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14: Converts to the Real - with Dr. Travis Lacey
3 Plays1 year ago
St. Edith Stein, Catholic Theologian, Philosopher, Confessor, Virgin, and Martyr is the subject of this episode. Dr. Lacey will guide us through not only her works on phenomenology, the nature of humanity and truth, and womanhood, but also her deep and profound love for her Catholic faith and Jesus in the Eucharist.
Notable dates, names, and published texts are written in the order in which they are mentioned:
-October 12th 1891: Born
From the age of seven she had “a ready intelligence, an iron will, a strong sense of duty, and a natural desire to help.”
Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology
“The Logical Investigations” by Edmund Husserl (1900)
Famous early phenomenologists and Catholics: Max Scheler and Deitrich von Hildebrand
“We were made to be enchanted by the real…we are made to commune and know the Truth.”
“On the Problem of Empathy” by Edith Stien (1916)
January 1st 1922: Baptized and Confirmed and greatly desired to enter the Carmelites
Erich Przywara SJ, introduced her to the writings of John Henry Newman and St Thomas Aquinas
“The Idea of the University” by St. John Henry Newman (1852)
Abbot Walzer, OSB was her spiritual director.
1923-1931 Attending liturgy at Benedictine Abby, teaching at a Dominican girls school, and being invited to speak on a lecture circuit
“Woman” by Edith Stein (1933)
1933 the National Socialist Party won a majority rule in parliament and Adolf Hitler was made chancellor.
October 13th 1933 Edith enters the Carmelite order
April 15th 1934 “Clothing Day”
“Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being” by Edith Stein (1936)
“The Science of the Cross” by Edith Stein (published in 1950)
September 1st, 1939 WWII Starts
August 9, 1942 (age 50 years) death and Feast day: Auschwitz extermination camp, Oświęcim, Poland
Teresa Benedicta of the Cross:
-Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux (both Carmelites)
-Benedicta: honors her Benedictine influence and the name itself means “blessed”
-“of the Cross” is a reference to St. John of the Cross.
“We need to make the Eucharistic Truths become effective within us." - Edith Stien
“Stein is convinced that the sacrifice of the Eucharist is really the icon, the model, the radiant image, or what all human acts of knowing and love must be like.” - Dr. Travis Lacey
"Eucharistische Erziehung" (Eucharistic Education, 1926) not yet published in English
“The Eucharist is the most pedagogical of all acts.” - Edith Stein
“The great wisdom of phenomenology is this: the world is more interesting than you normally think that it is. If you pay attention, its depths will become manifest to you. But not only it’s depths, but your depths too.” Dr. Travis Lacey
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Episode
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome everyone.
00:00:17
Speaker
My name is Father Jacob Rouse and I'm the pastor of Notre Dame Parish in Cresco, Iowa.
00:00:22
Speaker
And we are on the 13th episode of the DeBucharistic Revival Podcast.
00:00:29
Speaker
Because that's the name we're going with.
00:00:31
Speaker
Amen.
00:00:32
Speaker
I'm joined by my co-host and brother priest, Father Kevin Earlywine.
00:00:36
Speaker
Father Kevin, can you introduce yourself and where you are at as a priest?
00:00:40
Speaker
Yes, I am Father Kevin Earlywine, pastor of St.
00:00:44
Speaker
Patrick's in Hampton and St.
00:00:45
Speaker
Mary's Church in Ackley.
00:00:48
Speaker
And I'm glad to be here as co-host.
Introduction of Guest: Dr. Travis Lacey
00:00:50
Speaker
Mentally, where are you as a priest?
00:00:53
Speaker
Mentally.
00:00:53
Speaker
You don't have to answer that.
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, this isn't my therapy session.
00:00:57
Speaker
Yeah, I know, right?
00:00:58
Speaker
I know whose it is.
00:01:00
Speaker
It's the audience's, or rather, should I say philosophy session, because we are joined by Dr. Travis Lacey, here to talk about a very special saint and philosopher and theologian.
00:01:14
Speaker
And Dr. Travis, I'd like you to introduce yourself and where you teach.
00:01:19
Speaker
Well, thank you, Father Jacob and Father Kevin.
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, so my name is Travis Lacey, and I am a professor of theology at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
00:01:33
Speaker
Should I give you more background about it?
00:01:34
Speaker
How long have you been there?
00:01:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm finishing my third year here.
00:01:38
Speaker
And actually, I'll be, we're moving this summer.
00:01:42
Speaker
I recently accepted a job at Providence College in New England with the Dominicans.
00:01:47
Speaker
I'll be teaching in Providence's theology department starting this fall.
00:01:51
Speaker
But yeah, I'm finishing up my third year at Mount Mercy.
00:01:53
Speaker
This is where I came straight out of grad school.
00:01:55
Speaker
I did my PhD in theology at the University of Notre Dame.
00:01:59
Speaker
Got a wonderful education there.
00:02:01
Speaker
And then, yeah, I got this job at Mount Mercy and it's been wonderful.
00:02:03
Speaker
My wife and I love the Midwest.
00:02:05
Speaker
But yeah, moving on to Providence and we're really excited for that.
Dr. Lacey's Background and Conversion to Catholicism
00:02:10
Speaker
Is that public or is this now a breaking news podcast too?
00:02:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:15
Speaker
No, it's public.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's public.
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, and since I took the job last November, I don't quite think that April is first news, unfortunately.
00:02:25
Speaker
But I wish I would have kept it so you all could be journalists.
00:02:29
Speaker
So we could have been the breaking news on this podcast.
00:02:32
Speaker
That would have been cool.
00:02:33
Speaker
To our 50 listeners or however many we have.
00:02:36
Speaker
So you mentioned you are married.
00:02:38
Speaker
Do you have children?
00:02:40
Speaker
And what is your wife?
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:42
Speaker
So my wife and I, we have four children ex utero.
00:02:46
Speaker
And then with a fifth on the way, my wife is 36 weeks pregnant.
00:02:50
Speaker
Due with our fifth here at the end of May.
00:02:53
Speaker
So like a couple of crazy people, we're going to, my wife is going to give birth and then we are going to move across country naturally.
00:03:03
Speaker
But yeah, so we have four children who are born right now.
00:03:07
Speaker
Our oldest is Edith, named after St.
00:03:10
Speaker
Edith Stein, who we're going to be talking about.
00:03:12
Speaker
She will be turning nine this Sunday, actually.
00:03:15
Speaker
And then we have John Henry, who's seven, Drew, who is five, and then Miriam, who is two.
00:03:24
Speaker
And what's your wife's name?
00:03:25
Speaker
Shannon.
00:03:26
Speaker
Shannon.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:27
Speaker
What a beautiful family.
00:03:28
Speaker
Well, thank you.
00:03:29
Speaker
I think so too.
00:03:30
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I'm very, yeah.
00:03:32
Speaker
So we're all Catholic here, at least right now.
00:03:36
Speaker
But what about the past?
00:03:38
Speaker
Have you always been Catholic or did you travel from another belief system to the Catholic church?
00:03:44
Speaker
Can you say a little bit about that?
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm a convert.
00:03:47
Speaker
Like a surprising amount maybe of Catholic academics currently.
00:03:52
Speaker
When I was in Notre Dame, a bunch of my cohort who came in in my class, a lot of us were converts.
00:03:59
Speaker
So yeah, I was raised in a devout evangelical Protestant family.
00:04:03
Speaker
I grew up in a non-denominational church.
00:04:07
Speaker
Non-denominational churches, they're essentially Baptists theologically, but they don't belong to the denomination because they take very seriously the authority of scripture and the insufficiency of any purely human authority.
00:04:21
Speaker
And that includes like denominational oversight.
00:04:23
Speaker
They see that as a kind of human, you know, usurpation of the authority that belongs to God alone.
00:04:28
Speaker
And so, yeah, so I grew up in a non-denominational evangelical church in Oklahoma City.
00:04:33
Speaker
That's where I'm from.
00:04:36
Speaker
And yeah, my parents, my parents in my home church, they gave me the Christian faith and a love of Jesus and a sense that a deep, yeah, deep, deep commitment to the essential truths of the Christian faith.
00:04:49
Speaker
My parents are, they're incredibly wise people.
00:04:52
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And even though I obviously grew to disagree with some things about the church I grew up in, the wisdom of my church really lay the foundation for what led me to become Catholic.
00:05:03
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later.
00:05:04
Speaker
And we can get into that more if you want.
00:05:06
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That could be a whole podcast of its own.
00:05:08
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We're
Philosophical Exploration of the Eucharist
00:05:09
Speaker
here to talk about Edith, but I was curious, what is the one or two big billboard things that attracted you or finally got you to join the Catholic Church?
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, so let me give you three, and I'll hit them quickly.
00:05:24
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First is getting to know holy, pious Catholics.
00:05:29
Speaker
A line for most Protestant evangelicals, and I think most Protestants, is that Catholics can be Christians despite, not because of their Catholicism.
00:05:40
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But then when I went to college and I met my first Catholics, I didn't know a single Catholic growing up.
00:05:46
Speaker
But then when I met my first batch of Catholics in college,
00:05:50
Speaker
And I learned that those who bore the fruits of the Spirit and who seem to be the most virtuous and the most conformed to the image of Christ were precisely those who took their faith seriously, right?
00:06:03
Speaker
On the Protestant view, it would seem that
00:06:07
Speaker
The most virtuous or Christ imaging Catholics would be those who weren't the ones praying to Mary, who weren't obsessed with the idea of like the sacrifice of the mass, because these are the very things from a Protestant perspective that would be cutting against the grain of your own sanctification and your own relationship with God.
00:06:28
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But I learned that that was not the case.
00:06:30
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And it was precisely the Catholics who loved precisely those elements that are distinct from Protestantism and Catholicism.
00:06:37
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They were the most, yeah, they reflected the likeness of God.
00:06:43
Speaker
They were the most sort of mature in the virtues, the ones most conformed to the pattern of Christ.
00:06:49
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And so that was really a big influence for me.
00:06:51
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And along with them getting to know Catholic saints, once you read about St.
00:06:56
Speaker
John Paul II, Edith Stein, Mother Teresa, it's hard to, it's kind of hard to continue on to the same pre-suppositions I'd always had about Catholics.
00:07:04
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So that's one.
00:07:05
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Another one was the intellectual side of things.
00:07:07
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I started reading in the tradition.
00:07:09
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I started reading the church fathers and philosophy and the medievals.
00:07:13
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And we could really go into that in a number of ways.
00:07:17
Speaker
But yeah, wrestling through questions like justification, questions like ecclesiology, the nature of the church.
00:07:24
Speaker
In many ways, my dissertation grew out of my conversion.
00:07:27
Speaker
Actually, I wrote my dissertation on the Catholicity of the church.
00:07:31
Speaker
So in the creed, you know, we say, I confess one holy Catholic and apostolic church.
00:07:36
Speaker
What does it mean to say the church is Catholic?
00:07:38
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And that really grew out of a deep sense of what the nature of the church was and is and should be and the Catholicity of Catholicism, its universality, its totality, its embrace of the entire human condition was something that was really powerful.
00:07:55
Speaker
So there are all the intellectual arguments that I had.
00:07:58
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with myself and with others.
00:08:00
Speaker
And then finally, there was, you could say, more aesthetic considerations along with the intellectual ones.
00:08:07
Speaker
I loved Catholic art.
00:08:08
Speaker
I loved Catholic piety, Catholic liturgy, Catholic literature.
00:08:12
Speaker
I was an English major as an undergraduate, and I was really enchanted by the beauty that the Catholic Church produced.
00:08:20
Speaker
And so
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah, so all three of those things, they map nicely onto what philosophers called the transcendentals, right?
00:08:26
Speaker
It was the goodness of the saints, the truth of the faith, and also the beauty produced by the church itself.
00:08:32
Speaker
All three of those were super influential for me, and I don't think without any one of them it really would have happened.
00:08:38
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:08:40
Speaker
For our listeners, the three transcendental properties, truth, goodness and beauty.
00:08:45
Speaker
And there's some other ones, depending on who you ask.
00:08:47
Speaker
But basically, if the goodness of a thing or the truth of a thing or the beauty of a thing sparks interest in us,
00:08:57
Speaker
Then I liken it to when you walk in your grandma's house and you can smell the pie cooking and you just follow the scent.
00:09:04
Speaker
There must be a source of that truth, goodness and beauty.
00:09:09
Speaker
And there must be a source of the pie.
00:09:11
Speaker
And that, of course, is grandma's oven.
00:09:12
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And then to continue the analogy, the Lord, the source of all being, which is God, the Father Almighty.
00:09:18
Speaker
So the fact that we can smell those things as humans means that they have a source.
00:09:22
Speaker
Is that accurate?
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Father Jacob.
00:09:26
Speaker
And the other thing I would add to that is that it's important for the Catholic philosophical tradition especially that the transcendentals, truth, goodness, and beauty are ultimately one.
00:09:38
Speaker
That that which is true is good, and that which is good is beautiful, and that which is beautiful is true.
00:09:43
Speaker
They seem different to us because in our sort of complex, finite condition, they appeal to different aspects of us, right?
00:09:50
Speaker
So we know the truth by our minds.
00:09:52
Speaker
We will the good, right, with our wills and our desires and our affections, delight, and beauty.
00:09:58
Speaker
And so they have a way of appealing to different aspects of us, but ultimately they're all convertible because the ultimate truth, good and beautiful, is God, our triune Lord, Father, Son, and Spirit.
00:10:09
Speaker
So...
00:10:09
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, I don't think I could tell the story of my conversion without appealing to all three of them.
00:10:14
Speaker
Wow, that's amazing.
00:10:16
Speaker
Could you, since we're a Eucharistic revival podcast, before we get into Edith Stein, just say a word briefly about some of your experience in coming to the Catholic Church's understanding of the Eucharist, especially coming from a non-denominational, which is very not a liturgical tradition, right?
00:10:35
Speaker
And so moving into that.
00:10:37
Speaker
So just a word about that.
00:10:39
Speaker
That's right.
00:10:40
Speaker
So first, it can be difficult because it's important to understand that Protestants believe a kind of range of things about the Eucharist.
00:10:46
Speaker
So in a non-denominational background, I was probably at the farthest end of the spectrum away from the Catholic position as you could get from the Catholic view.
00:10:55
Speaker
So we grew up believing what is commonly known as the Zwinglian, or the memorialist view of the Eucharist, which is that the Lord's Supper is merely symbolic, right?
00:11:05
Speaker
It's a symbol of what Jesus does for you.
00:11:08
Speaker
And Jesus says, do this in remembrance of me.
00:11:09
Speaker
So you celebrate it out of obedience to his command.
00:11:12
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And so my church, we celebrated communion because it was obeying the words of our Lord.
00:11:17
Speaker
But it was purely a memorial, purely a memory.
00:11:20
Speaker
It didn't it's not a means of grace.
00:11:22
Speaker
It doesn't participate in like a higher supernatural reality.
00:11:26
Speaker
It's purely symbolic.
00:11:28
Speaker
And then in different shades of Protestantism, you have different different degrees of the way in which Christ is present in the sacrament.
00:11:37
Speaker
But yeah, that was one of the first things about my evangelical faith that came crumbling down.
00:11:41
Speaker
Because when you start reading the church fathers and the medievals and the tradition, when Jesus says, take, eat all of you, this is my body, right?
00:11:51
Speaker
They seem to think that he meant it.
00:11:53
Speaker
And they basically are unanimous on this.
00:11:56
Speaker
And when I say they, I mean the tradition.
00:11:58
Speaker
So Zwingli essentially invents the memorialist position on the Eucharist.
00:12:03
Speaker
And it's interesting that actually some of the great reformers themselves, like Martin Luther and John Calvin, they took Zwingli to task for this.
00:12:09
Speaker
Martin Luther will even say in some of his writings that he's more opposed to Zwingli than he is to the Romanists.
00:12:16
Speaker
And so it's important that not all Protestants go that far away from the position.
00:12:20
Speaker
But the idea that the Eucharist was just a symbol was one of the first things that came crumbling down precisely by reading the tradition and seeing how they read the Bible.
00:12:31
Speaker
Right.
00:12:31
Speaker
Because it's ultimately about our words, Lords, in the gospel and St.
00:12:34
Speaker
Paul repeats them in First Corinthians.
00:12:36
Speaker
Right.
00:12:37
Speaker
And they all interpret it literally.
00:12:39
Speaker
And so it seemed to me irresponsible or almost a kind of hubris to think that I could interpret the text better than they could.
00:12:45
Speaker
And so that was really essential to coming to a Catholic view of what you could call real presence.
00:12:50
Speaker
But there was another step as well, which I actually became very convinced that the Eucharist had to be a sacrifice because that's the other key thing, because there are Protestants like Lutherans and some Anglicans who believe that the Eucharist is the body and blood of our Lord.
00:13:06
Speaker
Most of them don't believe in transubstantiation, but we don't have to kind of get into that.
00:13:09
Speaker
They do believe it's really Jesus.
00:13:13
Speaker
But they tend to deny that the Eucharist is a sacrifice.
00:13:16
Speaker
But it seemed to me that when St.
00:13:18
Speaker
Paul in 1 Corinthians talks about that the bread that we break is a participation in the body of our Lord, that you can't really make sense of the thing unless it means participating in the reality, which it's memorializing.
00:13:31
Speaker
In other words,
00:13:32
Speaker
You think of it like this.
00:13:34
Speaker
Is the cross of Christ something that we're actually united to or not?
00:13:40
Speaker
Is it something when Jesus says that when I'm lifted up from this earth, I will gather all people to myself, as in John chapter 10, does he actually gather us in or not?
00:13:49
Speaker
And if the Eucharist doesn't participate in that, if we can't offer an acceptable sacrifice pleasing to God, to use the language of Romans 12, with Jesus on the cross, then
00:13:59
Speaker
What are we doing?
00:14:00
Speaker
And it seemed to me that the idea of the Eucharistic sacrifice really made sense of Christianity's fundamental belief that God is triune, right?
00:14:10
Speaker
Father, Son, and Spirit.
00:14:12
Speaker
And that what we're doing in the Eucharist is we're participating in the Son's eternal glorification of the Father.
00:14:19
Speaker
And this is what the Trinity is.
00:14:20
Speaker
It's a relationship of mutual glorification, of mutual love, glorification and love given and received in the spirit.
00:14:27
Speaker
And the cross is what it looks like if you sort of translate, if you will, the eternal glorification of the son of the father into the key of time.
00:14:37
Speaker
Well, it looks like the cross.
00:14:38
Speaker
And so the Eucharist is how we are caught up into that glorification, that we're incorporated into the kind of eternal Trinitarian act of mutual glorification.
00:14:50
Speaker
And once I saw that, it seemed to me that believing anything else would be not just false, but almost like laughably just inferior.
00:14:59
Speaker
I mean, once you understand that, like once you understand that the Eucharist allows you to participate in the eternal triune life of God, why would you even want anything else?
00:15:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:12
Speaker
Right.
00:15:12
Speaker
So, yeah, so it was belief both in the real presence, but also in the in the in the view of the Eucharist as a sacrifice.
00:15:19
Speaker
You need both.
00:15:20
Speaker
And that was really important to me.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for sharing that.
00:15:24
Speaker
I love that.
00:15:26
Speaker
Especially, I think, you emphasizing that second point, because I think that's something we don't always reflect on as much as Catholic Christians, you know, especially this time we emphasize the real presence, because that's challenging, but not that second point as much, which I agree is equally as important.
00:15:42
Speaker
You know, like, that's something I try to preach to my people a lot, but that how
00:15:47
Speaker
you know, what is going on in the Mass.
00:15:49
Speaker
And when I do baptism class, I talk about, you know, we share in the role of Christ as priest, prophet, and king.
00:15:55
Speaker
Well, how do we do the priest part, right?
00:15:57
Speaker
And I, you know, talk about prayer and offering of sacrifice, but particularly in participating in the sacrifice of Christ.
00:16:03
Speaker
That I come to Mass as a person in the pew, not me, Father Kevin, but a lay person in the pew comes to Mass and has their full conscious act of participation.
00:16:12
Speaker
It's not that they run around and do stuff.
00:16:15
Speaker
It's that they are actively taking the stuff of their life and making an offering, uniting it to the perfect offering, that Jesus is the perfect offering.
00:16:24
Speaker
He's the perfect gift to be offered to God the Father, the perfect sacrifice to be offered.
00:16:29
Speaker
And we imperfectly offer ourselves our heart, right?
00:16:34
Speaker
And yet it's drawn up into the perfect sacrifice and received by God the Father
00:16:38
Speaker
And in exchange, we receive the fullness of God's self, right?
00:16:42
Speaker
So I imperfectly offer my sinful, selfish heart.
00:16:45
Speaker
And in return, I receive the fullness of God, right?
00:16:47
Speaker
Because of the offering of Jesus, right?
00:16:50
Speaker
What a deal, man.
00:16:52
Speaker
What's that, Father Jacob?
00:16:53
Speaker
What a deal.
00:16:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:16:54
Speaker
It's the marvelous exchange.
00:16:56
Speaker
And it's an unjust exchange, but unjust in our favor.
00:17:00
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:17:02
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:17:04
Speaker
And I actually think it needs to be emphasized because it seems to me that the idea of sacrifice is the one that in our day and age is more likely to maybe rub people the wrong way.
00:17:14
Speaker
Because I think when most modern...
00:17:15
Speaker
listeners hear the idea of sacrifice they think of the sort of uh the the the terrified farmer propitiate propitiating the angry storm god because he wants a good harvest right and the angry storm god needs to be appeased or else his wrath will come descending upon you so you offer a sacrifice saying please angry storm god accept my sacrifice know how much i love you so that you treat me well
00:17:38
Speaker
And that's how most people think about sacrifice.
00:17:40
Speaker
But so much of the biblical story is about the reconfiguration, the redefinition of what sacrifice is, that it's the idea of this totality of self-gift, that God isn't interested in sort of depriving us of things, but it's
00:17:53
Speaker
But in us offering the whole of ourselves, that's one way of interpreting, right, the sacrifice of Isaac and the story of Abraham, right?
00:18:00
Speaker
That Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son.
00:18:03
Speaker
But the sign that God isn't interested in taking something from us that's of value is that he doesn't demand the sacrifice of Isaac in the end.
00:18:10
Speaker
What he wants is Abraham to give all of who he is.
00:18:13
Speaker
And so much of the biblical story is about redefining sacrifice precisely in this Trinitarian way.
00:18:19
Speaker
It's the totality of our self-gift.
00:18:21
Speaker
And the Eucharist is slowly conforming, configuring us to the perfect self-gift of Christ and the Father that we struggle to make, like Father Kevin was saying.
00:18:30
Speaker
So I think the notion of sacrifice tends to be the one that a lot of modern persons really have trouble with.
00:18:38
Speaker
But it's one that really needs to be emphasized, I think.
St. Edith Stein: Life and Impact
00:18:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I shared in a, I think a previous episode, but I once had a priest say to me that the way to read, you can't read scripture apart from the Eucharist, and that didn't make sense to me at first, but coming to understand both this idea of Christ's gift to us and the real presence,
00:18:59
Speaker
But also this idea of that it's the act that unites us to a sacrifice, how it really does tie everything in the Old Testament together.
00:19:06
Speaker
Like there's this theme, this line of theme throughout the whole Old Testament of, well, we could say of bread, right?
00:19:12
Speaker
There's all this bread imagery and the role that plays in...
00:19:17
Speaker
in the temple, in the man in the desert and stuff like that in the Passover meal.
00:19:20
Speaker
And then, of course, sacrifice, right?
00:19:24
Speaker
The offering of Cain and Abel, of Abraham and offering of Isaac of the Passover meal, which brings together bread and the sacrificial lamb and so on.
00:19:32
Speaker
And then the temple, of course, and how like how that all of a sudden, like I began to realize how that's all brought together in
00:19:38
Speaker
our participation in that through the Eucharist.
00:19:41
Speaker
Right.
00:19:41
Speaker
And that's like the key that like ties everything together and also unlocks everything in all of scripture.
00:19:46
Speaker
And we could go on about this.
00:19:48
Speaker
Father Jacob Rouse has something to say.
00:19:50
Speaker
Imagine every single mass, everything we just talked about is present and more and it's all free.
00:19:59
Speaker
Anyway, speaking of total self-gift, this, I think, brings us to the star of this podcast in particular.
00:20:06
Speaker
No, not Dr. Travis Lacey.
00:20:10
Speaker
We first asked him to be a part of this podcast because at a priest gathering, a convocation last year, he gave a series of talks about St.
00:20:19
Speaker
Edith Stein.
00:20:20
Speaker
And we just really liked his insight and his, actually, his love for her and his friendship with her.
00:20:27
Speaker
And
00:20:27
Speaker
So we wanted to bring him on and ask about his relationship with this great saint and what some of the things that she can teach us.
00:20:35
Speaker
So you want to give us some kind of overview of her life and how you were attracted to her?
00:20:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:43
Speaker
Thank you, Father.
00:20:44
Speaker
So St.
00:20:44
Speaker
Edith Stein, in brief, was a Catholic philosopher, theologian, canonized as both a confessor, which is someone who is canonized, who's made a saint because of the great holiness of their lives, but also as a martyr.
00:21:00
Speaker
Very unusual for the church to do this.
00:21:02
Speaker
that St.
00:21:03
Speaker
John Paul II canonized Edith Stein both as a martyr and as a confessor.
00:21:07
Speaker
She was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz, actually.
00:21:13
Speaker
And why was she killed at Auschwitz?
00:21:15
Speaker
Well, I guess we'll have to go back to the beginning.
00:21:17
Speaker
So Edith Stein was born on October 12th, 1891, the youngest of 11 children to a devout Jewish family.
00:21:25
Speaker
She was actually born on the feast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which along with Passover are the two probably holiest days of the Jewish liturgical calendar, right?
00:21:34
Speaker
The Day of Atonement and Passover are sort of like the Christians Christmas and Easter, right?
00:21:39
Speaker
They're the two biggest feasts of the entire year.
00:21:42
Speaker
And because she was the baby of the family, the youngest of 11, and because she was born on Yom Kippur, she was the great beloved of her devoutly Jewish mother.
00:21:51
Speaker
And so she was the favorite.
00:21:54
Speaker
Her mother had a particular affection for her.
00:21:57
Speaker
And this will become very important when we get to her story later for why it hurt her mother so badly when she became Catholic.
00:22:04
Speaker
But Edith, from a very early age, demonstrated high intellectual ability.
00:22:08
Speaker
She was quite precocious.
00:22:10
Speaker
One of the people who knew her describes her as from an early age, from the age of seven, having a ready intelligence, an iron will, a strong sense of duty, and a natural desire to help.
00:22:23
Speaker
And the iron will is absolutely true.
00:22:25
Speaker
Edith Stein seemed to, from a very young age, have a little bit of a temper, actually, a bit stubborn, and had an incredibly strong personality.
00:22:36
Speaker
But coupled with that, she had an extraordinary intelligence, and her family immediately...
00:22:41
Speaker
thought that she would probably go on to pursue intellectual achievements.
00:22:46
Speaker
So in March 1911, when she was 20 years old, she entered the university at Breslau.
00:22:52
Speaker
And now for women to go on to university, especially in Germany at this time, was not very common.
00:22:58
Speaker
And so she goes to a university at Breslau to study psychology.
00:23:02
Speaker
She's really interested in the human mind.
00:23:04
Speaker
She's interested in fundamental questions about what it means to be human and how we think and how our thoughts sort of have access to truth.
00:23:13
Speaker
But she quickly grew disenchanted with psychology because she thought that the scientific way of looking at questions of truth and a fundamental meaning, it obviously yielded access to certain truths and science does.
00:23:27
Speaker
Science can tell you a lot of true things about the natural world.
00:23:30
Speaker
And it's very central to a Catholic view of the various disciplines that science has allowed to teach us.
00:23:37
Speaker
And its method is sort of, you could say it's sovereign in its own sphere.
00:23:41
Speaker
And she learned a lot from the sciences.
00:23:43
Speaker
But what she realized was that the sciences couldn't help her answer questions of fundamental meaning or value.
00:23:49
Speaker
In other words, what the sciences couldn't tell you were things like, why does a human person matter?
00:23:54
Speaker
Or does a human person matter?
00:23:55
Speaker
Should they matter?
00:23:56
Speaker
Does it mean anything to be an individual?
00:23:59
Speaker
Are you just a member of a species?
00:24:01
Speaker
Is that how you should think of you?
00:24:03
Speaker
Stein realized that psychology couldn't answer any of these questions.
00:24:06
Speaker
By definition, it's a study of the human mind, and psychologists can tell you how human psychological and mental processes function, but they can't answer questions of meaning and value and significance.
00:24:17
Speaker
While she was at Breslau, she was growing steadily disenchanted with the sciences, and she read a work by a philosopher named Edmund Husserl called The Logical Investigations.
00:24:28
Speaker
Now, I should mention here something briefly.
00:24:30
Speaker
I don't want to regale your listeners with too much of this, but we need to know that Edmund Husserl is often taken to be the founder of a philosophical method that's known as phenomenology.
00:24:42
Speaker
Husserl believed that modern philosophy...
00:24:46
Speaker
had basically become too interested in the act of criticism, which is to say in a kind of a kind of hyper skepticism that modern philosophy was so interested in the deconstruction of reality, in pointing out the ways in which our minds are likely to err and the ways in which our cultural and our temporal and our personal assumptions are likely to get in the way of reasoning, that
00:25:10
Speaker
And by the way, that's all true.
00:25:12
Speaker
Our cultural assumptions can get in the way of seeking the truth.
00:25:15
Speaker
Our personal biases do get in the way of seeking the truth.
00:25:17
Speaker
So it's perfectly legitimate for philosophy to attend to these aspects of the human condition.
00:25:23
Speaker
The Christian way of saying this is that we're fallen, right?
00:25:25
Speaker
The sin affects our ability to think.
00:25:28
Speaker
So obviously it's good for philosophy to attend to these things.
00:25:31
Speaker
But what Husserl seemed to think is that philosophy had grown almost obsessed with this, that it had lost the basic sense, the basic kind of wonder that we can know things, that we can know truth.
00:25:42
Speaker
And not only that we can, but that we seem to have this insatiable hunger for it.
00:25:46
Speaker
Husserl realized that the human mind is so created to know the truth that it naturally adapts itself to basically know whatever you put in front of it.
00:25:57
Speaker
And we also know without being taught that we have to approach different aspects of reality in different ways.
00:26:04
Speaker
In other words, I could come to my five-year-old and I could give him an arithmetic problem and I could give him a human person and he wouldn't be able to explain it, but he would treat the two things very, very differently.
00:26:15
Speaker
Why?
00:26:16
Speaker
Because he knows, because he's hardwired to know, to use a rather crude computer metaphor, right?
00:26:23
Speaker
You could say theologically he was created to know that these are two different kinds of things.
00:26:28
Speaker
And therefore that he is the kind of creature who's made to enjoy and to commune with the truth.
00:26:35
Speaker
And so much of phenomenology is about attending to the real.
00:26:39
Speaker
It's about what the early phenomenologists thought of themselves as one, you know, academic monograph has called it.
00:26:46
Speaker
They thought of themselves as converts to the real, as philosophers who are committed to exploring the human nature.
00:26:54
Speaker
urge to commune with reality, with truth.
00:26:57
Speaker
And it was precisely in reading the logical investigations that Stein had something of a kind of philosophical conversion.
00:27:04
Speaker
Now at this time, I should also say that Stein wasn't an observant Jew.
00:27:08
Speaker
She wasn't a full-blown atheist either.
00:27:10
Speaker
She has a kind of a little bit of something of a teenage atheist rebellion phase, but she can't ever quite get rid of the need for some kind of transcendent deity, but she's not practicing her Jewish faith either.
00:27:22
Speaker
But she does seem to think that the materialist explanation of reality, the one she was getting from her psychology classes, wasn't quite sufficient.
00:27:31
Speaker
And she thought that Husserl and that phenomenology was a way of answering the philosophical questions that were far more pertinent to the human condition of the things that matter.
00:27:41
Speaker
So what Edith Stein does in 1913 is that she transfers from the university in Breslau to go to Göttingen to study with Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology.
00:27:52
Speaker
So we're talking about this reality stuff.
00:27:55
Speaker
One of the critiques I know from people who take a philosophy 101 freshman year, they're like, this is stupid because they're asking me to figure out if that chair is real or not.
00:28:06
Speaker
And, you know, that's part of the deconstruction and one of the critiques.
00:28:08
Speaker
But it seems like, and yes, that is part of philosophy is how do I know that chair or that lamp is real?
00:28:14
Speaker
And what is a chair?
00:28:15
Speaker
And what is the form of chair?
00:28:17
Speaker
But I think what it sounds like phenomenology is asking is like, what if there was a person in that chair and someone created that or something created that person?
00:28:27
Speaker
So it actually kind of sounds like refreshing, you know, as opposed to deconstructing.
00:28:31
Speaker
It's kind of...
00:28:33
Speaker
filling in gaps and sounds a lot more happier, you know?
00:28:37
Speaker
It is.
00:28:37
Speaker
It is, Father Jacob.
00:28:38
Speaker
It's so much happier that early phenomenology tended to draw Christians to it.
00:28:43
Speaker
In fact, a couple of the most famous early phenomenologists, Max Schaler and Dietrich von Hildebrand, were Catholic.
00:28:50
Speaker
Now, Schaler has something of a very tense relationship with the Catholic Church, but it's interesting that one St.
00:28:57
Speaker
John Paul II wrote one of his doctoral theses on the thought of Max Schaler.
00:29:03
Speaker
And so Shaler was for a time a practicing Catholic.
00:29:07
Speaker
And even when he developed a somewhat tense relationship with the church, he never abandoned belief in a supernatural deity, even in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
00:29:17
Speaker
So his relationship to Mother Church, you could say, was fraught, but he always kept a kind of supernatural religious sensibility.
00:29:23
Speaker
But then Dietrich von Hildebrand was very famously a very devout Catholic philosopher.
00:29:28
Speaker
Von Hildebrand was a philosopher that Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger said that, you know, that centuries from now, when the intellectual history of the 20th century gets written, that von Hildebrand will tower above all other figures.
00:29:43
Speaker
So that was at least Ratzinger's estimation of von Hildebrand as a philosopher.
00:29:46
Speaker
My point simply being that it tended to draw Christians.
00:29:50
Speaker
Precisely because it was this idea that we were made to be enchanted by the real, that you're made to commune with the truth, that you were made to know the truth, and that if you pay attention to all the ways that you naturally go about trying to learn the truth, you can learn something.
00:30:07
Speaker
And so it's interesting that in the early phenomenological circles, it tended to draw a lot of Christians to it.
00:30:12
Speaker
And so Stein, interestingly enough, she was surrounded by Christians in her study of phenomenology.
00:30:17
Speaker
So Stein moves to, she moves to Göttingen to study with Husserl.
00:30:22
Speaker
And in 1916, Husserl moves to take a position in Freiburg and asks Stein to come with him as his personal assistant.
00:30:31
Speaker
And so Stein moves to the university in Freiburg to be his assistant.
00:30:35
Speaker
And it's at that time that she wrote her dissertation on empathy.
00:30:40
Speaker
She was very interested in the idea that human beings could not just know things, but each other.
00:30:46
Speaker
And as I just mentioned with phenomenology, phenomenology is interested in asking the question, how do we get to know specific things?
00:30:53
Speaker
And that the way that we get to know specific things is different.
00:30:56
Speaker
So the way I get to know a mathematical idea is different from the way I get to know a historical event, which is different from the way I get to know a human person.
00:31:05
Speaker
And Stein was very interested in this thought, in this idea of how do I get to know human persons?
00:31:11
Speaker
And so she wrote her dissertation on empathy.
00:31:14
Speaker
which is a beautiful dissertation.
00:31:16
Speaker
And for those of you who, your listeners who might be a little bit more philosophically inclined, I'd highly recommend it to anyone.
00:31:23
Speaker
It's a beautiful text about empathy and the human desire to know other selves.
00:31:29
Speaker
But she writes her dissertation on empathy.
00:31:31
Speaker
And by 1919, because she's written this dissertation and she's qualified to teach in university, she applies for a university post, which she's rejected largely because she's a woman.
00:31:43
Speaker
In fact, there were no female professors in German universities at this time, and she had the support of a lot of famous German philosophers, but she was still rejected from all his positions.
00:31:56
Speaker
She continues her academic work, however, and continues working with Husserl as an assistant.
00:32:00
Speaker
When in the summer of 1921, her life was radically changed when she was staying with her friends, the Conrad Martiuses.
00:32:09
Speaker
So Hedwig Conrad Martius was a Lutheran, a Protestant, but a devout Christian and a phenomenologist, a student of Edmund Husserl.
00:32:17
Speaker
So Hedwig Conrad Martius, along with von Helmholtz.
00:32:20
Speaker
Holdebrand, along with Shaler, along with John Paul II, one of these Christian lovers of phenomenology, one of these converts to the real.
00:32:27
Speaker
Well, she's staying with her friends, the Conrad Martiuses, in the summer of 1921.
00:32:32
Speaker
And before she goes to bed, she's looking for some reading material.
00:32:36
Speaker
So as the story goes, she plucks St.
00:32:38
Speaker
Teresa of Avila's autobiography off the shelf.
00:32:41
Speaker
She reads it in one night.
00:32:43
Speaker
And at the end, she closes the book and she says, this has to be true.
00:32:48
Speaker
And so at that moment, she was both an intellect and will, you could say, Catholic.
00:32:54
Speaker
So the next thing that she did was she bought a catechism and a missal.
00:32:59
Speaker
And she went to mass at the local church in Berksabern.
00:33:02
Speaker
And she went to the priest after the mass.
00:33:05
Speaker
And she said, I'd like to be baptized.
00:33:07
Speaker
And this priest, a monsignor, said, well, look, to be baptized, you have to undergo this long catechetical process.
00:33:12
Speaker
You need to be examining, make sure you know what you're getting yourself into, that you know the basics of the Christian faith.
00:33:18
Speaker
And Stein couldn't think of anything else but to say, please examine me.
00:33:22
Speaker
And so the priest starts asking her questions and comes to find out that she might have a better grasp of the Christian faith than he does.
00:33:28
Speaker
And so this incredibly brilliant Jewish convert just sort of dazzled by her, the knowledge of the faith that she was able to acquire just by studying the liturgy, her missal, and her catechism.
00:33:40
Speaker
And so on New Year's Day, 1922, she was baptized in Confucius.
00:33:45
Speaker
And it's interesting, this point about the Missal, I just want to pause here because of the Eucharistic revival theme.
00:33:50
Speaker
You know, Stein had a Jewish university friend at this time who said that after Stein converted, her Missal was her most treasured possession.
00:33:58
Speaker
It was the thing that she really loved and treasured the most.
00:34:01
Speaker
And
00:34:02
Speaker
I think that when we think about what it means to learn and treasure the Eucharist, we oftentimes think about people like me, theologians, right?
00:34:08
Speaker
I need to learn more.
00:34:09
Speaker
I need to learn more theology.
00:34:11
Speaker
But the liturgy itself is designed to not just teach, but to conform us to the very realities that we're participating in.
00:34:18
Speaker
And so Stein, just by reading the text of the liturgy, was able to acquire this incredibly deep sense of the faith.
00:34:26
Speaker
You kind of said it just now, but the missal is not a...
00:34:33
Speaker
Cuban crisis.
00:34:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:35
Speaker
A missile is M-I-S-S-A-L.
00:34:38
Speaker
And that's a book that basically the priest reads from.
00:34:41
Speaker
So when you see the altar server come over for let us pray or during the Eucharistic prayer, that's what the priest is reading, reading from.
00:34:47
Speaker
So she was pouring over the texts and the prayers that are used at mass.
00:34:52
Speaker
And it's really cool that that the word said at mass are what taught and formed her.
00:34:57
Speaker
So that's what a missile is.
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah, thank you, Father Jacob.
00:35:00
Speaker
Thank you.
00:35:01
Speaker
Yeah, that's right.
00:35:01
Speaker
M-I-S-S-A-L missile.
00:35:03
Speaker
That's always a good one.
00:35:04
Speaker
Yeah, thank you.
00:35:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:07
Speaker
So I mentioned, you know, when she was born, when I went over the details of her birth, that her mother, she was a favorite of her mother, who was a devout Jew.
00:35:16
Speaker
Stein's conversion and baptism was very hard on her mother.
00:35:19
Speaker
And Stein, immediately after getting baptized, wanted to join the Carmelites, precisely because St.
00:35:25
Speaker
Teresa of Avila,
00:35:27
Speaker
was sort of her window into the Catholic faith, the means by which God's grace led her into Catholicism.
00:35:34
Speaker
She wanted to become a Carmelite immediately.
00:35:36
Speaker
But given how hard it was on her mother to be baptized, she knew that immediately going into taking religious vows and being cloistered nun to never see her mother again maybe, or maybe once every five years,
00:35:50
Speaker
depending on the convent, she knew that'd be too much.
00:35:53
Speaker
And so she had to withhold her immediate desire, which is to become a nun.
00:35:58
Speaker
And instead, what she did was in 1923, she started working at a Dominican girls' school in Speyer at St.
00:36:03
Speaker
Magdalena's.
00:36:05
Speaker
So she's teaching at this school.
00:36:07
Speaker
It's a girls' school, so only girls are students there with the Dominicans.
00:36:11
Speaker
And while she's there, she meets another Catholic theologian named Eric Shavara.
00:36:16
Speaker
And Shavara would come to impact Edith Stein in a lot of ways because Shavara would introduce her to John Henry Newman and Thomas Aquinas.
00:36:25
Speaker
And these are two very, very important influences for Edith Stein because I mentioned that she got interested in phenomenology and philosophy.
00:36:32
Speaker
But with Thomas Aquinas, this is her great sort of intellectual immersion into the Catholic philosophical tradition.
00:36:39
Speaker
and the theological tradition.
00:36:41
Speaker
And John Henry Newman is important for the Catholic faith in a lot of ways, but particularly for Stein.
00:36:47
Speaker
Newman, one of the books of Newman's that was most influential for her was his book called The Idea of a University.
00:36:53
Speaker
And remember that Stein is working at a girls' school at the time.
00:36:56
Speaker
She's very, very interested in the topic of education.
00:36:59
Speaker
And what does it mean to educate and form a human person?
00:37:03
Speaker
So given what she wrote her dissertation about, right, on empathy,
00:37:07
Speaker
Stein was for her entire life, both before and after conversion, absolutely obsessed with this question of the dignity and the sacredness of the individual person, how you come to know them, how you form them, how you become your actual individual self that God created you to be.
00:37:26
Speaker
And so when she became a teacher full time, she plunged headlong into this very question.
00:37:31
Speaker
What does it mean to be entrusted with the education?
00:37:34
Speaker
And her preferred word is actually the formation of a human person.
00:37:39
Speaker
And so John Henry Newman is really important for her on this because it's precisely by reading and then in translating Newman's idea of the university that she really starts to form a lot of her ideas on what it means to educate and form another human person.
00:37:52
Speaker
And it's actually through Stein's translations that Newman was really introduced to a German-speaking audience.
00:37:59
Speaker
So through Shavar's influence, Stein reads and translates both Newman and Aquinas.
00:38:05
Speaker
And so she adds to her phenomenological interests Catholic metaphysics and philosophy and theology and tries to think about how she can synthesize all these various patterns together.
00:38:18
Speaker
She's also very interested in Carmelite spirituality, obviously, and
00:38:22
Speaker
Also at this time, she develops a particular liking for the liturgy celebrated at a Benedictine abbey.
00:38:31
Speaker
Now here I should mention that the Benedictines were very influential in the liturgical movement that preceded the Second Vatican Council.
00:38:38
Speaker
So the liturgical reforms that came up and that were promulgated in Sacrosanical Concilium at the Second Vatican Council, these are the outgrowth of many decades of outgrowth
00:38:51
Speaker
activity in the church of theologians and liturgists and Catholics, wanting Catholics to realize what the treasure of the liturgy is.
00:39:01
Speaker
And this is really spearheaded by the Benedictines.
00:39:04
Speaker
The Benedictines are the ones who really took it to heart that the liturgy was a precious jewel of the faith.
00:39:10
Speaker
This great accomplishment of Catholicism was the production of the mass, of the mass of the Roman rite.
00:39:16
Speaker
And the Benedictines were also some of the first to actually publish missals for the laity to bring to mass.
00:39:22
Speaker
And so they were very interested in the laity understanding the beauty of the mass.
00:39:27
Speaker
And so it was at this Benedictine abbey, which really valued the liturgy, that Stein met the man who had become basically her spiritual director, Dom Raphael Balzer.
00:39:37
Speaker
And it's her time in the liturgy that she also develops a very, very deep devotion to the Eucharist.
00:39:43
Speaker
We have memories of Stein at this time that she would spend hours at this Benedictine Abbey just in front of the tabernacle, which is really interesting.
00:39:51
Speaker
And we'll come back to this later.
00:39:52
Speaker
But one thing that I learned from Stein, I want to go ahead and flag this now, is that I think that as Catholics, it's interesting.
00:39:59
Speaker
And I want to be careful how I put this.
00:40:00
Speaker
Obviously, Eucharistic adoration and exposition of the sacrament is a sacred and beautiful thing, and we should encourage everyone to
Stein's Decision to Join the Carmelites
00:40:08
Speaker
do it.
00:40:08
Speaker
But you can visit the sacrament even when it's reposing in the tabernacle.
00:40:12
Speaker
And I actually didn't quite realize that this would be a good thing to do until I encountered Edith Stein, who visited the tabernacle.
00:40:21
Speaker
So even when the sacrament wasn't exposed, even when it wasn't put up for adoration in the monstrance, she would just go to a tabernacle.
00:40:27
Speaker
where the presence of our Lord was kept reserved, and she would just spend hours in front of it.
00:40:32
Speaker
And I remember as a PhD student at Notre Dame being really moved by this, that she was so profoundly impacted by the presence of our Lord in the sacrament that she would just go seek out a tabernacle.
00:40:43
Speaker
Even if the Eucharist wasn't out, it was still worth visiting, right?
00:40:47
Speaker
It's still worth visiting the presence of our Lord, even when he's in the tabernacle.
00:40:51
Speaker
And so
00:40:52
Speaker
When I was a PhD student in Notre Dame, we had, you know, there's a ton of chapels at Notre Dame.
00:40:56
Speaker
It's one of the blessings of being there.
00:40:58
Speaker
And I would go to this little chapel in a building next to the library where my little cubicle was, and I'd spend time there.
00:41:04
Speaker
But I learned that from Edith Stein.
00:41:06
Speaker
I don't know how I got that sort of roadblock in my head that like I could only visit the sacrament if it was exposed during adoration.
00:41:13
Speaker
But just going to the tabernacle is really important.
00:41:15
Speaker
And she would do this.
00:41:16
Speaker
She'd spend hours in front of the sacrament.
00:41:18
Speaker
So from 1923 to basically 1931, Stein is, she's attending the liturgy at the Benetton Abbey.
00:41:26
Speaker
She's teaching at this Dominican girls' school.
00:41:29
Speaker
And she starts to become rather well-known in German Catholic circles because she starts getting invited to speak places.
00:41:36
Speaker
Because it's very, very rare that you have this woman teaching at a Catholic girls' school with as much education and acumen as Stein had.
00:41:45
Speaker
So Stein started getting invited basically on this lecture circuit to talk about education and specifically the theme of women's education.
00:41:52
Speaker
And so she delivered a ton of lectures about this topic during this time.
00:41:57
Speaker
And that's where Stein's book that in English is just called Woman.
00:42:01
Speaker
It's basically essays on what the meaning of a woman is.
00:42:04
Speaker
And really, they're actually essays about women's education, mostly.
00:42:08
Speaker
But it's also from this time kind of on the educational lecture circuit that she really composes her writings on the Eucharist.
00:42:16
Speaker
So Stein...
00:42:17
Speaker
Even though she has a bunch of contributions to theology, she always thought of herself first and foremost as a philosopher.
00:42:23
Speaker
So she actually doesn't write about the Eucharist a lot.
00:42:26
Speaker
Most of her writings are not about it.
00:42:28
Speaker
She doesn't really cover it very often.
00:42:30
Speaker
But the times that she does are generally during this time when she's talking about women's education.
00:42:36
Speaker
And that's the important thing to know right away here is that for her, we have to understand the formative significance, the educational significance of the sacrament.
00:42:46
Speaker
that the sacrament of the Eucharist is that which forms, which draws us into being, which gives us the concrete shape as sacred, unrepeatable individuals.
00:42:56
Speaker
And so for her, this idea of the Eucharist as formative, as educational, is really, really important.
00:43:01
Speaker
And it's during these years that almost all of her writings on the Eucharist come from.
00:43:07
Speaker
In 1931, then, she actually leaves her position at St.
00:43:12
Speaker
Magdalena's to try to get a university position again, but once again, she's rejected.
00:43:17
Speaker
She gets this job at this sort of educational institute in Münster, and she works there for a couple of years.
00:43:24
Speaker
And during this whole time, all she wants to do is be in a Carmelite convent.
00:43:28
Speaker
But one of the main reasons that she doesn't enter a Carmelite convent is, one, her own concerns about her mother, but also her spiritual director.
00:43:35
Speaker
Her spiritual director, Don Valtzer, at the Benedictine Abbey, the abbot at the Benedictine Abbey that I mentioned, he was convinced that Stein had gifts that the church needed to have out in the world and that there is a time that she needed to spend out in the world as a laywoman.
00:43:52
Speaker
and that she had so many gifts to give that she had to do those first.
00:43:55
Speaker
But what would end up changing all of this is that in 1933 in Germany, something rather drastic would happen, namely the Nationalist Socialist Party, whom we now call the Nazis.
00:44:05
Speaker
They won a majority rule in the German parliament.
00:44:08
Speaker
And after they won a majority rule in parliament, a man named Adolf Hitler was made chancellor.
00:44:12
Speaker
So in 1933, immediately a party extremely hostile to Judaism took power.
00:44:18
Speaker
stein of course was a jew uh an ethnic jew that is she was born to jews not a religious jew but the nazis defined judaism as a racial category not a religious one so it the question was was a question of blood right not religious observance and one of the first things that the nazis do is they pass a number of laws limiting trying to limit jewish public influence
00:44:41
Speaker
And so the first laws that the Nazis pass are restricting Jews from positions of what were deemed to be public influence, which would include things like lawyers, doctors, teachers.
00:44:53
Speaker
And Stein, of course, was a teacher.
00:44:55
Speaker
So given the Aryan laws that were passed by the Nazis in 1933, Stein basically had no professional opportunities available for her anymore.
00:45:04
Speaker
And so it was at this time that through intensive prayer, she concludes that the time had finally come for her to enter a Carmelite convent.
00:45:12
Speaker
And she also concluded at this time that maybe this would be the thing that would allow her mother to see that this is worthwhile because the convent would allow her a little bit of protection.
00:45:22
Speaker
It would allow her a little bit of her move from the public eye, that she could just be kind of a Jew hidden away from the world, a Catholic Jew, you could say, hidden away from the world in a Carmelite convent.
00:45:32
Speaker
But she would be safe there.
00:45:34
Speaker
And so she ends up joining the Carmelites on October 13th of 1933.
00:45:39
Speaker
The day before she went into the convent, she went to the synagogue with her mother.
00:45:43
Speaker
Her mother still wasn't reconciled to the prospect.
00:45:46
Speaker
And she has in one of her journal entries, this very moving account of this
00:45:51
Speaker
visit to the synagogue on October 12th with her mother who's in tears and just doesn't want her to do this, doesn't want to lose her baby.
00:46:00
Speaker
Because at this time, Stein's mother also feels as though at the time when Jews are about to be in their most tenuous position yet, she's being abandoned by her baby girl.
00:46:11
Speaker
And so it's important to see that for Stein, entering the Carmelan convent wasn't easy.
00:46:15
Speaker
It broke her mother's heart and she knew it and she didn't take that lightly.
00:46:18
Speaker
And it's in fact, because she didn't take it lightly that she waited so long.
00:46:22
Speaker
Remember, she wanted to become a Carmelite back in 1922.
00:46:26
Speaker
But it wasn't until 11 years later that she finally, ironically, thanks to the Nazis, felt as if she had no other option.
00:46:34
Speaker
And so as often happens in history, God uses a great evil to bring about a great good.
00:46:41
Speaker
like the crucifixion of our Lord, right?
00:46:43
Speaker
Our Lord was murdered, yet it's an evil out of which the greatest good that has been done was wrought, right?
00:46:50
Speaker
And so Stein enters the Carmelites in the fall of 1933, and she has a brief, what's called a probationary discernment period.
00:46:58
Speaker
And then on April 15th of 1934, she has her clothing day when she's given the Carmelite habit.
00:47:05
Speaker
And the ceremony and the homily preached at this event was her spiritual director, Abbot Valtzer, who was the abbot of that Benedictine monastery.
00:47:13
Speaker
Now here I just want to insert a slightly personal note, because when I became Catholic, we talked about the fact that I was a convert, and I started getting interested in the liturgical calendar when I converted.
00:47:24
Speaker
It was no small source of annoyance to me that my birthday, April 15th, was a liturgical wasteland.
00:47:33
Speaker
There are no feast days on April 15th, at least not feast days that anyone's ever heard of.
00:47:37
Speaker
If you look in your copy of Butler's Lives, there are some, you know, there are some saints that no one's ever heard of who might have their feast days on there.
00:47:45
Speaker
But really, April 15th is a day of horrors.
00:47:47
Speaker
First of all, it's when your taxes are due.
00:47:49
Speaker
Right.
00:47:50
Speaker
But even more than that, it's the day that Lincoln died.
00:47:53
Speaker
Right.
00:47:53
Speaker
So he gets shot on the 14th in the theater, but he dies on the 15th.
00:47:56
Speaker
It's also the day the Titanic sank.
00:47:58
Speaker
It hits the ice cream on the 14th, sinks on the 15th.
00:48:01
Speaker
And also just a few years ago, April 15th was the day that Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire.
00:48:06
Speaker
Oh, I didn't realize that.
00:48:08
Speaker
Happy birthday.
00:48:09
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:48:10
Speaker
It's a day of utter horrors.
00:48:12
Speaker
And so it was actually a great source of joy for me and still is when I learned that Edith Stein received her habit on April 15th of 1934.
00:48:20
Speaker
It's the only liturgically redemptive sort of
00:48:29
Speaker
note that my birthday sounds.
00:48:30
Speaker
And so weirdly enough, even it seems that providentially God has woven Edith Stein and me together from my birth, even though I didn't know it until I was almost 30 years old.
00:48:41
Speaker
So Edith Stein receiving her habit, her clothing day, her wedding day on April 15th has been a great source of comfort
Stein's Final Years and Martyrdom
00:48:49
Speaker
to me.
00:48:49
Speaker
It redeemed my birthday and the significance of my birthday for me.
00:48:53
Speaker
So Stein enters the convent and her superior, the abbess, wants her to continue her intellectual studies.
00:49:02
Speaker
At this time, Stein was at work on a great sort of final synthesis of all the things she'd been reading in Thomas Aquinas and Husserl and Carmelite spirituality and in Augustine.
00:49:13
Speaker
trying to synthesize phenomenology with Catholic metaphysics and theology.
00:49:18
Speaker
And she works on this out of obedience to her superior.
00:49:22
Speaker
Interestingly enough, Edith Stein didn't want to write anymore.
00:49:24
Speaker
She just wanted to pray.
00:49:27
Speaker
She just wanted to be at prayer with her sisters.
00:49:30
Speaker
But out of obedience, she continues her studies.
00:49:33
Speaker
And finishes her great masterpiece.
00:49:35
Speaker
It's called Finite and Eternal Being in the summer of 1936.
00:49:40
Speaker
But she doesn't publish it.
00:49:41
Speaker
And she doesn't publish it because she can't, because she's Jewish.
00:49:43
Speaker
And there are restrictions on Jewish publications.
00:49:46
Speaker
And so Finite and Eternal Being would remain hidden away in a drawer in a Carmelite convent.
00:49:50
Speaker
But she finishes it in 1936.
00:49:53
Speaker
And also in that year, her mother died.
00:49:57
Speaker
And after her mother died, her little her, I'm sorry, her older sister Rosa entered the Catholic Church.
00:50:04
Speaker
Rosa had been wanting to become Catholic for a while, but didn't feel that she could because of her mother.
00:50:09
Speaker
She thought that, especially after Edith's baptism and conversion, that if she then entered the church as well, that would just be too much.
00:50:16
Speaker
It would kill her.
00:50:17
Speaker
And so Rosa waited until Mrs. Stein passed away.
00:50:22
Speaker
She became Catholic and then also entered the Carmelite Convent.
00:50:25
Speaker
So there were two Steins living at that Carmelite Convent in Cologne.
00:50:30
Speaker
And they lived there for about three years.
00:50:32
Speaker
But then in 1939, World War II starts.
00:50:35
Speaker
And with the start of World War II, Nazi Jewish persecution starts to turn into outright slaughter, right?
00:50:42
Speaker
So what we think of as the Holocaust, this is a great – I mean, we have to understand that this event, this is –
00:50:53
Speaker
it's tied to the significance of World War II, right?
00:50:57
Speaker
And so the greatness of the horror of it, the magnitude of the horror of it is directly tied to the outbreak of the war.
00:51:07
Speaker
Before the war broke out, a lot of Jews in Germany actually convinced themselves that they could sort of
00:51:14
Speaker
make their way through the Nazi regime.
00:51:16
Speaker
And this is why a lot of Jews don't flee, because they think that, well, even if I can't be a lawyer, and eventually they pass interracial marriage laws, right?
00:51:25
Speaker
And so the Jews were thought of as being a different race, quote unquote.
00:51:28
Speaker
And so even if they couldn't marry Germans, even if they couldn't hold public office, they could still basically get by and still be good German citizens.
00:51:36
Speaker
But when World War II breaks out, this is all shattered.
00:51:39
Speaker
And it's clearly obvious what the...
00:51:43
Speaker
The end goal is supposed to be.
00:51:44
Speaker
And so after Kristallnacht on the night where the Nazis initiate all this violence against Jews in Germany, Stein really sees the desperation of her situation.
00:51:56
Speaker
And she and her sister are smuggled under the cover of nightfall on New Year's Eve into a Carmelite convent in Holland.
00:52:03
Speaker
And so she lives in Holland with her sister Rosa for three years.
00:52:07
Speaker
And she's able to live life peaceably there.
00:52:09
Speaker
And it's during that time that she writes her great study on Carmelite spirituality called The Science of the Cross.
00:52:16
Speaker
Really, really beautiful text.
00:52:17
Speaker
And that title is worth lingering on, The Science of the Cross.
00:52:22
Speaker
The idea that spirituality, that your relationship to God...
00:52:29
Speaker
On the one hand, it's not science like psychology, which she abandoned, but that doesn't mean it's just vibes, right?
00:52:34
Speaker
There's a kind of order to it.
00:52:36
Speaker
There's an order and there's a harmony to the spiritual life and that it's precisely by conforming ourselves to that divine order that our intimacy with God is deepened.
00:52:49
Speaker
And so she writes this beautiful work called The Science of the Cross, which is a study of basically of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, the two great Carmelite mystics.
00:52:57
Speaker
at the founders, especially of the Diskaust Carmelites.
00:53:01
Speaker
She lives there for three years.
00:53:03
Speaker
And then in July of 1942, the Dutch bishops put out a public statement condemning the Nazis and anti-Semitism.
00:53:11
Speaker
And then the Germans decide to retaliate.
00:53:13
Speaker
And they decide that even Jewish Catholics
00:53:18
Speaker
now needed to be rounded up and sent away to the labor or extermination camps, as they're probably more accurately known as.
00:53:25
Speaker
So on August 2nd of 1942, the Nazis come knocking at the convent door.
00:53:29
Speaker
They ask for Edith and Rosa Stein, and they transport them to a labor camp in Westerbork, and they're taken from Westerbork to Auschwitz.
00:53:40
Speaker
And we have a few memories of Edith and Rosa during this time of them comforting the children along the train who are just in tears.
00:53:47
Speaker
And Edith's faith and her patience and her joy were so magnificent during this time that a Dutch labor camp worker, so a Nazi, right?
00:54:00
Speaker
A guy manning, a guy staffing the labor camp at Westerbork is so moved by Stein that
00:54:08
Speaker
that he offers to help her escape.
00:54:11
Speaker
And she says no.
00:54:13
Speaker
And the reason she says no is that she felt that God had called her to bear the fate of her people, by which she means the Jews.
00:54:22
Speaker
And so Stein, when she became Catholic, she didn't see it as an abandonment of her Judaism, really, really interestingly, that obviously her faith entirely was unbathetic.
00:54:33
Speaker
Catholic, right?
00:54:34
Speaker
She didn't, by saying that she sees in continuity of Judaism, not that she thought that they believe the same things, but that there is a mysterious kind of affinity between the two, that Catholicism, Christianity, is the outgrowth of the trunk of Judaism, the same Paul talks about it in Romans 9.
00:54:53
Speaker
And so Stein really understood her becoming Catholic as the fulfillment and not the abandonment of her Jewishness, and that God had sort of mysteriously called her to bear the fate of her birth, and that that was a cross that he had given her was the cross of suffering with her people.
00:55:09
Speaker
And so Edith declines.
00:55:11
Speaker
She's sent to Auschwitz, and then on August 9th, she and Rosa are sent to a gas chamber, and now that's when we celebrate her feast day, August 9th.
00:55:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:55:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:20
Speaker
What a story.
00:55:21
Speaker
What a woman.
00:55:24
Speaker
I heard once, and I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard someone preach once about her that she, was she allowed to stay in her Carmelite habit when she went off to the labor camps?
00:55:39
Speaker
Do you know?
00:55:39
Speaker
I don't know if you know that fact or not.
00:55:41
Speaker
That's a really good question.
00:55:42
Speaker
I'm actually not sure.
00:55:43
Speaker
I mean... Someone said once that for some strange reason, they allowed her to remain in her Carmelite clothes or her nun clothes.
00:55:53
Speaker
And that became a great source of people and comfort for the prisoners.
00:55:58
Speaker
But yeah, and then she... So when she was going to execution that for some reason...
00:56:04
Speaker
For some kind of baffling, mysterious reason, they didn't take her clothes.
00:56:08
Speaker
Whereas everyone else, you know, usually they give them their standard striped clothes, prisoner clothes or whatever.
00:56:13
Speaker
That's right.
00:56:13
Speaker
It may or may not be true.
00:56:14
Speaker
I don't know.
00:56:15
Speaker
But maybe it's one of those like legends about her that just like that speaks to the beautiful witness that she bore and her love and care for the people that she accompanied to their death.
00:56:26
Speaker
So I'm just that or not.
00:56:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'll have to look that up.
00:56:32
Speaker
I'll have to look that up.
00:56:34
Speaker
I don't have every single fact about Edith Stein memorized.
00:56:37
Speaker
And so that could very well be true, Father Kevin.
00:56:39
Speaker
I'll have to look that up.
00:56:39
Speaker
It may or may not be.
00:56:41
Speaker
I don't know.
00:56:42
Speaker
You have quite a few facts at your fingertips, though.
00:56:44
Speaker
So I thought you might have that one, too.
00:56:46
Speaker
Sorry, I didn't mean to put you on the spot there.
00:56:48
Speaker
No, no, no, no.
00:56:49
Speaker
Yeah, and you can please ask me anything.
00:56:51
Speaker
Did she take another name?
00:56:54
Speaker
Yes, thank you.
00:56:55
Speaker
I left that out.
00:56:55
Speaker
So it's common for, depending on the religious order, that when you take religious vows, that you take a new name, a new name that kind of embodies the life and the model that you want to model your own religious life after.
00:57:10
Speaker
And the name that Edith Stein took was Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
00:57:16
Speaker
So she really milks this one for all it's worth, right?
00:57:20
Speaker
So first you have Teresa, primarily for Teresa of Avila, whose autobiography convinced her of the truth of Catholicism.
00:57:28
Speaker
But you also have Therese of Lisieux, of course, the little flower, who's also Carmelite.
00:57:33
Speaker
Then you have Benedicta.
00:57:35
Speaker
And remember that she was really formed during her time at a Benedictine Abbey.
00:57:39
Speaker
That's really where she grew up in the liturgy.
00:57:41
Speaker
And so she had a great devotion and love for St.
00:57:45
Speaker
Benedict and the Benedictine charism.
00:57:47
Speaker
And then of the cross, evoking St.
00:57:50
Speaker
John of the cross.
00:57:51
Speaker
So she really tries to milk her name for all it's worth, right?
00:57:54
Speaker
She references up to four saints with a religious name, Teresa Benedict of the cross, Teresa of Avila, Therese Benedict, and then John of the cross.
00:58:03
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:58:04
Speaker
I also heard a priest talk about that, her name, of course, Benedicta, also the word, it also means blessed, right?
00:58:12
Speaker
Of course.
00:58:12
Speaker
That's what the word name Benedict means.
00:58:14
Speaker
And so he reflected on Teresa, blessed of the cross or blessed by the cross as a way of also playing on her name.
00:58:21
Speaker
And I don't know if that was his own reflections or another intentional thing about her name as well, but just reflecting on the reality, I mean, you talked about
00:58:30
Speaker
The science of the cross was a great work that something about the way that the cross of Jesus Christ was a blessing unto her and her life.
00:58:38
Speaker
Right.
00:58:39
Speaker
We'll catch a lot of those titles in the show notes.
00:58:42
Speaker
I'll do my best to pick.
00:58:44
Speaker
You dropped a lot of names.
00:58:45
Speaker
Two things that really stick out to me is very early on.
00:58:50
Speaker
Well, actually, three things.
00:58:51
Speaker
Technically, six.
00:58:52
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:58:53
Speaker
You talked about four things.
00:58:56
Speaker
You talked about formation when it comes to education, and I think any one of our listeners can take that and chew on it, is that, I mean, if you've got a bunch of kids in a classroom, here, learn these math facts or learn these Spanish words.
00:59:09
Speaker
But really the goal of education and specifically Catholic education is forming the human person.
00:59:18
Speaker
And I think that's a really valuable thing than just memorizing facts.
00:59:22
Speaker
Along, just to add to that, Father Jacob, some years ago, I remember we switched to you talking our Wednesday night classes rather than talking them about them as merely catechesis or religious education that we now tend to use the term faith formation, right, for our classes, you know, for our kids and stuff like that, that they are faith formation classes or a director of faith formation rather than director of religious ed or something.
00:59:49
Speaker
So kind of along those very lines.
00:59:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:52
Speaker
Anyway, just a fun factoid.
00:59:54
Speaker
I still have five things left.
00:59:56
Speaker
All right.
00:59:56
Speaker
I'm just kidding.
00:59:58
Speaker
The tavern, I was amazed at how she, this titan of intellectual production,
01:00:07
Speaker
she would spend hours doing nothing.
01:00:10
Speaker
I mean, literally in the world's eyes, sitting in front of a tabernacle in an empty church is useless in the world's eyes.
01:00:16
Speaker
Um, but, but it's, it's almost as if her, the culmination of her in this, in a opposite way, mother Teresa got all her, all her power and her motivation from prayer in the mornings.
01:00:28
Speaker
Um, it's, it sounds, I can imagine, uh,
01:00:31
Speaker
And Benedicta sitting in an empty church at the end of the day or in the afternoon.
01:00:35
Speaker
And it's almost as if all her work comes to fulfillment in just sitting in the silence,
Stein's Philosophical and Spiritual Insights
01:00:43
Speaker
not accomplishing anything, not writing anything, just experiencing the real, you know.
01:00:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right.
01:00:51
Speaker
That's exactly right.
01:00:52
Speaker
And this comes out in her writings on the Eucharist.
01:00:56
Speaker
I don't mean to jump the gun here, but just because it sort of rhymes at the point you're making.
01:01:00
Speaker
When she writes about the Eucharist, one of the things that she says over and over is that we need to make the Eucharistic truths become effective within us.
01:01:11
Speaker
And what she seems to mean by that, and what she says she means at least, is that you need to spend time just contemplating the truths of the Eucharist.
01:01:19
Speaker
That she thinks that in order to really appropriate the reality of the presence of our Lord and his sacrifice, you just have to think about it.
01:01:31
Speaker
That the Eucharist, that one way that the Eucharist becomes more meaningful to you, that your life becomes more ordered to it, that you become more, that your life becomes more transparent to it, is just by thinking about it.
01:01:47
Speaker
She really believed, and this comes from her dissertation on empathy before she converted, that the interesting thing about human persons is that we have depths.
01:01:55
Speaker
We have these reserves to ourselves that are more than just our exteriors, and that makes us different from other kinds of things.
01:02:02
Speaker
And that the things that most inform us, think about that word inform, it's actually related to that word formation.
01:02:09
Speaker
Really to inform someone is to have it...
01:02:13
Speaker
imprinted on you right so that it forms you to inform someone is to touch them in a way that's formative and so to really be informed by the eucharist to have it imprinted on the core of your being you just have to pay attention to it like a coin i'm sorry
01:02:32
Speaker
Like a coin being pressed, like you put the image on the coin or something?
01:02:35
Speaker
That's exactly right.
01:02:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great image, Father Jacob.
01:02:38
Speaker
That's exactly right.
01:02:39
Speaker
And so she says this in her writings on the Eucharist, that you just have to think about it.
01:02:43
Speaker
You have to think about its truths and let the magnificence of them impress themselves into the core of your being.
01:02:49
Speaker
So that it's more than just a factoid that you can rattle off.
01:02:52
Speaker
Like, yeah, if you're listening to this podcast, I suspect that you know your Eucharistic doctrine.
01:02:58
Speaker
You probably don't just pull up Eucharistic revival podcasts unless you're the kind of person who knows those things.
01:03:03
Speaker
I would generally wager.
01:03:05
Speaker
But for Stein, it has to be more than that.
01:03:07
Speaker
It has to be more than a factoid because a factoid is external.
01:03:10
Speaker
A factoid is something that...
01:03:13
Speaker
that you know at a certain level, but not one that's necessarily impressed you at the root of your being.
01:03:19
Speaker
And so this is related then to a time at the tabernacle that you just have to, in order to be informed by something, to have its image impressed on you, you just have to attend to it.
01:03:30
Speaker
So, I mean, there's a lot of things we could say about that, but it's remarkable how much this is just in continuity with her early philosophical studies on phenomenology that Husserl said, we have to just pay attention to the real.
01:03:41
Speaker
And that's something that Stein kept with her.
01:03:43
Speaker
It's remarkable that in one sense, Stein's life is a story of deep discontinuity.
01:03:48
Speaker
It would appear right from Judaism to a kind of agnostic, philosophical, academic life to Catholicism.
01:03:54
Speaker
But there's there's a I think a deeper and a more profound continuity underlying it all.
01:03:59
Speaker
Mm hmm.
01:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, so the Eucharist informs or forms us, right?
01:04:06
Speaker
That's right.
01:04:08
Speaker
And it comes from spending, the simple act, like we said, of spending time in the presence, whether in formal exposition of the Blessed Sacrament to a door, or just being in the physical presence of
01:04:22
Speaker
while it's in while he's in the tabernacle right that's right something about being in the physical presence and and pondering that you know and and and bringing and uh bringing all we are to that too you know uh that that becomes formative you know we sometimes talk about that
01:04:41
Speaker
You know, the Eucharist becomes the body of Christ, but then it's, in a way, that's what makes, forms us, forges us into the body of Christ, too.
01:04:51
Speaker
It's impressing the very, I mean, presence and image of Christ into us, right?
01:04:58
Speaker
That makes us members of that body of Christ.
01:05:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:04
Speaker
And so, yeah, there's a lot that could be said there.
01:05:06
Speaker
Father Jacob.
01:05:07
Speaker
Yeah, I noticed...
01:05:09
Speaker
The third thing I noticed is we have spent over an hour and it's been delightful, but it's unfortunately tragically abbreviated.
01:05:19
Speaker
I mean, we're talking about one person, Edith Schein and Jesus and other people.
01:05:25
Speaker
But if she has all this to offer, I mean, wouldn't that logically lead that every other single person listening to this, whether or not you have...
01:05:34
Speaker
in your estimation, fantastic writings and dissertations and stuff like just you being a mother in your house, like you have unsearchable depths to you as well.
01:05:45
Speaker
All three of us do, everyone listening to this.
01:05:48
Speaker
And I mean, and attending to, yes, attending to Jesus in the Eucharist and the truths about it, but could it be said then I could attend to someone who,
01:05:57
Speaker
maybe you and your wife attending to one another or me and someone who I don't like, you know, letting them impress upon me and learning more about them.
01:06:04
Speaker
Does that all track with the phenomenology flavor?
01:06:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think it absolutely does.
01:06:15
Speaker
It absolutely does.
01:06:17
Speaker
Yeah, the great wisdom of phenomenology is this, is that the world is more interesting than you normally think that it is.
01:06:26
Speaker
But if you pay attention, its depths will become manifest to you.
01:06:31
Speaker
But not only its depths, but your depths too.
01:06:33
Speaker
Because it's precisely when you attend to things that you precisely see how deeply they can work their way inside of you.
01:06:39
Speaker
That you can do more than just rattle off factoids, but you can actually be informed.
01:06:44
Speaker
You can sort of nestle things inside of the home of your soul.
01:06:49
Speaker
And so Stein loves, you know, Teresa of Avila's famous image of the interior castle.
01:06:54
Speaker
that you can take things into the most interior of castles.
01:06:58
Speaker
And this is partially what she means by making the Eucharistic truths effective.
01:07:01
Speaker
She wants you to take the Eucharist and the truth that the Catholic faith teaches about it into that most interior castle.
01:07:11
Speaker
But to do that, you have to pay attention to it.
01:07:13
Speaker
In other words, you have to think about it.
01:07:17
Speaker
Just think.
01:07:19
Speaker
Because we are, right?
01:07:20
Speaker
Descartes says we are if we think so.
01:07:23
Speaker
All right, you're going to break Descartes into this.
01:07:24
Speaker
Yeah, you're welcome.
01:07:26
Speaker
Well, I know you have several more things on your list, Father Jacob, but I was just going to say, I mean, and that's part of what we're hoping by doing this podcast is helping people in reflecting on various facets of this Eucharistic mystery and then taking that to that time of
01:07:46
Speaker
Not just thinking about it like as I'm washing dishes, but to really like take that time of contemplative, like contemplating on these mysteries, allowing them by highlighting the different facets, allowing us to attend to it more and draw it into the depths of our being.
01:07:59
Speaker
The truth of who Jesus is in the Eucharist, what this gift of the Eucharist is, this profound mystery.
01:08:04
Speaker
And how this mystery can literally transform ourselves in our life and how we live.
01:08:10
Speaker
So, Father Jacob, you have two more things on your list.
01:08:13
Speaker
No, I have three more things, but it's actually a three for one.
01:08:15
Speaker
You'll like this.
01:08:16
Speaker
Okay.
01:08:17
Speaker
Because as we're talking about at the very beginning, truth, goodness, and beauty, the transcendental properties.
01:08:24
Speaker
I mean, she was pursuing truth with her life.
01:08:26
Speaker
She was, I mean, good to the people around her and even the people in the extermination camps.
01:08:33
Speaker
And and then, I don't know, beautiful faith.
01:08:38
Speaker
Where's beauty fitted?
01:08:39
Speaker
But it's so cool that the things she studied and the things she professed, even writing the paper, the dissertation on empathy.
01:08:46
Speaker
And it's almost like it seems to be orchestrated that like she was going to, you know, actually live these things out in her final moments.
01:08:54
Speaker
And not only is that like poetically pleasing, it's just astounding at how the Lord works in all of our lives.
01:09:02
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's very perceptive, Father Jacob.
01:09:07
Speaker
So one classical way, you seem to be struggling with the beauty aspect, but I think you nailed it, actually.
01:09:13
Speaker
One classical way of defining beauty is to say that it's the perfect uniting, or the perfect harmony, you could say, of form and content.
01:09:21
Speaker
In other words, that the content of a thing perfectly matches the shape in which it's expressed.
01:09:26
Speaker
Right.
01:09:27
Speaker
right so a beautiful novel would be one in which the beauty of the actual story is told in such a way that matches the the events themselves right and that's what you're it's it's sort of a mat a matching of interior and exterior that's one way of thinking about what beauty is and that's what you're saying you decided that's absolutely true and that's this is something that i think a lot of people have have noticed with stein is that for her and for me as well
01:09:53
Speaker
I don't want my intellectual pursuits to be purely intellectual, right?
01:09:59
Speaker
I mean, it's sort of scary business being a theologian because I'm exposed to deeper and more beautiful things every single day than a lot of people get exposed to over their lives.
01:10:13
Speaker
And that's not a thing I can take pride in.
01:10:15
Speaker
It's my job.
01:10:16
Speaker
But the danger of that is you can get numb to it.
01:10:21
Speaker
You can get numb to the beauty of these things by reading about them and teaching them and studying them and writing about them.
01:10:29
Speaker
And so Stein for me is a perfect example of someone for whom it was never merely academic.
01:10:34
Speaker
It was never merely intellectual.
01:10:36
Speaker
There was this perfect harmony, this perfect synchronization, you could say, of form and content of the things she was committed to intellectually and the shape of her life as such.
01:10:47
Speaker
So yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
01:10:51
Speaker
So what else is we're kind of starting to come to the end of our podcast here?
01:10:55
Speaker
What else could we say?
01:10:57
Speaker
I mean, we kind of touched on it already, but just like to kind of bring together in a coherent way, like what can we learn from St.
01:11:04
Speaker
Edith Shine other than, you know, incredible person with incredible life,
01:11:08
Speaker
who teaches many, many beautiful things about who we are as humans and reveals steps of the Catholic faith, but particularly what might we take away from her is like what we can learn about the Eucharist, particularly in this time of Eucharistic revival.
01:11:22
Speaker
I know we kind of touched on them already, but kind of bring it together for us.
01:11:26
Speaker
Sure.
01:11:27
Speaker
So Stein, and this is probably who,
01:11:35
Speaker
I got it from.
01:11:37
Speaker
Stein was also very interested in this idea of the Eucharist as a sacrifice.
01:11:42
Speaker
And Stein is convinced that the sacrifice of the Eucharist is really the icon, the model, the sort of radiant image of what all human acts of knowing and love must be like.
01:12:04
Speaker
So again, remember when I said that most of her writing on the Eucharist comes from the time when she's talking about women's education.
01:12:11
Speaker
So it's during this time that she gives talks.
01:12:13
Speaker
One is called Eucharistic Education, which means Eucharistic Education.
01:12:18
Speaker
It hasn't been translated in English.
01:12:20
Speaker
But in this talk, she talks about what it means to give a Eucharistic education.
01:12:25
Speaker
It's really interesting.
01:12:26
Speaker
And she writes this treatise on philosophical anthropology.
01:12:29
Speaker
So like a philosophical sort of outline of what it means to be human, what it means to have bodies and souls and intellects and feelings and how our souls make us different from plants and animals and things like that.
01:12:41
Speaker
And in this work on philosophy, she concludes with a chapter that's called the Eucharist as Pedagogical Act.
01:12:51
Speaker
And she says in this concluding chapter that the Eucharist is the most pedagogical of all acts.
01:12:58
Speaker
So you have this repeated theme with her of the Eucharist in education, the Eucharist in pedagogy.
01:13:04
Speaker
And I think the link is something like this.
01:13:08
Speaker
Stein is convinced, and this is largely, I think, due to her training in phenomenology, that the way you get to know things is ultimately by a kind of self-sacrifice, by a kind of self-gift.
01:13:22
Speaker
You have to open yourself up to something.
01:13:24
Speaker
You have to put yourself in a posture of receptivity to something, whether it's a mathematical theorem, whether it's a novel, whether it's a historical event or another human person.
01:13:36
Speaker
To the extent that your defenses are raised, to the extent that you keep the thing you're trying to get to know at a distance, you can't actually get to know it.
01:13:43
Speaker
You might be able to learn some facts about it, but you can't be informed.
01:13:48
Speaker
It will not weasel its way into your interior castles.
01:13:52
Speaker
And so if you actually want to know anything, you have to be willing to kind of sacrifice yourself to it.
01:13:59
Speaker
Now, here I want to make an important qualification.
01:14:02
Speaker
There are a lot of bad ideas out there.
01:14:03
Speaker
So does Stein think that even bad philosophy needs to work its way into the interior castle?
01:14:09
Speaker
No.
01:14:10
Speaker
But Stein would then say this, you don't actually even know if what you're dealing with is bad unless you at least make an initial act of sacrifice.
01:14:18
Speaker
In other words, if you open up a book that you've never read, you might have decent reasons for thinking it's going to be bad, right?
01:14:25
Speaker
Like this is an author I don't trust or I have a teacher or a friend who I trust and says this is not a good book.
01:14:31
Speaker
But at the end of the day, you won't know unless you try.
01:14:34
Speaker
And that means taking a kind of little sacrifice, a little opening up and offering of yourself to the thing in question.
01:14:41
Speaker
And then as you read, as you encounter, you might find that it's bad, okay?
01:14:45
Speaker
And so the proper position that you should adopt toward falsehood, toward ugliness, toward evil is, of course, one of rejection, obviously.
01:14:55
Speaker
But the point is this, you won't know what you're dealing with until you make that initial sacrifice, okay?
01:15:01
Speaker
And how often do we do this with human beings, right?
01:15:03
Speaker
You don't actually know who you're dealing with until you actually open yourself up to them.
01:15:08
Speaker
I mean, this is like the first thing children learn, that children say, well, I don't like this guy.
01:15:13
Speaker
And then this other kid says, well, I've gotten to know him a bit.
01:15:16
Speaker
And then we repeat this lesson for the rest of our lives, that somehow in the act of getting to know a human person, that their faults and their vices are real, but they become more than their faults and their vices.
01:15:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:27
Speaker
But you'll never know that unless you actually make that initial little act of sacrifice to them, right?
01:15:33
Speaker
To let them into your life, to actually receive them in the fullness of your being, to not try to decide in advance that you already have the thing in question entirely figured out.
01:15:45
Speaker
And so the point is, is that all knowledge requires self-gift, self-offering.
01:15:50
Speaker
And if that's true, then it means that in order to be educated persons, in order to be formed persons, you basically have to be living Eucharists.
01:16:01
Speaker
You have to be modeled after the Savior who gives himself to the Father, and in giving himself to the Father, gives himself to us.
01:16:10
Speaker
And in point of fact, in giving himself to us, he gives himself to be abused.
01:16:14
Speaker
And we do abuse him.
01:16:15
Speaker
We come to the sacrament unworthy without examining ourselves.
01:16:19
Speaker
We might drop him on the floor, right?
01:16:22
Speaker
We might have no sense of gratitude or awareness about what we're doing.
01:16:26
Speaker
And so he gives himself over to our abuse, but he gives himself to us nonetheless.
01:16:31
Speaker
And so if we want to actually be educated, informed, if we want to be the kinds of people who have actually let in the truth into our interior castles, you have to be a Eucharist, a little Eucharistic image.
01:16:44
Speaker
And so I think that that's a really...
01:16:48
Speaker
I think there's a lot of things that you could say that Stein teaches us about the Eucharist, but I think that's one of the big ones because it's the point that she comes back to again and again.
01:16:56
Speaker
The Eucharistic, the educational, the pedagogical dimension of the Eucharist, that you can never really truly be educated, formed, the person who you were created to be, unless you make of yourself a self-gift like Jesus did to the Father.
01:17:12
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:17:15
Speaker
Amen.
01:17:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:19
Speaker
That sounds great.
01:17:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:27
Speaker
So just about that whole self gift, like the being drawn in.
01:17:30
Speaker
And I like that image with the person, like you have to let the person in a little bit, right.
01:17:34
Speaker
To, to know them that little sacrifice.
01:17:37
Speaker
But also that's a two way street, right.
01:17:39
Speaker
In the human relationship.
01:17:40
Speaker
Right.
01:17:41
Speaker
And that's right.
01:17:43
Speaker
building off what you're saying, that reality of us letting Christ in, and even though we often do abuse him, and he's opening himself up to abuse as we fail to draw him in, he also is drawing us into his interior castle, right?
01:18:01
Speaker
That, I mean, that's a two-way exchange, right?
01:18:06
Speaker
It's exactly right.
01:18:07
Speaker
I don't know if mutual is a self-gift, because that implies that we're equal, but
01:18:13
Speaker
But it's a two-way street in the self-giving, usually which we're failing at.
01:18:17
Speaker
But I think there's something to be said about us drawing Christ, allowing him in the Eucharist to that sacrifice of us drawing him into our interior castle, but also allowing him to draw us into his heart, into his interior castle, the depths of his being.
01:18:38
Speaker
That's exactly right.
01:18:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right, Father Kevin.
01:18:42
Speaker
That in order to, yeah, that you have to offer yourself in order to be similarly incorporated into someone else.
01:18:52
Speaker
That's exactly right.
01:18:54
Speaker
And I think mutual is exactly the right word because the whole point, it seems to me,
01:19:00
Speaker
is that the relationship that Jesus has with the Father by nature as the eternal Son of God, which is a relationship of mutual gift and love and glorification,
01:19:12
Speaker
I don't think we need to shy away from this language.
01:19:14
Speaker
One thing that actually drew me to Catholicism was the audacity of it.
01:19:17
Speaker
It actually seemed adequate to the audacity of scripture itself.
01:19:21
Speaker
Is that what Jesus has with the father by nature eternally, which is a relationship of mutual love, gift and glorification is made ours by grace, by gift that we are incorporated into the life that the father has with the son and the spirit.
01:19:36
Speaker
Love, gift, glory given and received is precisely the relationship that we're given, that we're incorporated into that rhythm, into that dynamism, into that back and forth, that gift exchange.
01:19:48
Speaker
And certainly, as it turns out, the Bible does actually talk about God's glorification of us, which is just astounding if you think about it.
Exploration of Catholic and Protestant Perspectives
01:19:56
Speaker
But it's true.
01:19:57
Speaker
It really is mutual.
01:19:59
Speaker
Now, you could say there's a kind of asymmetry in who does more, right?
01:20:04
Speaker
But there's a radical, radical asymmetry, an infinite asymmetry.
01:20:10
Speaker
But it is, in fact, mutual.
01:20:12
Speaker
That again, the audacity of Catholicism to go back to my testimony was actually a big influence for me because it seemed to me that actually there's a sort of embarrassment there.
01:20:26
Speaker
in a lot of sort of Protestant soteriology with these audacious claims of scripture, that a lot of Protestant objections to the idea of like the intercession of the saints, that it's this idea that God wouldn't give you that much.
01:20:40
Speaker
No, no, no.
01:20:40
Speaker
You're taking away from God.
01:20:42
Speaker
He wouldn't actually incorporate you into the disposition of his own providence.
01:20:46
Speaker
He wouldn't actually give you so much of himself that
01:20:51
Speaker
that he allows you some sort of distribution of his graces and goodwill.
01:20:56
Speaker
He doesn't do that much, does he?
01:20:58
Speaker
And so there's that, and it sounds pious on the one hand, like who am I to say that we become the kinds of people that can actually intercede and work miracles for others?
01:21:07
Speaker
Um,
01:21:09
Speaker
But what it comes down to is it's actually a sort of embarrassment about the very audacity that God gives himself to us totally, fully, prodigally.
01:21:18
Speaker
And that was one of the things that actually drew me to Catholicism, that the things that in a lot of Protestant circles are likely to be dismissed as a kind of blasphemy.
01:21:28
Speaker
It's like, oh, you're usurping on God's sole prerogative, right?
01:21:34
Speaker
But what if it's something he gives you to share in?
01:21:37
Speaker
What if God actually is a self-giver?
01:21:39
Speaker
What if that's what the Trinity means, that God gives who he is to another, namely the Father to the Son, and then invites you into that self-gift?
01:21:48
Speaker
And I think Stein helped me see all that, the audacity of it all.
01:21:52
Speaker
And all it can do is just humble you.
01:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:21:56
Speaker
And one more thing, I think, building off of everything you're saying and what Stein said, when I talk to people, like, about intimacy, right, and I mean this in the broadest sense of, like, closeness, like, and friendship, right, that part of that requires, and this goes on the idea of the sacrifice, a free sharing of a vulnerability, you know,
01:22:17
Speaker
I have to make myself vulnerable or share some vulnerability within me on some level, right?
01:22:21
Speaker
In letting the person in, I'm becoming vulnerable with them on some level, right?
01:22:26
Speaker
And so how do we have intimacy with God?
01:22:29
Speaker
Well, I define intimacy as a free sharing of vulnerability received well by the other.
01:22:35
Speaker
Well, how can we have intimacy with God who has no vulnerabilities?
01:22:38
Speaker
He's almighty, all power of all knowing, right?
01:22:40
Speaker
except that in the person of Jesus Christ, he makes himself vulnerable to us on the cross.
01:22:45
Speaker
And then particularly, like what you were saying in the Eucharist, that he'll, he becomes, allows himself to become most vulnerable to us so that he does invite us to all the way into the depths of intimacy with him, which is mind blowing in a beautiful way.
01:23:03
Speaker
Beautiful.
01:23:03
Speaker
It's good, true and beautiful.
01:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right.
01:23:06
Speaker
That's exactly right, father.
01:23:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:08
Speaker
You could say that, that,
01:23:10
Speaker
that in Jesus and in the cross, God sort of carves a hole in his own being for you to, for you to, you know, sneak your way into, you know, God's infinite, all powerful.
01:23:20
Speaker
There are no holes in his being, right?
01:23:22
Speaker
But what happens on the cross is the side is pierced in the blood and the water rush out.
01:23:28
Speaker
There is a hole and you can, you can, you're, you're invited to, to, to sneak your way in, you know, to be incorporated in there, to be taken very into that very life.
01:23:38
Speaker
That's absolutely right.
01:23:39
Speaker
Father.
01:23:40
Speaker
man.
Episode Conclusion and Reflections
01:23:41
Speaker
Well, there's so much I think we could keep talking about and unpacking, but I think this is going on record is probably our
01:23:48
Speaker
longest podcast we've recorded.
01:23:50
Speaker
Classic.
01:23:51
Speaker
You bring the act on and he doesn't stop talking.
01:23:55
Speaker
No, no.
01:23:56
Speaker
It was so beautiful.
01:23:57
Speaker
And I think St.
01:23:58
Speaker
Edith Stein is such an incredible saint.
01:24:00
Speaker
So it was good to talk about her, but also just these, these, she helps us to reflect in sort of a, again, on another facet of this Eucharistic mystery.
01:24:09
Speaker
So thank you.
01:24:10
Speaker
Thank you for being with us and helping us to do that.
01:24:13
Speaker
If you've been with us this long, you've opened yourself up and been vulnerable and have been imprinted by this podcast, hopefully.
01:24:22
Speaker
Just like a theologian or a philosopher who might become numb to the beautiful mysteries he encounters, just like a priest saying mass every day, or just like a gardener in a greenhouse every day.
01:24:33
Speaker
I mean, the mystery is always before us.
01:24:36
Speaker
And so whether you really comprehend it, none of us really comprehend it, but you just got to walk in.
01:24:42
Speaker
and think about it.
01:24:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:45
Speaker
So thank you so much for joining us.
01:24:47
Speaker
This has been an absolute delight and a pleasure.
01:24:50
Speaker
And I hope our listeners will agree too.
01:24:54
Speaker
You can keep track of Dr. Travis Lacey by traveling to New England to take classes with him, where maybe he'll be in another episode where he'll unveil his translation of Eucharistic Istihum, maybe.
01:25:08
Speaker
Well, thank you.
01:25:09
Speaker
Thank you, Father Jacob and Father Kevin.
01:25:12
Speaker
It was a pleasure and a delight to be with both of you.
01:25:14
Speaker
So I feel honored that you invited me part of the hottest Eucharistic revival podcast in the Midwest.
01:25:20
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:25:21
Speaker
All right.
01:25:25
Speaker
Well, you and the Eucharist, everyone.
01:25:27
Speaker
Thank you.