Spirituality: The Courage of St. Edith Stein

 Today the Church celebrates the feast day of St. Edith Stein, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, a convert to Catholicism, a nun, and a martyr. Here is an excerpt from Fr. Barron' book, Catholicism, on the spirit of St. Edith.

St. Edith had been raised Jewish, but fell into atheism as a young woman. After studying under Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, and obtaining her doctorate from the University of Göttingen, she converted to Roman Catholicism and contributed greatly to both philosophy and theology by  connecting phenomenology with classical Thomism. After her conversion she joined the Carmelites only to be arrested and executed by the Nazis.
 
Fr. Barron writes about the example and witness of St. Edith Stein, also called St. Teresa Benedicta a Cruce (Teresa, Blessed by the Cross), in his book Catholicism. Here is an excerpt from the book on her conversion, and an excerpt describing her martyrdom.
 
“[A] turning point occurred while Edith was strolling with a friend through the old section of Frankfurt. They chanced upon the cathedral, and the two women entered the building as tourists, intent on admiring the architecture. Edith spied a woman, fresh from her rounds of shopping, kneeling in the empty church, obviously lost in prayer. She had certainly seen people at prayer in the synagogue during services, but she had never seen anything like this communion with a presence personal and yet unseen. “I could not forget that,” she wrote. Edith Stein’s conversion was not like Paul’s, sudden and dramatic. It was more like Augustine’s or John Henry Newman’s: gradual, interior, accompanied by a good deal of intellectual wrestling. One night, while staying with friends outside Freiburg, Edith searched through their library looking for something to divert her for the evening. She came upon Saint Teresa of Avila’s autobiography. She took the book off the shelf and stayed up all night reading it. The next morning she put down the test and declared simply, “That is the truth.” What precisely impressed her about the book is impossible to say. When pressed on the matter later, Edith replied, “secretum meum mihi” (that is my secret). It seems fair to conclude that the reading of Teresa’s Life was that galvanizing moment, the occasion for all of the strands to come together...