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Edith Stein’s Testimony - 1939

Edith Stein (image used by permission).

Introduction

Edith Stein was a Jew by birth who abandoned her Jewish faith for atheism. Several incidents led her to Christ, including seeing a Catholic woman enter a church to pray on market day, and observing a Protestant widow’s faith while she [Edith] was busy organizing the woman’s late husband’s papers. What finally brought her to Christian faith was reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. She was baptized and eventually joined the Carmelites, taking the name Sister Teresa Benedict of the Cross. While at a Carmel house in Holland, where she had been sent for safety in face of rising German anti-Semitism she anticipated her martyrdom, and penned a testament on this day, June 6, 1939. The Germans eventually gassed her at Auschwitz. She had a passport that would have let her travel to safety in Switzerland but refused to abandon her sister Rosa who was unable to obtain the necessary papers.

Quote

“I beg the Lord to take my life and my death ... for all concerns of the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary and the holy church, especially for the preservation of our holy order, in particular the Carmelite monasteries of Cologne and Echt, as atonement for the unbelief of the Jewish People and that the Lord will be received by his own people and his kingdom shall come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world, at last for my loved ones, living or dead, and for all God gave to me: that none of them shall go astray.”

Source

http://carmelclarion.com/edithsteinbio.html

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