Saint of the Day: St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Carmelite Nun (1891-1942)

Her life

+ Edith Stein was the eleventh child of a Jewish family from Wroclaw, Poland. As a teenager, she renounced her family’s faith and became an atheist.

+ A lifelong seeker of truth, she subjected every idea to fierce intellectual scrutiny and as a university student she studied psychology and philosophical phenomenology. 

+ One of her professors introduced Edith to contemporary Catholic philosophy and this began the process of conversion that led to her baptism in 1922. 

+ Inspired by the life of Saint Teresa of Avila, Edith eventually joined the Discalced Carmelites in Cologne, Germany, receiving the religious name “Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.”

+ As a person of Jewish ancestry, she was subject to the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies and she fled to the Netherlands in order to protect the members of her community in Germany. It was there that she wrote her major work, The Science of the Cross. 

+ In 1942, Sister Teresa Benedicta was arrested and deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz where she was killed in the gas chambers on August 9. 

+ Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross has been heralded as a model of virtue, self-denial, and heroism for both Jews and Christians and was canonized in 1998. Executed with Saint Teresa Benedicta was her sister, Rosa, who had also converted to Catholicism and who was living as an extern sister in the Carmel in Cologne. 

For prayer and reflection

“Through the experience of the Cross, Edith Stein was able to open the way to a new encounter with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faith and the Cross proved inseparable to her. Having matured in the school of the Cross, she found the roots to which the tree of her own life was attached. She understood that it was very important for her ‘to be a daughter of the chosen people and to belong to Christ not only spiritually, but also through blood.’”—Pope Saint John Paul II at the canonization of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Spiritual bonus

On August 9, we also remember the martyr Franz Jägerstätter. A husband and father, he worked as sacristan for his parish, arranging funeral and prayers services, and helping to develop a special ministry for the bereaved. He became a staunch critic of the Nazis and opposed the unification of Germany and Austria. When he was drafted into military service within the Third Reich, he refused to comply because of his dedication to his faith. He was arrested and, ultimately, executed on August 9, 1943, in Brandenburg, Germany. Blessed Franz was beatified in 2007.   

Prayer

God of our Fathers,
who brought the Martyr Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
to know your crucified Son
and to imitate him even until death,
grant, through her intercession,
that the whole human race may acknowledge Christ as its Savior
and through him come to behold you for eternity.
Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.

(from The Roman Missal)
Saint profiles prepared by Fr. Silas Henderson, S.D.S.