Homily: August 9 2016 - St. Edith Stein - Finding Christ by Seeking for Truth

On August 9 the Catholic Church remembers St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as St. Edith Stein. St. Teresa converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the course of her work as a philosopher, and later entered the Carmelite Order. She died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1942.

Edith's father died when she was just two years old, and she gave up the practice of her Jewish faith as an adolescent. As a young woman with profound intellectual gifts, Edith gravitated toward the study of philosophy and became a pupil of the renowned professor Edmund Husserl in 1913. Through her studies, the non-religious Edith met several Christians whose intellectual and spiritual lives she admired.

In 1921, while visiting friends, Edith spent an entire night reading the autobiography of the 16th century Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila. “When I had finished the book,” she later recalled, “I said to myself: This is the truth.” She was baptized into the Catholic Church on the first day of January, 1922.

10 years later she imitated Theresa of Avila by entering the Carmelite convent and took the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.  It was 1933, Adolf Hitler was Chancellor of Germany.
Though the Jews were the principle victims of the Nazi’s in World War II, millions of Catholics, including bishops, priests, and nuns were murdered in the concentration camps.  In 1942, the Nazi’s arrested Sister Teresa.  She and her sister Rosa, also a Catholic, were transported to Auschwitz in Poland by boxcar.  One week later, Sister Teresa died in a gas chamber.

She was canonized in 1998 by Pope Saint John Paul II, who also proclaimed her a co-patroness of Europe the following year.

At her canonization, Saint John Paul said, “For a long time Edith Stein was a seeker. Her mind never tired of searching and her heart always yearned for hope. She traveled the arduous path of philosophy with passionate enthusiasm. Eventually she was rewarded: she seized the truth. Or better: she was seized by it. Then she discovered that truth had a name: Jesus Christ. From that moment on, the incarnate Word was her One and All. Looking back as a Carmelite on this period of her life, she wrote to a Benedictine nun: “Whoever seeks the truth is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously”.

I think these words give us great hope for the future of the Church in America. So many young people are searching for the truth. They want lives full of meaning—more than their parents in some respects. They are rejecting the rampant materialism and perversion and promiscuity of the sexual revolution. Our Cleveland seminary is fuller than it has been in 30 years. Young women are forming new religious orders and returning to tried and true traditional modes of religious life, seeking the truth and the face of Christ.

St. Edith Stein reminds us that only those who commit themselves to the love of Christ become truly free. Through her intercession, may we seek the peace and freedom which comes from Christ, and may the whole human race turn to Christ for freedom and salvation, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.