St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
Feast Day: August 9
The youngest of 11 children of a devout Jewish mother in Wroclaw, Poland, Edith was an atheist by her teens.
After studying philosophy in Germany, she was deeply affected by reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila.
Baptized a Catholic in 1922, she joined the Discalced Carmelites in Cologne in 1933, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
Fleeing the Nazis, she moved to a convent in Echt, Netherlands, but was arrested with non-Aryan Christians after the Dutch bishops protested Nazi deportations.
She was martyred at Auschwitz.
