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She wanted, immediately, to become a nun, but her spiritual directors insisted that she wait. So she waited, and while she waited, she wrote, and published, and taught, until the 1933 ban on Jewish teachers. Finally, that same year, she entered a Carmelite convent at Cologne. She stayed there for five years, until the superiors decided that she was not safe, and moreover that her presence was a danger to all the sisters there. She was transferred, with no small difficulty, to a convent in Echt.
Stein arrived there on New Year's Eve, 1938. Her sister Rosa joined her—Rosa was not a nun, but she too had become a Catholic. Edith Stein lived and prayed in Echt until August 2, 1942, when the ss interrupted evening prayer at the convent and arrested the Steins. On August 5, Edith was interned at Westerbork. Two days later she was sent to Auschwitz. The exact date of her death is unknown; the best guess has it at August 9.
But Stein's story doesn't end with her death. Forty-five years later, the Roman Catholic Church beatified her, then canonized her, and the controversy began. To become a Catholic saint, one must be responsible for two posthumous miracles—unless one is a martyr, in which case the bar drops to one. Stein's miracle was the healing of a child, overdosed on Tylenol. The child was hospitalized, her parents prayed to Stein, and the girl recovered. The other miracle? Martyrdom in the Shoah rendered that requirement moot.
But was Stein's death the death of a Catholic martyr? Though the Nazis certainly killed many Catholics on account of their faith, Stein was not one of them; she died not because she was a Carmelite nun, but because she was a Jew. Outraged Jews around the world criticized the Church for usurping Stein's death (and not just Jews; the church's claim to Stein's martyrdom is one of the many Catholic wrongs Garry Wills catalogues in Papal Sins). The protest, it seems to me, is reasonable: it is indisputable that Stein died not in odium fidei (Catholic fides, anyway), but because she was a Jew. The Netherlands Red Cross Bureau of Information certificate that records her arrest and death puts it plainly: she died "for reasons of race, and specifically because of Jewish descent."
Edith Stein appears, at first blush, unique, this Jewish nun who died in Auschwitz and was canonized by the Catholic Church. But there are lots of contexts, lots of backdrops, that help situate Stein. Flirtation with Christianity was common among leading European Jewish intellectuals of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and her chroniclers like to compare Stein to several near-Jewish converts of her day. The most frequent comparison is to Simone Weil.
Weil was a fiery French Jewish intellectual whom many readers have first encountered in her book Waiting for God, frequently found in that memorable silver HarperPerennial edition, with a watery image of Weil, her perfectly round glasses and her sober young face, eerily peering up at the reader. Like Stein, Weil was a brilliant student, graduating from the Sorbonne at the top of her class, academically outdone by only one other student, another Simone: Simone de Beauvoir. Like Stein, Weil was unequivocally drawn to Christianity, but unlike Stein she refused to be baptized, preferring to remain a "Christian outside the Church."
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