On October 12, 1891 Edith Stein was born in Breslau, Germany. It was the Jewish feast of Yom Kippur. A brilliant and sensitive student she wandered from the faith of her ancestors, yet remained avid in her quest for truth.As is well known, she received her doctorate in philosophy as a student of the great founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. But it was not until her providential reading of Teresa of Avila's Life that she found the way that led her to Christ, the Truth.Though she was nourished by the rich Benedictine tradition and gloried in the Church's liturgical year, Edith was drawn ever deeper to contemplative prayer and to the Carmelite tradition that traced its inspiration to the prophet Elijah.In her brief narrative, "How I Came to the Cologne Carmel," Edith shares this poignant account of the day in 1933 when she prepared to take leave of her beloved mother, Auguste Stein, in order to enter the Carmelite Convent:

My last day at home was October 12th, my birthday. It coincided with a Jewish holiday, the end of the Feast of Tabernacles. My mother attended services in the synagogue of the rabbinical seminary. I accompanied her, because I wanted to spend as much of this day together as possible. An eminent scholar gave a beautiful sermon.On the way there, on the trolley, we had not talked very much. In order to comfort her a little, I had said that at first there would be a probationary period. But that was no help. "If you take on a probationary period, I know that you will pass."Now my mother asked to walk home, a distance of about forty-five minutes, and this at eighty-four years of age! But I had to consent, for I knew well that she wanted to talk with me undisturbed a little longer. "Wasn't it a beautiful sermon?" "Yes it was." "Then it's possible to be devout as a Jew also?" "Certainly, if one has not come to know anything else."Now she replied, sounding desperate: "Why did you have to come to know it? I don't want to say anything against him. He may have been a very good man. But why did he make himself into God?"

Edith Stein's passion was, inseparably, for Christ and for his people. She once wrote: "What could the prayer of the Church be if not great lovers giving themselves to the God who is Love?"