Edith Stein

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Also known as
Edith Stein
Teresia Benedicta

memorial
9 August

Profile

Our Saint for today has a lot of discussion around her by many critics and fans trying to figure out why she was martyred, for being Jewish or Being a Catholic, come on!

Edith was the youngest child born into a religious Jewish Family. By the time she was 13 she had lost all interest in “religion.” Tempered by the horrors of World War I, Edith became a nursing assistant and worked in a hospital for communicable diseases.

She was a brilliant student studying philosophy at the University of Göttingen, Germany and in Breisgau, Germany. Earned a doctorate in philosophy by the time she was 25. Witnessing the strength of faith of Catholic friends led her to an interest in Catholicism, which led to studying a catechism on her own, mostly from reading the works of the reformer of the Carmelite Order, St. Teresa of Jesus; she was drawn more closely to the Catholic Faith.

On 1 January 1922 she was baptized in Saint Martin’s church, Bad Bergzabern, Germany. She then taught at a Catholic school of education. As a result of the requirement of an "Aryan certificate" for civil servants promulgated by the Nazi government in April 1933, she had to quit her teaching position.

She was admitted to the Discalced Carmelite monastery the following October. She received the religious habit of the Order as a novice in April 1934, taking the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross ("Teresa blessed by the Cross").

In 1938 she and her sister Rosa, by then also a convert and a Sister of the monastery, were smuggled out of Germany, to the Carmelite monastery in the Netherlands for their safety; they were a double target for the Nazis both Jewish and Catholic. Despite the Nazi invasion of that state in 1940, they remained undisturbed until they were arrested by the Nazis on 2 August 1942 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died in the gas chamber on 9 August 1942.

Born
12 October 1891 at Breslaw, Dolnoslaskie, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) as Edith Stein

Patronage
against the death of parents
Europe
martyrs