In the outline of Edith Stein’s works, the theme of the woman can be placed in relation to the Eternal Being, as the Finite Being has in itself a luminous and indestructible trace of God Himself.This is the foundation of the divine vocation in man and woman.

Edith Stein deals with the difference between sexes, a problem of the being in itself and at the same time a psychological and cultural problem. Man and woman are called to preserve their resemblance in God, to dominate the Earth together and to propagate the human race. But everyone has to do it in his way! He has to respect and develop the own characteristics of being a man or a woman, even within a common fundamental vocation.

The relation man-woman that Paul assumed as a symbol to indicate the union between Christ and the Churc, is enlightened by that same reality it is a sign of. So, for the human couple, the perfection of the relationship between Christ and the Church becomes exemplary. When the man-woman balance is compromised, both the paternal and maternal role degenerate.

In the field of the man-woman relationship,Edith puts also the question of the office of a priest in the Church: is the proposal of the feminine priesthood worth considering, or is it a function reserved to man?

The original Church admitted the consacred virgins and the widows to some forms of participation within the liturgical service and it recognized the feminine diaconate with a particular "consecration". But the further historical development brought to a restriction of the offices given to women, under the influence ofr the Old Testament and the Roman Law.

Nowadays instead there is a rise for the woman, due to her right wish to occupy in the Church a place correspondent to her own attitudes. Even because –Edith Stein says- woman feels the necessity of "building" the ecclesiastical reality with an active contribute, specifically feminine.

Such aspirations will later be gathered and realized with the official aknowledgement of determined offices. As regards priesthood, Edith wouldn’t find any difficulty to admit that it suits man better,considering that God became incarnate on earth in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s man. But the different ecclesiastical function doesn’t involve an ontological differentiation of the two genres, masculine and feminine.

Being a man or a woman involves the same call to follow Christ who " embodies the ideal of human perfection, free from any fault, rich of masculine and feminine features". The woman’s divine vocationAnd the scripture is inserted into the unitary nucleus of the human species, into its being a person in a unique way, as a man is.

This woman’s vocation is at the same time natural and religious, thet is life, lived according to the human articulating own to femininity, passing through a deep relationship with man and interacting with her vocation, leads to the communion with God and it can contribute to the realization of her plan in history.

There is a natural vocation in a woman, clearly said in her own body. In fact it can’t be denied "the evident reality that woman’s body and soul are made tofulfil a particular aim". And the Scriptures clearly express whar, since the beginning of the world, the daily experience teaches us: the woman is confirmed to be man’s mate and mother.Because of this aim her body is particularly endowed and to this aim even the particular features of her soul correspond.

The Thomistical principle of the soul forma corporis is confirmed in the peculiar quality of a woman’s psychic and spiritual faculties and in her attitudes. "A woman’s way of thinking, her interests, are directed towards what is alive, personal, towards the object considered as a whole. Protecting, taking care, defending, feeding and bringing up: these are the inner needs of a woman that can be considered an adult. They are maternal needs! What hasn’t got life in itself, the thing, is interesting for her only when it is useful to a person, it is not interesting in itself."

This woman’s practical attitude shows something similar on the theoretical plan: "The woman’s natural way of knowing is not conceptual but contemplative and experimental, directed to the concrete."

If there is a woman’s natural vocation, which at the same time is human and religious, there is also according to Edith Stein, a multiplicity of ways,beyond the family, open to the explication of the woman’s natural gifts.

"Only the one who is blind against reality could deny that a woman can practise other professions except that of being a wife and a mother! No woman is only a woman: each one has her own likings and her own natural talents, just like a man. These skills make her suitable for the different artistic, scientific and technical professions.
Moreover, the individual tendency can preferably orientate towards any field, even towards those that are in themselves far from feminine features. But, to tell the truth, it is necessary that the objective tasks of these professions are suitable to the peculiarities of femininity".

The Carmel in Kohln, where Edith entered on 14th October, 1933.

With the increasing of the violence of the Nazi persecution, as we have seen, Edith Stein left the Carmel in Kohln in Germany and took refuge in Holland, at the Carmel un Echt. She had done it with a silent suffering, deeply calm because she was unified in herself and abandoned in God. She was conscious the that was a step of her walking towards the Eternal Being.

While at Spyer’s time she followed St. Thomas school, obtaining a solar light from Sholastic, now the philosophical Edith, in obedience to her prioress, dedicated herself to the study of the mystical doctrine of St. John of the Cross, the doctor of "the obscure night" and of "nothingness".

A consequence of it was first the study: "Roads to God’s knowlwdge", and later the work: "Scientia Crucis". She gave the metaphisical study the sub-title: "Rising towards the sense of the Being". Now, with "Scientia Crucis", she reached the top of the Carmel to taste God’S Experience in the darkness of faith.

And she was just living the cross of experience under the increasing of Nazi threat.So she quickly drew up her work,foreseeing the end. And she couldn’t see the end of it as the Nazi SS tore her up from the Carmel before she could finish it. But the important was that Edith continued her walking towards God.

The commentary to St.John of the Cross’s doctrine, traced in "Scientia Crucis", let to catch a glimpse of her living what she was writing as her own experience. "In the mortal anguishes of the night of the spirit, the soul imperfections are subject to a crucial test as wood loses any trace of humidity in the fire, and then it catches fire in the splendour of the flame. The flame that first has wrapped the soul and then has burst it is love."

As the "mystical death" on his own cross is the necessary passage towards resurrection, this event of the spirit will end participating to Jesus’ crucifixion, with a life of renunciation and of abandonment to grief:" The more perfect this crucifixion will be, be active or passive, the more intense the participationt the divine life will be."

These is the synthesis of the "Science of the Cross" themes. Edith lived such themes with all the strenght of her personality, in an opening to God that at the Carmel, with the offering of her life, grew more and more.

"When I could see her alone again - as dom Raphael Walzer, her spiritual director wrote in a witnessing - she said that she was at ease in her heart and in her spirit, as if she was at home. She answered with all the impulse of her inflamed nature. I have to say that facing her I wasn’t even tempted to call for a miracle of the Grace. No, everything seemed so simple and natural, like the visible flowering of her spiritual maturity. I think to her love for the Cross and to her wish for the martyrdom just like this: it is not a conscious attitude of her spirit, but it is a tendency deep-rooted in her heart to follow God everywhere…. Her witnessing gives strenght and light".

The same feeling had his friend Dom Feuling, who witnessed that "Edith grew up within religion. She, who once had fought in defence of the spititual values in the brilliant circle of her contemporaries, now was hidden, deep-rooted in a life that was an experimental knowledge of Truth. She had passed the period of the disputes. She had gone beyond things. Now her starting point was the Divine Faith. Over the Human world of the philosophical science and of the theological knowledge, she had come to that degree of experimental knowledge that one can feel indistinctly, that St. Thomas linked to the Holy Spirit’s gifts."

Edith Stein in Auschwitz [painted by M.Celeste, New York]

If the experience of life, as far as "knowing the reality" is the most complete, appropriate, absolute way by which the subject reaches knowledge and so he reaches the Truth in reality", we are facing a religious perspective and a style of Christian life that in Edith Stein were deeply marked by a personal and historical idea of a high spiritual tension.

In this fundamental situation, Edith Stein’s mystical, religious and christian experience sprang and grew up, making her one of the most significant women of our century. Her experience was very close to those of other two jewish women: Simone Weil, with her cultural and spiritual itinerary, Anna Frank, with her final destiny: the Holocaust.

With their sacrifice, their works, the witnessings of their lives, they enlightened one of the darkest periods of European history. Edith Stein ,born a Jewish and later a sister following Jesus of Nazareth,a renegade like her, banished from the Holy City and killed with a humiliating death, was called to sacrifice herself with Him for her people.

She happened, but also had the rare priviledge, to seal with her blood the principles on which she founded her christian experience.This is the reason why her messaga is a cry for freedom and resurrection given to history, to women and men of all times. A message particularly given to all women that recognize in Christ their own reason of life.

NOTE: this text about Edith Stein, written by Sr Licinia Faresin, an Ursuline, was published in the volume Cammini di resistenza al femminile (1998), edited by the Centro Documentazione e Studi "Presenza Donna", in Vicenza (Italy).
In the Presentation, written by Sr Maria Grazia Piazza, teacher of Sociology at the Gregorian University in Rome, it is said: "Since few years the Centre "Presenza Donna" ventured in the uneasy, but rich and stimulating, road of the dialogue and collaboration among associations, groups, people (especially women) who share the desire of looking inside and around: to the world, to history, to Churches, from a different point of view, including also a feminine eye".
In the same volume we can find the figures of Elisa Salerno (by Sr Maria Luisa Bertuzzo), Chiara Zamboni e Stella Morra (by Sr Federica Cacciavillani), Etty Hillesum (by Sr Maria Grazia Piazza).