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On August 2, 1942, the German S.S. stormed a Carmelite convent in Echt, Holland, and demanded that one of its nuns, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, be handed over immediately, along with her sister Rosa.
The convent was thrown into confusion: The prioress begged for more time, sisters threw together some belongings for the two women, and alarmed neighbors gathered outside. Only Sr. Teresa maintained her composure. “Come, Rosa,” she said calmly. “We are going for our people.”
Thus began the final chapter in the story of St. Edith Stein, who had taken the name Sr. Teresa when she became a Carmelite. And it’s this final chapter, including her death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, that is the most familiar to us. But while the climax of Edith’s story is riveting, the entire journey of her life can speak to us even more powerfully. Edith Stein’s heroic death was in essence the culmination of a life lived under the cross of Christ, a life that had been “crucified” with him for years.
Growing…
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My father enlisted in the US Army in World War II at age 17 and fought for the Allies in the Battle of the Bulge, said to be the bloodiest battle in history. I wish he were still with us because he would have been very moved by the parable of Edith Stein’s life as would my dear departed mother, who was still a child during the war. As we look at today’s world, these words of Edith’s are ever more poignant to me, their daughter: “The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night.” Let us all step forth out of the darkest night even though it may not be comfortable.
What a wonderful summary of the life of this saint! While our faith is congenial to thought, reason, and philosophy it is not grasped by nor fully reducible to any of them. Edith Stein paradoxically discovered this in her deep engagement with philosophy. Edith Stein reached the “ceiling” of human reason beyond which there is either nothing else new to say ( the claim of most human thought and philosophy, especially postmodernism) or, in the case of there actually being God, the ceiling of human reason discloses its own limits; discloses that ireason points beyond itself! As Edith Stein discovered, not intellectually but by being touched by the Spirit and by the Cross, reason contains its own built- in limits. Reason’s ceiling has a hole in it through which revelation, grace, and the love of God and the Cross of Christ may be allowed to pour into those souls so predisposed. Edith was certainly predisposed! Would that our modern day human thought and philosophies discover that hole in the ceiling of reason and be open to God from above.