The legacy of Edith Stein – the brilliant philosopher and contemplative Religious who died in Auschwitz – is sometimes contested; few would argue with her insight that spirituality and the life of the intellect are together the ‘root and ground’ of life

One hundred years ago, on 1 January 1922, a German Jewish woman, one of the most gifted thinkers of her time, undertook an act the reverberations of which continue down to the present. The woman, Edith Stein, had been born in Breslau (then part of Germany, now Wroclaw in Poland) in 1891 to a large, middle-class Jewish family and would later be known, after her entry into the Carmelite Order, as Sr Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Canonised in 1998 by Pope St John Paul II who, the following year, made her a co-patron of Europe, her life and legacy continue to be contested, not least by Jewish and Catholic groups who each claim her for their own.

Who was this woman whose family described her as “a book sealed with seven seals”? On that cold January day in 1922, the Feast of the Circumcision, this enigmatic woman entered the parish church of St Martin in Bad Bergzabern, a spa town in the southern German Rhineland-Palatinate, with a group of friends in order to be baptised into the Catholic Church. As with so much of Stein’s legacy, there exist several versions of the events that led up to this life-changing act.