the theme of reconciliation. Evident in her is the achievement of the conciliation of the intellectual and the mystical — a symbol for our unbelieving times — of a simple personality and profound depths, of the Hebrew woman and the follower of Christ unto death. Rather than being dragged into death, Teresa Benedicta gave her life lovingly, out of the deep conviction of her faith, for the sake of peace and for the Jewish people then persecuted by the Nazis. She saw herself as a little Esther. If it is certainly true that neither her life nor the high flights her writings attain can be understood without her adhesion to Christianity, equally evident is the Hebrew substratum from which she set out towards the encounter with the Lord Jesus. This beautiful dimension in which what was Jewish in her was integrated into her rich Christian personality has not gone by unnoticed.

Her Baptism at the hands of Fr. Breitling in January of 1922 filled her with joy and peace. Her Confirmation ceremony on the feast of the Purification, in the Speyer chapel, was an extraordinary experience for her. Sealed by the divine Spirit her ardent search for the truth had found an insatiable source that she embraced with all her being. Its impulse would take her to her profession in the Carmel.

She certainly felt herself to be a daughter of the Church that she loved passionately, but she respected her origins. She was to later go to Breslau and communicate it to her mother, a pious Jew: “Mother, I have converted to the Catholic faith.” Pope John Paul II seems to have implicitly alluded to this aspect of Teresa Benedicta when in her beatification he referred to her as “a daughter of Israel of our century” and later remarked that “the fact that in this liturgical celebration Jewish brothers and sisters are also present, above all relatives of Edith Stein, fills us with feelings of joy and gratitude.”

Edith Stein was born on the day that Yom Kippur was celebrated. In 1933, in Memories of Life in a Jewish Family, she wrote: “The most solemn Jewish feast was that of Reconciliation (Yom Kippur). That day was the only time in the year when the High Priest entered the Sancta Sanctorum and offered the sacrifice of reconciliation for himself and for the whole Jewish people, carrying out the expiatory act that washes away the sins of the people.” She confesses in her written autobiography, published with the title Yellow Stars, that this Feast of Reconciliation “was the celebration I was most attracted to.”

This experience brought her to adhere intensely to the Lord’s Cross from the very beginning of her conversion. Just as she had an intense devotion to the Child Jesus, she lived admiring and loving the “redemptive energy of the Cross.” It was for her the eloquent symbol of the love of God that comes to cancel the rupture produced by sin. She would say that “the fruit of death on the Cross is redemption,” and she expressed it with her life.

She often saw herself as a holocaust victim united to the Lord Jesus. She used to spend the new day of reconciliation, Good Friday, praying intensely in the Church the whole day. Cardinal Wetter has noted that “the day in which God reconciled the world to Himself through the Cross of His Son was for her an especially holy day.”

Edith Stein, author of The Science of the Cross, untiring contemplator of the mystery of the Reconciliation, was invited to offer her life as a Christian of Hebrew origin, and she gave it, full of faith and hope, with her heart lovingly united to the Reconciler. When the moment arrived she embraced the terrible cross she was presented with. Fifty-six years later the Church confirmed her as a beloved daughter who had triumphed and heroically kept the faith bearing witness to the love that surged in torrents out of her heart.