KARL STERN was born in Bavaria in 1906 to socially assimilated Jewish parents. He studied medicine in Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt, specializing in psychiatric research. He emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1936, finding work in neurological research in England, and later as a lecturer in neuropathology and assistant neuropathologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute. In 1943, after much soul-searching and ultimately influenced by encounters with Jacques Maritain and Dorothy Day, Stern received baptism as a Catholic.