Edith Stein: a Eucharistic Witness unto Death

St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – Edith Stein - died a martyr on this day 84 years ago.  She was among the Catholics of Jewish origin arrested after the Dutch bishops publicly condemned Nazi persecution of the Jews.  They were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were murdered in the gas chambers.  I recall seeing aghast the remains of that place when I visited there in 2011: it was a ghastly reminder of the industrial scale of evil perpetrated by the Nazi regime and its accomplices.

Edith Stein was born in 1891 in Germany in what is now modern-day Poland.  She was a gifted child - encouraged by her mother to think critically.  During her teen years, she abandoned the Jewish faith of her childhood and described herself as an atheist in her early adulthood.  She was awarded  a doctorate in philosophy at the age of 26.  A reading of the autobiography of St Teresa of Avila in 1921 made such a deep impression on her that she decided to embrace Catholic Christianity in 1922.  She is on record for saying this:

This was something totally new to me. In the synagogues and Protestant churches I had visited, people simply went to the services. Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church, as if going to have an intimate conversation. It was something I never forgot.

Years later, she would write as follows:

Only in daily, confidential relationship with the Lord in the tabernacle can one forget self, be free of all one’s own wishes and pretensions, and have a heart open to all the needs and wants of others (Essays on Woman).

And

This heart, it beats for us in a small tabernacle where it remains mysteriously hidden in that still, white host. (The Hidden Life).

She entered the enclosed Carmelite order of nuns in 1933 after writing a strongly worded letter to Pope Pius XI the previous year in which she wrote in April of that year:

We all, who are faithful children of the Church and who see the conditions in Germany with open eyes, fear the worst for the prestige of the Church, if the silence continues any longer. We are convinced that this silence will not be able in the long run to purchase peace with the present German government. For the time being, the fight against Catholicism will be conducted quietly and less brutally than against Jewry, but no less systematically. Before long no Catholic will be able to hold office in Germany unless he dedicates himself unconditionally to the new course of action.

The letter was signed off as follows:

At the feet of your Holiness, requesting your apostolic blessing,
(Signed) Dr. Edith Stein, Instructor at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy, Münster in Westphalia, Collegium Marianum.

In December, 1938, Edith - now Sr Teresa Benedicta wrote in her diary:

I know that my letter was received by the Holy Father. I never received a reply.

In fairness to the Pope, he did issue an encyclical, in 1937, entitled Mit brennender Sorge ("With Burning Anxiety").  In it, he condemned the Nazi exaltation of race, blood and state; defended the rights of the Church; and warned of the grave dangers posed by National Socialist ideology. It is a pity that it took so long to say this as the horse had well bolted by then.

On New Year's Eve 1938 Sr Teresa Benedicta was transferred to a Carmelite convent in the Netherlands. On 9 June 1939 she wrote:

Even now I accept the death that God has prepared for me in complete submission and with joy as being his most holy will for me. I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death ... so that the Lord will be accepted by His people and that His Kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world.

Three years later, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was murdered by the Nazi regime. Her death may be seen as the culmination of a life of self-oblation. Having learned before the Eucharistic Lord the meaning of self-giving love, she accepted suffering in union with Christ and in profound solidarity with her Jewish people. Her martyrdom remains a powerful witness to the inseparable connection between the Eucharist and the Cross.