Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein, was a philosopher of Jewish origin who, after years of searching for the truth, was baptized, entered the Discalced Carmelites, and was killed at Auschwitz. Her liturgical memorial falls on August 9, the anniversary of her death.

She was born on October 12, 1891, in Breslau (today Wrocław), then part of Germany, the youngest of eleven children of a Jewish family, on the day her family was celebrating Yom Kippur. Her father, a timber merchant, died when she was a small child. Although her mother raised her religiously, as a teenager Edith deliberately stopped praying.

She studied German philology and history in Breslau, and from 1913 philosophy in Göttingen under Edmund Husserl. During the First World War she worked as a nurse in an Austrian field hospital. In 1916 she obtained her doctorate in philosophy in Freiburg and until 1918 was Husserl’s assistant. In the summer of 1921, in Bergzabern, she read the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila in a single night. When she had finished, she said to herself: “This is the truth.” On January 1, 1922, she was baptized.

Then, until 1931, she taught at the school and teacher training college of the Dominican Sisters in Speyer and gave lectures, mainly on women’s issues. From 1932 she lectured at an institute of education in Münster, but in 1933 Nazi laws aimed at Jews took this work from her. On October 14, 1933, she entered the Carmel of Cologne, and in April 1934, at her clothing, she took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her mother’s opposition to this path caused her deep pain.

In the monastery she completed her principal work, Finite and Eternal Being, which by then could no longer be published. On the last day of 1938, as the persecution of the Jews grew, she was moved to the Carmel of Echt in the Netherlands. In her will of 1939 she wrote that she already accepted with joy the death that God had appointed for her. In Echt she worked on a study of Saint John of the Cross, The Science of the Cross, which remained unfinished.

The Dutch bishops publicly protested against the deportation of the Jews, and in retaliation the occupiers struck at Catholics of Jewish origin as well. On August 2, 1942, the Gestapo took Edith and her sister Rosa, who was also a Catholic, from the monastery in Echt. As they left, Edith said to her: “Come, we are going for our people.” By way of the camps of Amersfoort and Westerbork, both were taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed in a gas chamber on August 9, 1942.

John Paul II beatified her as a martyr on May 1, 1987, in Cologne, and on October 11, 1998, in Rome he declared her a saint. He said then that in celebrating her memorial each year we must also remember the Shoah. On October 1, 1999, he proclaimed her, together with Saint Bridget of Sweden and Saint Catherine of Siena, co-patroness of Europe.