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Two biographies of St. Edith Stein, by Sarah Borden and Carmelite Sister Teresia Renata Posselt, focus on one of the dominant spiritual and intellectual figures of 20th-century Catholicism. St. Edith Stein, who as a religious was Carmelite Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was declared a saint by Pope John Paul II in 1998. So significant are St. Edith's writings that many of us believe she should be named a doctor of the church.

And Peter Dembowski's book, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto: An Epitaph for the Unremembered, provides a sense of the larger historical context of the fate of Christian Jews such as Stein throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.

Borden's book, Edith Stein, is part of Continuum's Outstanding Christian Thinkers series. It focuses on her philosophical and theological writings, works that profoundly influenced another great Catholic thinker of the 20th century, Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul.

Written for a general audience, it sets her ideas in the context of her times. After a helpful overview of the saint's life and works, Borden takes up the saint's philosophy work on phenomenology of the person, her social and political writings, and her writings on women and education, Christian philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology and spirituality.

Edith Stein: The Life of a Philosopher and Carmelite, by Carmelite Sister Teresia Renata Posselt, prioress of the Cologne Carmel when St. Edith lived there, was the first biography of the saint and went through nine editions between 1948 and 1963. Here it is updated by editors Suzanne M. Batzdorff, Edith's niece, who remains an Orthodox Jew, Carmelite Sister Josephine Koeppel and Carmelite Father John Sullivan.

The first edition contained personal knowledge, but did not have scholarly apparatus. The three editors, in a wonderfully unobtrusive way, correct the prioress's errors of fact and update the volume using the scholarship of the half-century between its original publication and their own research. The focus of this work is on the life of St. Edith Stein. This volume is thus the definitive biography of the saint and likely will be for many years.

Dembowski, author of Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto: An Epitaph for the Unremembered, is himself a Catholic and a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. Much of his large and interconnected family of Catholics and Jews perished in the Shoah. He writes with the passion of a witness and active member of the Polish anti-Nazi underground.

A University of Notre Dame professor of Romance languages, Dembrowski also brings his academic skills to this carefully researched work. This makes his "microhistory" of the "far larger tragedy" of the Jewish people during the Shoah come vividly alive for the reader. As a scholar, he deals with the sources historians have, and the problems they present. As a witness and survivor he takes us down the streets of the ghetto and into the homes of its inhabitants. Readers will be surprised to learn here about the three Catholic parishes and the Protestant and Orthodox Christian congregations inside the ghetto.

Dembrowski shows how Jewish Christians were viewed in the eyes of both Jews and fellow Christians, which was largely negative in both cases. He makes the point that the large majority of converts were nonobservant in the Jewish faith who were seeking spiritual meaning in their lives. Their conversions were seldom from Judaism but rather from atheism or agnosticism to faith in the God of Israel.

This point is critical in understanding the implications for today of the fact that Jews and Christians – with the faith differences between them denied by Nazi racial ideology -- died together in the Shoah.

Borden sees the canonization of St. Edith Stein, properly understood, as not a triumphal appropriation by the Catholic Church of the Jewish suffering of the Shoah but rather a constant reminder to the church to reject its anti-Semitic past and acknowledge God's enduring covenant with the Jews.

Dembrowski concludes that the profound change in the church's understanding of its relationship with Jews and Judaism that came about with the Second Vatican Council "is, to a large extent, the result of the common persecution and common death of Jews and their brethren, the Christian Jews. So many of them died together. They should be remembered together."

Both authors cite the words of Pope John Paul II and the 1987 and 1998 statements to this effect issued by Cardinal William H. Keeler in the name of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

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Fisher is an associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington.