Edith Stein's Journey from Philosophy to Sainthood

The story of Edith Stein unfolds as the story of a woman who was born into a Jewish family in October 1891 and ended a saint. She lost her father at the age of two, and the grief that overwhelmed her perturbed the child’s soul to such an extent that in her teenage years, she had already tried as best she could to distance herself from Judaism.

Stein devoted a lot of time and effort to the study of philosophy. She studied at the Higher Courses for Women at the University of Breslau, where she heard about the outstanding phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. The result of studying as prerequisites of philosophy is to write a thesis on the topic of empathy, which is quite an extraordinary success for a woman intellectual of those times and socio-cultural order.

In World War I, Edith shook people’s wounds, and her former patients remember her today as a very successful and talented medical assistant. However, she showed no less ability in the field of her purely scientific work. It all began around 1921 when she bought the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read it at one go. January 1, 1922, Turira entered the Catholic Church, and later she moved to the Dominican Order, where she taught in the Dominican school. Then in 1934, according to her vocation, she moved to the Carmelite convent where she became a nun with the name Teresa Benedicta a Cruce.

Together with all the monks of Europe, she prayed for prayers to be torn away from them, and even the threat of death did not frighten her. But alas, she was arrested and shot in Auschwitz on August 9, 1942. From 1998, she is glorified, and on his first visit to Europe, the Pope declared her co-patroness of Europe.