St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (1891-1942)

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (born as Edith Stein) was born in 1891 in Breslau, Poland, and was the youngest child of a large Jewish family. She was an outstanding student and was well versed in philosophy. She received the doctorate in 1916 from the University of Gottingen and started to teach at the University of Freiburg. She was an atheist as a young person, but one day, she started to read the autobiography of St Teresa of Avila, and eventually became interested in the Catholic Faith, and in 1922, she was baptized at the Cathedral Church in Cologne, Germany. Edith left the University of Freiburg and started tot each a Catholic girls school in Speyer, run by the Dominicans. Eleven years later, in 1933 Edith entered the Cologne Carmelite convent. Because of the ramifications of politics in Germany, Edith, whose name in religion was Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was sent to the Carmel at Echt, Holland. She wrote a letter to Pope Pius XI condemning Nazism, and even though her letter received no answer, and it is not known for certain whether the Pope ever read it. However, in 1937 the Pope issued an encyclical written in German, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety), in which he criticized Nazism, listed violations of the Concordat between Germany and the Church of 1933, and condemned antisemitism. When the Nazis conquered Holland, Teresa was arrested, and, with her sister Rosa, was sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. One day, they asked all the girls in that camp to strip naked, promising them a cleansing shower, but instead Teresa, aged 51, and all the other women died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz on August 9, 1942. In 1987, she was beatified in the large outdoor soccer stadium in Cologne by Pope John Paul II. Out of the unspeakable human suffering caused by the Nazis in Western Europe in the 1930's and 1940's, there blossomed the beautiful life of dedication, consecration, prayer, fasting, and penance of Saint Teresa. Even though her life was snuffed out by the satanic evil of genocide, her memory stands as a light undimmed in the midst of evil, darkness, and suffering. She was canonized on October 11, 1998.