Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Biography

She was the daughter of a Jewish family. Orphaned by her father, she went to the synagogue with her mother. Her mother soon noticed that she was only doing it to please her and at the age of 21 Edith confessed herself to be an atheist. Since he was young he studied philosophy in Breslau, but it soon became insufficient. In 1913, attracted by Husserl's phenomenology, she decided to change universities. In 1914 she began her doctoral thesis but soon interrupted the work to collaborate with her help in the First World War where she worked for 6 months as a Red Cross nurse, and had a decisive encounter with the situations in man's life: pain, hatred, war, death. It will be an incentive to continue looking for answers. Concluding his thesis he works as Husserl's assistant. In 1917 the death of a great friend, Adolfo Reinach, changed his life. He has to go visit Ana, his friend's widow, and he doesn't know what to say to console her. But he discovers in her a deep peace and hope, the fruit of his conversion to Christianity. In 1918 he had a mystical experience of the God of Jesus Christ, he did not know which path to follow. But a definitive step arises: a married couple invites her to their farm where she spends the entire night reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Jesus. "As I closed the book, I said to myself: this is the truth!" In 1933 he entered the Carmel of Cologne. Edith consummates her vocation in martyrdom, in the face of Nazi persecution against the Jews, she marches to the Carmel of Echt in Holland. On May 2, 1942, the Gestapo went to look for Edith. Two days later she is transferred to Poland, with her sister Rosa, also converted to Catholicism. The Dutch Red Cross publishes a note: "Edith Stein, born in Breslau, was murdered on August 9, 1942 in Auschwitz, with gas." She was canonized as a martyr in 1998. In October 1999, she was declared the patron saint of Europe along with Saint Brigid and Saint Catherine.