Doctor Crucis. The Criteria for Conferral of the Title of Doctor of the Church and their Application to the Case of Edith Stein. Part I

Edith Stein is widely recognised as a saint, a martyr, a victim of the Holocaust and a female philosopher – but can she be a Doctor of the Church? So far, thirty-seven figures, including four women, carry the title due to their so-called ‘eminent doctrines’, eminentes doctrinae. For centuries, a procedural difficulty existed in awarding the titles to martyrs, however, in the second decade of the 21st century, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints reached a conclusion that martyrdom is not, in principle, an obstacle in awarding the title. A question, therefore, can be posed: does the legacy of someone among the Christian martyrs fulfill the criteria of the Church’s Doctorate? The aim of this article is to investigate the criteria for conferral of the title of the Doctor of the Church, prime among which is a criterion called eminens doctrina, and apply them to one example, that of Edith Stein. In doing so, I consider the question purely historically and philosophically, starting out with definitions of the Father of the Church and the Doctor of the Church in part one (available below). In the second part of the article (available in 2024), I ask what aspects of the female martyr’s theology, philosophy and spirituality fulfill the criteria of an eminent doctrine, as formulated in the Church’s documents, and which are insufficient or lacking. In order to highlight the nature of a particular criterion, I contrast Stein’s case with other recently debated cases, such as those of Irenaeus of Lyons and John Paul II.