Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Edith Stein was born in Breslau on October 12, 1891, the youngest of seven children in a Jewish family. Her father died early, and her mother, a woman of great character, ran the lumber business on her own. She was a true philosopher, not a dabbler: she studied with Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and became his assistant. In 1916 she earned her doctorate summa cum laude. For years she tried to get a professorship and never succeeded: she was a woman, and she was Jewish. Since her teens she had called herself an atheist. Her conversion came in 1921, while she read the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila in a single night; at the end, she says, she closed the book and said: “This is the truth.” She was baptized in 1922. Her mother never fully forgave her. She taught and wrote until 1933, when the racial laws took away even that little. She then entered the Discalced Carmelites in Cologne, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In 1938 she was moved to the Netherlands, to Echt, to keep her safe. On August 2, 1942, the Nazis arrested the Catholic Jews of the Netherlands, in retaliation for a letter from the Dutch bishops condemning the deportations. They took her and her sister Rosa. They died in Auschwitz on August 9. John Paul II proclaimed her a saint in 1998 and co-patron of Europe the following year. If your name is Edith or Teresa, today is your name day.