St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross: A Woman for Our Times

On August 9 the Church celebrates the feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, the former Edith Stein, from the town of Breslau, then in Germany, and now Wroclaw in Poland.
            
Edith was born of an observant Jewish family in 1891. She lost her faith in God and abandoned the practice of Judaism in her teenage years. A brilliant young woman, she enrolled at the University of Gottingen and became fascinated with the philosophical school of phenomenology. She followed closely the work of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and, under his tutelage, earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1916.
            
She was on a life-long search for truth and the meaning of life. While she was on a summer holiday in 1921 at the home of a friend, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, who has recently converted to the Catholic Faith, one evening she pulled a book off a shelf, The Biography of St. Teresa of Avila, and stayed up all night devouring the book. Upon finishing the life story of this famous 16^th century Carmelite reformer the next morning, she exclaimed, “This is the truth!” She claimed later to have found faith in God and her vocation to become a Carmelite nun that night. She was received into the Catholic Church in 1922.
            
Edith taught at the school of the Dominican Convent in Speyer. Later she began to teach at the Catholic Institute of Scientific Pedagogy in Munster. This position lasted for only one year because the Nazis who had come into power in Germany excluded all people of Jewish descent from holding teaching positions.
            
In 1933, Edith entered the Carmel of Our Lady of Peace in Cologne, Germany. She took the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in honor of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. As a Carmelite nun she continued her philosophical studies and writing.

Germany in the 1930’s was a very dangerous place for Jews. Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies began to make real impact on the day-to-day life of Jewish citizens. Seeing the dark clouds on the horizon, her religious superiors had her transferred to the Carmel in Echt in Holland hoping that there safety would be assured. Her blood sister Rosa, a Carmelite tertiary and extern (a sister who was not bound by the cloister and served as a connection with the outside world), accompanied Sister Teresa Benedicta to Echt. In 1940, the Nazis invaded Holland taking control of the country. They began to enforce in 1942 a nefarious part of their agenda known as “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. It called for a systematic genocide of every Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe.
            
On July 26, 1942 a pastoral letter of the Dutch bishops that condemned the persecution of the Jews was read at every Sunday Mass in every Catholic church in Holland.  Infuriated by this bold action of the bishops, the Nazis retaliated by rounding up every Jew who had converted to Catholicism including those who had become priests and religious. This round-up began the following Sunday , August 2. At 5:00AM that day when the Carmelite nuns were at prayer in their convent chapel, the dreaded knock came to the convent door. The Gestapo had arrived to take Sister Teresa Benedicta and Rosa. They were given only a few minutes to ready themselves to depart. They did not even have time to a have proper goodbye to the other nuns.  Sister Teresa Benedicta could only say to the community, “Please pray, Sisters!”  Then turning to her sister, Sister Teresa Benedicta said, “Come, Rosa. We go for our people.”
            
They, with other Jews who became Catholic, were taken to a camp in Westerbork in Holland. Those who saw Sister Teresa Benedicta there described her as a rock of prayer organizing the other religious for communal prayer. She took care of the Jewish children whose mothers were so distressed and in shock that they could care for them. One person described her as she sat in prayer as “the Pieta without the Christ”. She, in fact was not without the Christ, for the Christ was the Jewish people to whom she gave care and comfort.
            
While at Westerbork, Sister Teresa Benedicta sent a message through a friend to her superiors in the Carmel of Echt asking for the next volume of the breviary (the official prayerbook of the Church, the Divine Office) for herself as well as a cross and a rosary for Rosa. She was not there long enough to receive them.
            
On either August 6 or 7, sister Teresa Benedicta and Rosa along with the others with them were taken by train from Westerbork heading east with the final destination being the death camp of Auschwitz in Poland.   

It is reported that the last sighting of Sister Teresa Benedicta was at the train station in her hometown of Breslau (Wroclaw).  A former student of hers, walking on the platform in front of a train, claimed to have seen a woman in a Carmelite habit with a Star of David pinned to it holding that hand of a small child at the open door of a boxcar of a train heading east to Auschwitz.

Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and her sister Rosa arrived at the death camp on Sunday August 9, 1942. They were promptly murdered in the gas chamber and their bodies incinerated in the crematorium of Auschwitz. They were buried in a mass grave. When the Carmelite nuns of Echt were going through Sister Teresa Benedicta’s few possessions left in her cell in the convent, they found a prayer card on the back of which she wrote an act of offering of herself for her Jewish brothers and sisters. Indeed, her life was offered as a pleasing sacrifice to God. She was beatified on May 1, 1987 in Cologne, Germany and was canonized on October 11, 1998 at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In 1999 she declared a co-patroness of Europe along with St. Bridget of Sweden and St. Catherine of Siena.

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is a powerful example for us today because of her tremendous faith and holiness that influenced and continue to influence so many. She provides for us a model of complete fidelity to the teachings of Christ’s Body the Church and the creative genius of women in the Church as well their maternal vocation lived out by caring for the children of God that they bear biologically or care for spiritually. For our times that are marked by polarization, violence, and the destruction of human life and dignity from the womb to the end of life, she is a shining example of someone who laid down her life and offered herself in sacrifice for her brothers and sisters. She is a witness to the power of prayer and faith in God as well as a martyr of love for others, even her persecutors.  
 
Most Reverend William J. Waltersheid
Auxiliary Bishop of Pittsburgh