St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was born Edith Stein on 12 October 1891 into a devout Jewish family at Breslau (then in Germany, now Wrocław, Poland), and died on 9 August 1942 in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. A brilliant student, she drifted from her faith into atheism and became a distinguished philosopher, an assistant to Edmund Husserl and a leading figure of the phenomenological movement. Her long search for truth reached a turning point when, in one night, she read the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila and concluded, 'This is the truth.'

Baptized in 1922, she taught and wrote as a Catholic before entering the Discalced Carmelites in 1933, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. As Nazi persecution of the Jews intensified she was moved to a convent in the Netherlands for safety, but after the Dutch bishops publicly condemned Nazism, the regime retaliated by arresting Catholics of Jewish descent; she was deported and killed as a daughter of her Jewish people and a disciple of Christ. Canonized in 1998 by Pope St. John Paul II, she was named a co-patroness of Europe.