An anti-totalitarian saint: The canonization of Edith Stein

This essay explores the intellectual origins of Edith Stein’s canonization. In the years of the early Cold War, when Christians on both sides of the Atlantic proclaimed “Judeo-Christian civilization” to be the greatest bulwark against totalitarianism in both its Nazi and Soviet guises, Stein became a powerful anti-totalitarian symbol. During the 1980s, a new Pope, John Paul II, revived the memory of Stein and linked it to his own rich understanding of Judeo-Christian civilization as a set of values opposed to both Nazism and Communism. Thus, Edith Stein became an icon of anti-totalitarianism in an age of Holocaust memory.