Charity registration No. SC002876   Sunday August 1st.. 2010 Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Main Menu Notices 2 Page 4 Page 5 Notices dith Stein is one of those people whose entire life seems to  be a sign. She was born on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of  Atonement, in 1891 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw,  Poland), the youngest of eleven children in a devout Jewish  family. When she was not yet two years old her father died suddenly, leaving   Edith’s mother to raise the seven remaining children (four had died in  childhood) and to manage the family business. Brought up on the  Psalms and Proverbs, Edith considered her mother a living example of  the strong woman of Proverbs 31, who rises early to care for her  family and trade in the marketplace. By her teenage years, she no  longer practiced her Jewish faith and considered herself an atheist, but  she continued to admire her mother’s attitude of total openness toward  God.  Like many before and since, Edith Stein came to Christianity through  the study of philosophy. One of the first women to be admitted to  university studies in Germany, she moved from the University of  Breslau to the University of Gottingen in order to study with Edmund  Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Edith’s philosophical studies  encouraged her openness to the possibility of transcendent realities,  and her atheism began to crumble under the influence of her friends  who had converted to Christianity.  During the summer of 1921, at the age of twenty-nine, Edith was on  holiday with friends but found herself alone for the evening. She  picked up, seemingly by chance, the autobiography of St. Teresa of  Avila, founder of the Carmelite Order. She read it in one sitting,  decided that the Catholic faith was true, and went out the next day to  buy a missal and a copy of the Catholic catechism. She was baptized  the following January, but her desire immediately to enter the  Carmelites was delayed for a time. Her advisers saw that her  conversion and claustration would be a double blow to her mother, and  they knew the Church could benefit enormously from her  contributions as a speaker and writer.  Edith eventually became a leading voice in the Catholic Woman’s  Movement in Germany, speaking at conferences and helping to  formulate the principles behind the movement. By the time Hitler rose  to power in early 1933, she was well-known in the German academic  community. Hitler’s growing popularity and the increasing pressure on  the Jewish people, prompted her to request an audience with the pope  in the spring of 1933. She hoped that a special encyclical might help  counteract the mounting tide of anti-Semitism.   Unfortunately, due to bureaucratic confusion, her request may not  have reached the Pope. However, in 1937, Pope Pius XI issued an  encyclical written in German, Mit brennender Sorge, in which he  criticized Nazism, listed breaches of an agreement signed between   Saint Edith Stein — Convert, Nun, Martyr