When I was 18, I struggled with my identity as a woman, attempting to reconcile my deepest desires with the way of the world and the ways of God. I longed to love and be loved. In pursuing these desires via the way of the world, I was left empty, tattered, spiritually destitute. Two years later, after traveling many winding, bumpy roads, I found myself reawakened to the gift and beauty of our Catholic faith. This reawakening led me to encounter St. Edith Stein (also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross). The witness of her life proved to be a salving balm to the wounds I inherited a few years prior and continues to be a guiding light each time my vision becomes darkened by counterfeit understandings of femininity.

Life of St. Edith Stein On Oct. 12, 1891, in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), Siegfried and Auguste Stein welcomed their eleventh child, Edith. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement — the most important Jewish feast day — her mother took it as a sign that God had wonderful plans for this baby girl. Indeed, he did.

The desire to know truth was written on Edith’s heart from a young age. But her tenacious journey to truth was not straight. Like many of us, Edith wrestled with her faith. Eventually, Edith renounced her Jewish faith and proclaimed herself an atheist. “I consciously decided, of my own volition, to give up praying,” she wrote. In 1911, she enrolled in the University of Breslau to study German and history, and in doing so, discovered her passion for philosophy and women’s studies. At one point she even became a radical suffragette (though she later lost interest in this issue). It was her love of philosophy that led her to transfer to Gottingen University in 1913, where she studied under the renowned philosopher Edmund Husserl. There she also encountered philosopher Max Scheler, who proved to be instrumental in her eventual conversion to Catholicism.