A Saintly Great-Great-Aunt -- UW Engineer Going To Vatican Ceremony

For most of his life, Ron Stein has, for a living, performed the very secular task of weighing atoms, seeking answers to the nature of existence in the mass spectrometer he used to measure an atom's mass.

Numbers and equations require no faith, only strict observation and careful calculation. That won't help him regarding his great-great-aunt Edith.

Next month, the former Edith Stein will be made a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.

Ron Stein, whose ancestry is Jewish, and who is an agnostic and a scientist, will witness the canonization service and press all his instincts to understand this other world of saints, martyrs and miracles.

"I'm not very religious," said Stein, 54, an electrical engineer at the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington. "I look at people as being equals. I don't have a belief that there really are saints that commune with God. Those things seem far-fetched to me."

Edith Stein, sister of Ron Stein's great-grandfather, has been approved for sainthood 56 years after her death. Ron Stein will leave Seattle on Wednesday on a five-week trip that will end in the Vatican on Oct. 11 with his great-great-aunt's canonization.

"Some of the draw is the family reunion," said Ron Stein, who will travel in France and northern Italy before the ceremony.

More than 80 of her family members will make the trip to Rome, where they will privately dine with the pope and several cardinals -

a fringe benefit of having a saint in the family. As St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein will find an unusual place in eternity for a woman who came into the world as a Jew.

Born in 1891 in what is now Wroclaw, Poland, Edith Stein grew up believing neither Judaism nor Christianity. Searching for her own answers, she attended two German universities and earned a doctorate degree in philosophy, a rare accomplishment for a woman at the time.

She was baptized a Catholic in 1922, inspired partly by the biography of St. Teresa of Avila, who lived in the 16th century. She taught convent school in Germany for several years while writing about philosophy and religion. When the Nazis banned Jews from academic posts in 1934, she entered a Carmelite convent in Cologne and continued to write books. Many have been reprinted in Germany.

In 1938, when the climate in Germany worsened for Jews, she was sent to the Netherlands. In 1942, Catholic bishops in the Netherlands spoke out against the mistreatment of Jews by the Nazis, who, in retaliation, rounded up Catholics of Jewish extraction. Stein, known then as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed within a week.

Much has been made recently of the Catholic Church's silence during the Holocaust, but Ron Stein holds no grudges.

"The church was relatively powerless anyway," he said. "They might have made more of a stink and lost what influence they did have."

His great-great-aunt's canonization, Stein said, serves as a memorial to the Jews who died, "a way to build, instead of with stones, with images and words, a memorial."

It can take decades, even centuries, for an individual to be pronounced a saint.

Last year the Catholic church recognized a 1987 event as a miracle, clearing the way for Edith Stein's sainthood.

That year, a 2-year-old girl from Massachusetts named Benedicta McCarthy had a rare allergic reaction to a packet of painkillers she had swallowed. She was near death, and doctors had little hope she would survive. Family members prayed to her namesake, Sister Teresa Benedicta, and within days the girl recovered. Doctors had no explanation.

Since attending his great-great-aunt's 1987 beatification in Cologne, Ron Stein has taken a scholarly interest in her.

Stein, whose father is Jewish and whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, was raised Protestant along with his sister. At age 14, on his way to a bar mitzvah with his family, he had to ask his father what a bar mitzvah was.

He took a path of science, earning a doctorate in physics. This is his first trip to Rome.

Hugo Kugiya's phone message number is 206-464-2281. His e-mail address is: hkugiya@seattletimes.com