SAINT TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS (EDITH STEIN)

Feast Day - August 9

Lived (October 12, 1891 – August 9, 1942)

A brilliant philosopher who became an atheist when she was 14 years old. Edith Stein turned a new leaf when she read the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila that she began a spiritual journey that led to her baptism in 1922. Twelve years later she followed the footsteps of her Saint Teresa of Avila by becoming a Carmelite Nun, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Born in a popular Jewish family in Breslau, Germany—now Wroclaw, Poland—Edith Stein abandoned Judaism in her teens. As a student at the University of Göttingen, she became attracted to phenomenology, an approach to philosophy, earning a doctorate degree in philosophy in 1916. She continued as a University Teacher until 1922 when she moved to a Dominican school in Speyer; her appointment as lecturer at the Educational Institute of Munich ended under pressure from the Nazis.

After living for four years in the Cologne Carmel, Sister Teresa Benedicta moved to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands, in 1938. The Nazis occupied that country in 1940. In retaliation for being denounced by the Dutch bishops, the Nazis arrested all Dutch Jews who had become Christians. Teresa Benedicta and her sister Rosa, also a Catholic, died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was beatified in 1987, and canonized in 1999 by Pope Saint John Paul II.