Saint of the day - August 9
A brilliant philosopher who stopped believing in God when she was 14, Edith Stein was so captivated by reading the autobiography of Teresa of Avila that she began a spiritual journey which led to her baptism in 1922. Twelve years later she imitated Saint Teresa of Avila by becoming a Carmelite, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
Her father died while Edith was only two years and her mother took care of the family. Despite her mother being strict on religion, Edith Stein did not believe in the existence of God.
During World War I, Edith joined the University of Freiburg to study empathy. Thereafter, she graduated with a doctorate in philosophy and became the teaching assistant of Edmund Husserl.
"I no longer have a life of my own", she wrote at the beginning of the first World War, having taken a nursing course and gone to serve in an Austrian field hospital. This was a hard time for her, as she looked after the sick in the typhus ward, worked in an operating theatre and saw young people die.
Around this time, Edith Stein had interacted with the Catholic faithful and in the process, began reading the autobiography of St Teresa of Ávila. This started changing her heart from agnosticism, and she felt that she needed to convert to Catholicism.
One year later, on January 1,1922, Edith Stein was baptized. She was offered to teach at the Dominican nuns’ school in Speyer, Germany from 1923 to 1931.
On October 14,1933, Edith Stein joined the Monastery St. Maria vom Frieden of the Discalced Carmelites in Cologne and during her investiture on April 15,1934, she took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Teresia Benedicta a Cruce).
On 9 November 1938, the anti-Semitism of the Nazis became apparent to the whole world. Synagogues were burnt and the Jews were terrorized. On New Year's Eve 1938, she was smuggled across the border into the Netherlands, to the Carmelite convent in Echt.
Even before the Nazis captured the Netherlands, Teresa knew that she would not survive the Nazi atrocities and she had offered herself as a sacrifice of atonement for true peace to the heart of Jesus. After May 1940, when the Netherlands was invaded by the Nazis, she would confine herself in a cold place starving, so as to prepare her body for the torture in the concentration camps.
On July 20 1942, the Dutch Bishops made a public statement in churches all over the country condemning the racism by the Nazis. This made the Nazi regime in the Netherlands order the arrest of 243 baptized Jews and all other Jewish converts who had been spared in an earlier operation. On August 2, 1942, Teresa was arrested along with her sister Rosa and taken to Amersfoort and Westerbork concentration camps, before being deported to Auschwitz.
At Westerbork, a Dutch official saw how pious and calm Teresa was, and offered to help her escape; but she refused. She said that she wanted to share in the fate of her fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.
On August 9, 1942, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, her sister and a number of Jews were killed in the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 11,1998.
Other Saints of the Day
1. Saint Maurilio of Rouen
2. Saint Marianne Cope
3. Saint Nathy
4. Saint Romanus Ostiarius
5. Saint Bandaridus of Soissons
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