Feast (Memorial) of St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, OCD

Today marks the day on which Sister Teresa Benedicta, OCD, was martyred in 1942. "We bow down before the testimony of the life and death of Edith Stein, an outstanding daughter of Israel and at the same time a daughter of the Carmelite Order, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a personality who united within her rich life a dramatic synthesis of our century. It was the synthesis of a history full of deep wounds that are still hurting ... and also the synthesis of the full truth about man. All this came together in a single heart that remained restless and unfulfilled until it finally found rest in God." 

These were the words of Pope John Paul II when he beatified Edith Stein in Cologne on 1 May 1987. When I first began studying theology my major professor told us, [[If you are serious about doing theology you will need to come to terms with the holocaust.  If you can't do that, you shouldn't even try to do serious theology!]] What Dr Dwyer was talking about is the same thing JP II was describing when he spoke of all of those things that came together in Edith Stein's single heart and remained restless and unfulfilled until she finally came to rest in God.]] The holocaust embodied both the most exhaustively ignoble and inhuman aspects of our most venal existence, as well as the noblest aspects of divinely fulfilled humanity. The stories of the holocaust are full of killers and cowards, saviors and martyrs, appalling cruelty and creative, sacrificial courage. As a whole it revealed the depths of our need for a merciful God whose chosen solution to our profound inhumanity was, in Christ and his Cross, to take that terrible depravity into himself so that it could be conquered and transformed with a love that suffers for the sake of the other for God's own sake. All of this did St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross reprise in her own life as a Carmelite nun, philosopher, and martyr for her own Jewish People.

For a terrific biography of Sr Teresa Benedicta, try Edith Stein, The Life of a Philosopher and Carmelite, by Teresa Renata Posselt, OCD, ICS Publications. Posselt was the Novice Mistress and then the Mother Prioress when Edith Stein lived at the Cologne Carmel. The text has been reprinted and enlarged with scholarly perspectives published in separate "gleanings" sections, so they are available, but do not intrude on Posselt's text. Another excellent biography you might check out is, Edith Stein, A Biography by Waltraud Herbstrith, OCD, Harper and Row. Sister Herbstrith knew Edith Stein well and has apparently spent a large part of her life making sure the story of Sister Benedicta's life and martyrdom was completely told. Finally, for a theology book that takes both the Cross and the Holocaust with complete seriousness check out Regis Martin's, Suffering of Love, Christ's Descent into the Hell of Human Hopelessness. It does just what Prof Dwyer told his own students to aim for.