St. Edith Stein

St. Edith Stein Stained Glass Window in the Newman Center

Biography 

Her more important philosophical discertations are about Empathy, this is represented by the shared pain of the two prisioners embrace at the bottom of the scene. At the bot­tom of the scene there is a prisioner garment with her pri­sioner number.

A phenomenological philosopher who offers us a theory of empathy, a theory of values, and a theory of how human persons relate to one another in community. As a student with Husserl, Edith was faced with writing a doctoral the­sis and began to search for a topic. She became interested in the idea of empathy (Einfühlung) which Husserl had adopted, that is, the experience by which human beings have access to the experience of other human beings. She observed that although Husserl talked about empathy, he had not actually defined it. Thus with Husserl’s approval, she had her topic: What is empathy?

At Speyer she studied the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and translated his treatiseThe Truth into German for the first time. Soon she began lecturing widely in Europe, to women’s groups, on the education and role of Catholic women.
When the Nazis blocked her, as a Jew, from teaching, she was forced to make a life-changing decision. To her mother’s dismay, she entered the Carmelites as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. As a Carmelite she wrote, among other works, Life in a Jewish Family and The Science of the Cross, a study of Saint John of the Cross. She led a deliber­ate life of holiness and self-offering. The Nazis forced her to wear a Star of David.

As the safety of anyone with Jewish heritage evaporated, she fled from her Carmelite monastery in Cologne to Carmel in Echt, Holland. But there was no escape. When the Dutch bishops spoke out against the Nazis, the Third Reich retaliated by rounding up all Jewish converts to Ca­tholicism in Holland. In a filthy, crowded boxcar they were transported to Poland.

Edith was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz on August 9, 1942. Her sister Rosa, who had also converted and who stayed close to Edith, was killed with her.