St. Edith Stein is also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (religious life name). She was a brilliant philosopher, spiritual writer, and convert to the Church from Judaism. During World War II, she perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Edith Stein was born at Breslau to a Jewish family, she abandoned the Jewish faith in 1904 and became a self-proclaimed atheist. Entering the University of Göttingen, she became a protégé of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and a proponent of the philosophical school of phenomenology both at Göttingen and Freiburg in Breisgau.

She earned a doctorate in 1916 and emerged as one of Europe’s brightest philosophers. One of her primary endeavors was to examine phenomenology from the perspective of Thomistic thought, part of her growing interest in Catholic teachings. Propelled by her reading of the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, she was baptized on January 1, 1922.

She gave up her university post and became a teacher in the Dominican school in Speyer, receiving as well in 1932 the post of lecturer at the Educational Institute of Munch. She then resigned under pressure from the Nazis who were now in control of Germany.

In 1934, Edith entered the Carmelite Order. Smuggled out of Germany into the Netherlands in 1938 to escape the mounting Nazi oppression, she fell into the hands of the Third Reich with the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in 1940.

Edith was arrested in 1942 with her sister Rosa (also a Catholic convert) as part of Hitler’s order to liquidate all non-Aryan Catholics. She was taken to Auschwitz and on August 9, 1942, she died in the gas chamber.

In the years after the war, her extensive spiritual and philosophical writings were collected and published, receiving promotion by the Archivum Carmelitanum Edith Steith at Louvain, Belgium. Later, Pope St. John Paul II declared her one of the co-patrons of Europe.