Click the picture to access our SMMP novena to St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein! 

Edith Stein was born on Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) in 1891. Two years later, her father suddenly died, leaving her mother to raise seven children. She took over his lumber yard, and successfully turned a profit for decades. Raised by her older sisters, Edith showed academic promise early on.  Eventually, she earned a doctorate in philosophy with renowned phenomenologist Edmund Husserl at the University of Gottingen.

Denied a university professorship as a woman, she worked as a teacher in a Dominican high school after her conversion to the Catholic faith in the early 1920's. (Her conversion deeply upset her family.) Finally in 1932, she secured an instructor position at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Munster. A year later, after the Nazis came to power, she lost the position because of her Jewish heritage.

She became a Carmelite nun, despite the tears of her mother. Stein made her first vows in the Cologne Carmel in 1935, and perpetual vows in 1938. After Kristallnacht in 1938, she was transferred to the Carmel in Echt, Holland. The Nazis deported her in 1942, along with her sister Rosa. Both were killed at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

She was canonized in 1998 by Pope John Paul II, who held her philosophical work in high esteem.

Not long before she died, Edith Stein composed a novena to the Holy Spirit. SMMP prays this every year. We have a special devotion to our patroness.

You can find it online here:

Pentecost Novena, Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

Day Six

Day Seven

Day Eight

Day Nine