1) St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) converted from Judaism to Catholicism and later became a Carmelite nun. 2) She wrote extensively about the meaning of the cross and her last work was on "The Science of the Cross" before being deported to Auschwitz in 1942. 3) For Edith Stein, "science of the cross" referred to a living, effective truth that influences one's actions and shapes their view of life and God through their experiences with suffering.

1. GOD’S DIVINITY,
SUFFERING,
CROSS
ST. EDITH STEIN
(SISTER BENEDICTA
OF THE CROSS)
SEM. DENMARK HUGO | LA SALETE

2. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 2
* 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
Aushwitz in 1942.

3. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 3
* As a young woman with profound
intellectual gifts, Edith gravitated to
ward the study of philosophy and
became a pupil of the renowned
professor Edmund Husserl in 1913.
through her studies, non- religious
Edith met several Christians whose
intellectual and spiritual lives she
admired.

4. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 4
* In 1921, while visiting friends, Edith
spent an entire night reading the
autobiography of the 16 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 1st day of
January 1922.

5. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 5
* Edith intended to
join Carmelites
immediately after
her conversion.

6. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 6
* In 1933, the rise of Nazism, combined
with Edith’s Jewish ethnicity, put an end
to her teaching career. After a painful
parting with her mother, who did not
understand her Christian conversion,
she entered a Carmelite convent in
1934, taking the name “Teresa
Benedicta of the cross” as symbol of her
acceptance of suffering.

7. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 7
* When she chose the secluded
life of Carmel and accepted the
vows of obedience, chastity,
and poverty, or, as she called
them “the three nails of the
cross.”

8. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 8
* She wrote extensively about the
meaning of the cross and her last yet
incomplete work before her
deportation to and death at Auschwitz
in 1942 was “The Science of the
Cross.” Her personal life- long journey
of faith towards the cross and her
decision to enter the convent are the
most fascinating aspects of her life.

9. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 9
* The word “science” changed its
meaning with the passage from antiquity
and the Middle Ages to modern times.
The ancients saw it as the certain
intellectual knowledge of something
through its causes. Science in this sense
referred to a universal, demonstrated,
organized knowledge of facts and truths
and the reasons or causes of these.

10. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 10
* Today science means the
observational or investigative sciences,
sometimes called the empirical and
experimental sciences. ? What then
could Edith be thinking of when she
uses the term “science of the cross”?
She did not see a “science of the cross”
as a theory, a structured correlation of
propositions about the cross.

11. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 11
* She has in mind living, real, and
effective truth, planted deep like an
acorn within a person, taking root and
growing. It is effective truth because it
influences what one then does or
omits, the cross first showing itself in
the doing and the omitting.

12. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 12
* But what did Edith mean by speaking
of a “science” of the cross. From the
interior depths where the truth of the
cross makes its impression, one’s view
of life arises, including an image of
God and the world. All of this can be
expressed in a mode of thinking, in a
theory.

13. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 13
* If the mystery of the cross
becomes the inner form of this
science, a living energy that
allows the soul to be molded by
what is received from this
mystery, it turns into a science
of the cross.

14. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 14
* Trust in God’s ultimate love and
wisdom yet never simply surrender to
the outer limitations of humanity’s
existence. The cross in its glory points,
above all, to the Resurrection, the
overcoming of all death and suffering
through divine love.

15. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 15
* By realizing that the cross calls us to
action and joy rather than surrender, we
may hope to transcend the boundaries
imposed by a world built on human
limitations. To share in the glory of the
cross, our actions and choices must be
oriented towards in creasing our personal
closeness to God, to nurturing an ongoing
love affair hidden in the innermost core of
our being.

16. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 16
* The teaching of the cross would be
lost if it did not express one’s own
personal experience. Through love, we
are each to combat evil, and love
triumphs over evil. She tells us that her
search for truth had been a constant
prayer.

17. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 17
* Her mentor St. Teresa of Avila, she
writes that only by this emptying of self
can one be filled by the presence of
God. This free act of spiritual poverty is
mandatory for union with God. God
resides in each of one of us, and it is the
Triune God. The Divine life within us is
the divine Trinitarian life. She writes in
The Science of the Cross:

18. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 18
* The soul in which God dwells by grace is no
impersonal scene of the divine life but is itself drawn
into this life. The divine life is three- personal life: it is
overflowing love, in which the father generates the
Son and gives Him His Being, while the Son embraces
this Being and returns it to the Father; it is the love in
which the Father and Son are one, both breathing the
Holy Spirit. By grace this Spirit is shed abroad in
men’s hearts. Thus the soul lives its life of grace
through the Holy Spirit, in Him it loves the Father with
the love of the Son and the Son with the love of the
Father.

19. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 19
CONCLUSION
* To share in the glory of the Cross, our
actions and choices must be oriented
towards increasing our personal closeness
to God, to nurturing an ongoing love affair
hidden in the innermost core of our being.
The Cross is a call to a living faith and
fearless action.

20. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 20
It is not for us to remain standing beneath it,
grief- stricken and paralyzed by pain, albeit
embracing suffering for the sake of
suffering. In Christ on the Cross, God has
given us all the answers. It is up to us to act
on them. According to St. John of the Cross,
on whose writing’s Edith Stein based her
own Science of the Cross, in letter to the
Hebrews,

21. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 21
“let it be understood that God has
remained, as it were, mute, and that he
has nothing more to say, because what
he was saying in fragments by the
prophets, he said it its entirety, by giving
us the Whole who is His Son.”

22. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 22
“I ask the Lord to accept my life and my
death,” she wrote in 1939, so that the
Lord will be accepted by His people and
that His Kingdom may come in glory, for
the salvation of Germany and the peace
of the world.”

23. FIRSTUP
CONSULTANTS 23
On our own journey of faith and facing
life’s challenges, let us remember Edith
Stein’s words: “BE PATIENT WITH
YOURSELF; GOD IS.”