Gas-Chamber Martyr

Before the enclosed grille of the Discalced Carmelite Convent in Cologne, a distinguished German philosopher nervously submitted to a test of humility: she sang a ditty for the brown-robed nuns assembled to examine her for entrance. Later, one of them asked anxiously: "Is she a good needlewoman?''

Dr. Edith Stein, whose fame had not penetrated convent walls, never learned to sing or crochet very well, even after she joined the nuns behind the grille. But, as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, she learned the spiritual lessons of Carmel so well that she has already been proposed as a candidate for beatification in the Roman Catholic Church. In The Scholar and the Cross (Newman Press; $3.50), German-born Author Hilda Graef analyzes Edith Stein and her spiritual saga with rare objectivity. One fact emerges clearly: whether saint or simply, as a friend suggested, "an ideal personality," Edith Stein was one of the most remarkable women of her time.

Beyond Kindergarten. Born at Breslau, Silesia into a prosperous orthodox Jewish family, Edith was the youngest of seven children and the favorite of her stern, devout mother. After an intellectually precocious childhood, she decided to be an atheist at 13, remained one until she was 21. Later she fell under the spell of Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who bucked the relativistic trend in German philosophy by reaffirming the existence of objective truth and of a knowable world, i.e., phenomena. Edith's friends teased her, in rhyme, for thinking only of Husserl while other Austrian girls were dreaming of Busserl (Austrian patois for kiss). At Breslau University and later at Goettingen, she made such a mark with the clarity and precision of her thought that Philosopher Husserl asked her to become his assistant at Freiburg. She soon took her place as an equal beside the city's distinguished philosophers.

Edith returned to Breslau fired by a desire to discover the truth, beside which, she said, everything else was philosophical kindergarten. She began to investigate the "phenomenon" of the Catholic Church. Alone one night at a friend's farm, she picked up the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, read all night until she had finished it. "This," she said, "is the truth." She was baptized on New Year's Day, 1922, after she proved that she knew Catholic doctrine so well that no formal instruction was necessary.

Beyond Philosophy. Edith wanted to enter the Carmelite order immediately, but her spiritual advisers urged her to make use of her talents in the lay apostolate. She taught at several Catholic schools, lectured all over Germany and Austria on phenomenology and Thomism and the position of women in the church. (Said she of the priesthood of women: "Dogmatically, it seems to me that nothing could prevent the church from introducing such an unheard-of novelty.")

Despite her heavy duties, she always willingly helped those who asked her for spiritual help or philosophical guidance. However, during this period she was possessed with a drive for perfection, occasionally was sharply intolerant of those who could not match her Spartan spiritual pace, e.g., she scolded a nun for hinting that it was sometimes hard to stay awake during prayers.

As a Catholic, Edith Stein always remained intensely proud of her Jewish heritage. When Hitler's persecution of the Jews began in 1933, she willingly suffered with them. She had to give up her teaching job, stop her lecturing. With her lay apostolate clearly at an end, Edith, at 42, entered the Carmelites.

Beyond Significance. "Edith Stein's entry into Carmel," said her prioress, "was, in fact, a descent from the height of a brilliant career into the depths of insignificance." In the depths of insignificance, Edith Stein changed. She who had often been cool and aloof found herself wearing a red wig and performing a Chaucerian skit during a convent entertainment; she who had been intolerant of weakness learned charity by falling asleep during meditation. In time, says Author Graef, "Edith Stein became a perfectly harmonious spiritual personality."

Edith was permitted to continue her intellectual work whenever she could find a gap in the strict Carmelite routine. She produced extensive spiritual and philosophical writings that were remarkable even though, in the Catholic view, they suffered from certain defects inherent in her background (she sometimes confused theology with philosophy, sensing with reasoning). The tension between the philosopher and the Carmelite was resolved "by continual growth in holiness rather than the transformation of the philosopher into a theologian."

Pogroms broke out in Germany in November 1938, and association with Jews became a real risk. The prioress of Cologne, who had an entire community to consider, reluctantly sent Sister Benedicta to the order's Dutch convent at Echt. There on Passion Sunday, a few months after her flight from Cologne, Sister Benedicta, with a sense of premonition, received permission from her prioress to offer herself spiritually as a "sacrifice of expiation for true peace: that the reign of Antichrist may perish . . ."

Beyond Help. Soon World War II began, and the Germans marched into Holland. In the spring of 1942, Sister Benedicta and her sister Rosa were called before the SS police for questioning. Instead of the official "Heil Hitler!" Sister Benedicta greeted the Gestapo with "Praised be Jesus Christ."

In August German occupation authorities ordered the arrest of all non-Aryan Catholics in Holland, and Sister Benedicta and Rosa were herded into a van and taken to a concentration camp. Amidst the suffering and despair at the camp, "Sister Benedicta walked about among the women, comforting, helping, soothing like an angel," an escaped Jewish businessman wrote later.

One of Sister Benedicta's fellow religious at Echt soon received a brief message: "Greetings from my journey to Poland. Sister Benedicta." On Aug. 9, 1942 Edith Stein and her sister Rosa died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

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