St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

Who they were

Edith Stein was the youngest child of an observant Jewish family in Breslau, a self declared atheist by her teens, and one of the most gifted philosophers of her generation: a doctorate summa cum laude under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, whose assistant she became when a university chair was closed to her as a woman.

One night in 1921 she picked up Teresa of Avila's autobiography at a friend's house and read until dawn. Her recorded verdict, this is the truth, ended the search her whole philosophy had been. Baptized in 1922, she taught, translated Aquinas, and lectured across Europe on women's education. In 1933, the Nazi race laws having ended her public work, she entered the Carmel of Cologne as Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her order moved her to Holland for safety. In 1942, when the Dutch bishops publicly condemned the deportations, the occupiers retaliated by seizing Catholics of Jewish descent, and Edith and her sister Rosa were arrested on 2 August. Witnesses from the transit camps recorded her calm, and her care of children whose mothers had stopped functioning. She was killed at Auschwitz on 9 August 1942. Her last recorded words, leaving the convent, were to Rosa: come, we are going for our people. She was canonized in 1998 and is a co patroness of Europe.

Why people turn to St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

Seekers whose search runs through books and doubt, since hers did, all the way. Converts bearing a family cost. Philosophers and academics have a patron from inside the discipline.

How to ask their intercession

With the honest question you actually have, since her whole path ran through asked questions. And on 9 August, her feast, pray for her people and for the memory of the six million.