This is an ambitious project: a synthesis of the prolific and wide ranging thought of John Paul 11, but the author carries it off well. After a brief biography of the Pope and a listing and summarising of his writing (encyclicals, personal writing etc.), Dulles analyses his output via his major themes which range from the Trinity to evangelisation, the nature of suffering and the economic and social order. What comes across to the reader is a sense of the grandeur of this holy man: his thought encourages; it quite strictly gives one the courage to do what one is called to; it is catholic in that it embraces so much of humanity - hardly an area of human experience is left untouched.

It is progressive in the true sense: it takes the best from the past and uses it to inform and develop the current age, conscious of contemporary problems and uncompromising in the application of the gospel to them, ‘the gospel which liberates’.

The picture of where this man comes from, both socially and intellectually, goes somewhere to explaining his ‘grandeur’. By the time he was 20 he had experienced the loss of his entire family. He lived through the horrors of Nazism, the devastation of World War 11 and the harsh domination of the Soviet Union. As a student he was attracted to theatre and literature, then philosophy. He was fed on the best of Catholic tradition and was attracted to St. John of the Cross and St. Thomas Aquinas from an early age. He twice seriously considered a Carmelite vocation.He was deeply involved with families as a priest and contributed to Vatican 11 in a range of areas..

Edith Stein. Selected Writings. With Comments, Reminiscences and Translations of her Prayers and Poems by her niece, Susanne M. Batzdorff. Templegate Publishers, Springfield, 1990.

This is a small volume (126 pages), yet full of insight into the world of Dr. Edith Stein - St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, OCD (1891-1942) - German philosopher, teacher, feminist, contemplative nun, victim of Nazi hatred.

It comprises writings by Stein, including an account of how she came to Carmel, a preface by Sr. Maria Amata Neyer, OCD, Curator of the Edith Stein Archive in Cologne, and two essays and a poem by Stein’s niece, Susanne Batzdorff, who is also the translator. This book furnishes not only the original German text of the poems and prayers but also facsimile reproductions of Stein’s elegant, controlled handwriting. It is illustrated with photographs of Stein as scholar and later as Carmelite nun, and portraits of her relatives.

Edith Stein was a philosopher, a collaborator with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who, after her conversion to Catholicism in 1922, worked on reconciling the philosophy of Aquinas with modern thought and lectured in philosophy, education and women’s issues. The poems and prayers in this volume reveal, as well as a sophisticated intellect, a deep confidence in God’s providential care and final victory, all the more remarkable for having been composed in the midst of the darkness and anxiety of the 1930s, the decade of the Nazification of Germany. In ‘Vineyards of Carmel’, for example, Stein likens the nuns in formation at Carmel (of which she was one) to ‘Young vines, newly planted,’ and implores God to ‘Shield them from the enemy/Who in darkness cowers’. Particularly poignant among the poems is the radiant ‘Seven Beams from a Pentecost Novena’, which was composed for the feast of Pentecost, 1942, only weeks before Edith and her older sister Rosa (also a convert to Catholicism) were arrested by the Nazi authorities and sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz where they were gassed.

Prior to entering Carmel in 1933, Stein had a premonition that the fate of the Jewish people would also be hers. She was willing to share the cross that was laid on them. How this would manifest itself she did not know but she was sure that Christ would reveal it in his own time. The account of this premonition is contained in the essay ‘How I Came to the Cologne Carmel’, written by Edith towards the end of 1938.

As Sr. Neyer says in the Preface, this work is the centrepiece of the volume, a ‘uniquely moving’ description of the path by which Edith became a nun. We are told that she had aspired to Carmel even before her baptism, after reading a life of St. Teresa of Avila. Her plans were deferred to spare her aged mother and other members of her family, already distressed by her decision to become a Christian. When her academic career was ruined by the anti-Semitic legislation of the new National Socialist government she decided that the time was now ripe to enter Carmel.

Neither her conversion nor her entry into the cloister however saved her from Nazism. When official anti-Semitism entered a particularly violent phase in 1938 Edith was moved from Cologne to the Carmel of Echt in the Netherlands. It was from here, after the German invasion of that country, that Edith and Rosa were taken away to be executed. They were seized as part of a general round-up of Dutch Catholics of Jewish background, carried out in reprisal for a pastoral letter delivered by Dutch bishops publicly protesting the anti-Semitism of the occupying German regime.

Edith Stein. Selected Writings contains two essays by Susanne Batzdorff which deal with the impact of Stein’s conversion on her family and the question of whether she died as a martyr for Judaism or Christianity. Batzdorff describes Edith as her ‘cherished aunt’ and yet her feelings are ambivalent. She is a ‘friend with a delightful sense of humour’ who ‘brought a holiday atmosphere with her’ on her annual visits, but also ‘Tante Edith’, aloof, keeping her family at arm’s length: ‘We remained outside....Oh, Tante Edith/We hardly knew you.’