Edith Stein was born into a Jewish family of Breslau, Poland, but had lost faith in Judaism by the time she reached her fifteenth birthday. She turned out to be a brilliant scholar and earned her Doctorate in Philosophy at the age of twenty-five. She was an honest thinker and an ardent searcher after truth. The staunch faith of her catholic friends and the way they lived their religion ignited the inquisitive mind of Edith to pore through Catholic literature. The book that fascinated her most and which eventually led her to Catholicism in 1922 was the Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Twelve years later, she became a Carmelite nun at Cologne and took the religious name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. During the oppressive Nazi regime, she was smuggled out of Germany into Holland in 1938. After the German occupation of the Netherlands, Hitler ordered the extermination not only of the Jews, but also of all the Jewish converts to Christianity. Edith, her sister Rose (who was also a new convert to Catholicism) and several others were captured and deported to the dreaded concentration camp at Auschwitz where they were martyred in a gas chamber on August 9, 1942. She was canonized in 1998.
Reflection: Edith’s determination to embrace the truth that she discovered, though it meant a great embarrassment to her Jewish community, and her outstanding courage to stand up for Christ even when it meant loss of property and life, reveal that her discipleship was at its best. When one’s life is rooted in faith, one is totally prepared to lose everything to gain Christ.
Do not do it! Why should I be spared? Is it right that I should gain no advantage from my Baptism? If I cannot share the lot of my brothers and sisters, my life, in a certain sense, is destroyed.
(St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, when some one proposed a possible rescue operation)
