Edith Stein

Edith Stein, our patron saint, celebrated women’s unique gift to act as instruments of empathy in her writings and through her exemplary life. She was one of the first women admitted to university in Germany, and was a brilliant student of philosophy. As an advocate for women in the professional world, she herself worked as an educator, a nurse, and a philosopher. For a decade between the time that she converted to Catholicism and when she entered a Carmelite convent, she fought for upholding the truth about the dignity of women through her writings and frequent lectures. Her life in the solitude of the cloistered convent gave her the opportunity to live her teachings on empathy. She offered herself to God for her people who were suffering under Nazism, and then died at Auschwitz in 1942. We look to Edith Stein for inspiration as a model of turning one’s heart to God and as a woman who worked to live out her vocation through the genuine feminine spirit of self-gift.