Feast of St. Teresa Benedicta: Jewish Convert/ Victim of the Holocaust

Saint Terese Benedicta (1891-1942) 

 

The Church today celebrates the heroic virtue of a modern day saint.

Edith Stein, a young women from a prominent Jewish family, converted to Catholicism before WW2 and became a Carmelite nun. She was gifted in her understanding of philosophy and taught at a university in the Netherlands. Today the Church honors this godly woman. She had forsaken all to follow the Truth leading to her death in the concentration camps at the hands of the Nazis. It was her reading of St. Terese of Avila that led her to conversion. We should never under estimate the power of the saints to change lives.

"In his homily at the canonization Mass, Pope John Paul II said: “Because she was Jewish, Edith Stein was taken with her sister Rosa and many other Catholics and Jews from the Netherlands to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, where she died with them in the gas chambers. Today we remember them all with deep respect. A few days before her deportation, the woman religious had dismissed the question about a possible rescue: ‘Do not do it! Why should I be spared? Is it not 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.’"
From St Anthony's Messenger, Go here for the full story
St Terese, intercede for us that we too will live our lives in the hands of God as you did.