St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Edith Stein was arrested at the Carmel of Echt in the Netherlands on August 2, 1942, one of hundreds of Catholics of Jewish descent seized in reprisal for the Dutch bishops' pastoral letter read from every pulpit that July against the deportation of the Jews. She died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz on August 9. The Church keeps her memorial on that date.

She was born at Breslau on October 12, 1891, the youngest of eleven children in an observant Jewish family, and lost her faith as an adolescent. She took her doctorate in philosophy under Edmund Husserl at Göttingen in 1916 and served as his assistant at Freiburg. In 1921, staying at a friend's house, she read the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila through in a single night and closed it saying that this was the truth. She was baptized on January 1, 1922.

She taught and translated — Newman, Aquinas — until the racial laws of 1933 closed German academic life to her. On October 14, 1933 she entered the Carmel of Cologne and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her community moved her to Echt at the end of 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogrom, judging the Netherlands safer. There she wrote her study of John of the Cross, The Science of the Cross, which the arrest left unfinished.

John Paul II beatified her at Cologne in 1987 and canonized her in Rome on October 11, 1998. On October 1, 1999 he named her a co-patroness of Europe alongside Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. The Carmel of Cologne keeps her memory at the place where she received the habit; the Kraków region holds Auschwitz, where she died and where no grave marks her.