23 Facts About Edith Stein

Edith Stein was murdered in the gas chamber at the concentration camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau on 9 August 1942, and is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is one of six patron saints of Europe.

From reading the life of the reformer of the Carmelites, Teresa of Avila, Edith Stein was drawn to the Christian faith.

Edith Stein was baptized on 1 January 1922 into the Catholic Church.

Edith Stein then taught at a Jewish school of education in Speyer.

Edith Stein was admitted as a student to the study of religion to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne on 25 November, on the first vespers of the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila, and received the religious habit as a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce.

Edith Stein made her temporary vows on 21 April 1935, and her perpetual vows on 21 April 1938.

Edith Stein was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, into an observant Jewish family.

Edith Stein was the youngest of 11 children and was born on Yom Kippur, that important Jewish festival of the Hebrew calendar; these facts combined to make her a favorite of her mother.

Edith Stein was a very gifted child who enjoyed learning, in a home where her mother encouraged critical thinking, and she greatly admired her mother's unwavering religious faith.

At age 19, Edith Stein moved with her family to Breslau to a house bought by her mother, which she later described in her Autobiography.

In 1916, Edith Stein moved to the University of Freiburg in order to complete her dissertation on Empathy.

Edith Stein then became a member of the faculty at Freiburg, where she worked until 1918 as a teaching assistant to Husserl, who had transferred to that institution.

Edith Stein's rejected habilitation thesis, Beitrage zur philosophischen Begrundung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften, was published in the Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phanomenologische Forschung in 1922.

Edith Stein visited Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg in April 1929, the same month that Heidegger gave a speech to Husserl on his 70th birthday.

Edith Stein's letter received no answer, and it is not known for certain whether the Pope ever saw it.

Edith Stein entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery St Maria vom Frieden in Cologne-Lindenthal in October 1933 and took the religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce.

Edith Stein's move to Echt prompted her to be more devout and even more observant of the Carmelite rule.

Edith Stein therefore wanted to undertake this task and thereby clarify this crucial idea for the development of the phenomenological movement.

Edith Stein worked on Dionysius the Areopagite, translating his works into German and writing a work supposed to be lost on symbolic theology.

Edith Stein's final work, the Science of the Cross, was a commentary on John of the Cross, which developed the specifically Carmelite understanding of the depths of the soul, already of interest to Edith Stein in her early work.

In 1988, Edith Stein was pictured on a German postage stamp with Rupert Mayer SJ in honor of their beatification.

The statue comprises three different views of Edith Stein reflecting her Jewish and Christian faith, and a pile of empty shoes representing the victims of the holocaust.

In June 2009, the International Association for the Study of the Philosophy of Edith Stein was founded, and held its first international conference at Maynooth University, Ireland, in order to advance the philosophical writings of Stein.