Edith Stein Net Worth

Background and career

Edith Stein (German: [ʃtaɪn]; religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross; 12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a German philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite. She was murdered in the gas chamber at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp on 9 August 1942, and is canonized as a martyr of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.

Stein was born into an observant German Jewish family, but had become an agnostic by her teenage years.

After World War I broke out, she trained as a nursing assistant and worked in an Austro-Hungarian field hospital in 1915. After completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1916, she obtained an assistantship to Edmund Husserl there.

From reading the life of the reformer of the Carmelites, Teresa of Ávila, Stein chose to convert to the Roman Catholic Church. She was baptized on 1 January 1922. At that point, she wanted to enter a Carmelite monastery as soon as possible, but this was only possible for newly converted with a special dispensation; furthermore she was dissuaded by her spiritual director, Josef Schwind, a canon of the Speyer Cathedral. He told her that her work in the world was too important. Stein then taught at a Catholic school of education in Speyer. As a result of the requirement of an "Aryan certificate" for civil servants promulgated by the Nazi government in April 1933 as part of its Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, she had to quit her teaching position after eight years of work.

Edith Stein was admitted as a postulant to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne on 25 November, on the first Vespers of the feast of Saint Teresa of Ávila, and received the religious habit as a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (Teresia in remembrance of Teresa of Ávila, Benedicta in honour of Benedict of Nursia). She made her temporary vows on 21 April 1935, and her perpetual vows on 21 April 1938.

The same year, Teresa Benedicta a Cruce and her biological sister Rosa, by then also a convert and an extern (tertiary of the order, who would handle the community's needs outside the monastery), were sent to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands, for their safety. In response to the pastoral letter from the Dutch bishops on 26 July 1942, in which they made the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis a central theme, all baptized Catholics of Jewish origin (according to police reports, 244 people) were arrested by the Gestapo on the following Sunday, 2 August 1942. They were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and were murdered in the Birkenau gas chambers on 9 August 1942. Stein was beatified in 1987 and canonized in 1998 by Pope John Paul II.