She died on this day in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, a professed Carmelite nun, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was gassed there with a group of Jews, because she too was born a Jew.
She was born Edith Stein, the youngest of 11 children. Her father died when she was two and her strong-willed mother was left alone. As Edith grew it was clear she had a superior intellect, which she demonstrated in the study of philosophy and her work for women’s suffrage. It was her work in philosophy which planted the Catholic seed in her mind to study Catholicism, writing a doctorate under Husserl on "The Problem of Empathy.” But it was the sight of an old woman praying in the Frankfurt Cathedral which planted Christ in her heart.
"This was something totally new to me,” she later wrote. “In the synagogues and Protestant churches I had visited people simply went to the services. Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church, as if she was going to have an intimate conversation. It was something I never forgot.”
But then it was the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila that brought her fully to the Faith. "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth.”
And so she was baptized and eventually entered a Carmelite convent and became one of the greatest spiritual writers the church has ever known. But now her scholarship and indeed her whole life had a different purpose: "If anyone comes to me,” she wrote in 1933, [all I want to do] is to lead them to Him."
To know Christ, she later wrote, is to know his Cross. "I understood the cross as the destiny of God's people…” she wrote, as she was beginning to sense the impending danger to all Jews and former Jews under the Third Reich. In 1939 she wrote to a friend: "Even now I accept the death that God has prepared for me in complete submission and with joy as being his most holy will for me. I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death ... so that the Lord will be accepted by His people and that His Kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world."
So, Edith was arrested by the Gestapo, along with many other Jewish converts in retaliation against a letter of protest written by the Dutch Roman Catholic Bishops against Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews. Edith wrote at the time, "I never knew that people could be like this, neither did I know that my brothers and sisters would have to suffer like this. ... I pray for them every hour. [But] God will certainly hear our prayers in distress."
God did hear the prayers of this Carmelite "daughter of Israel," as Pope John Paul II called her at her canonization. He heard her prayers to live and die close to the Cross of Jesus, after which she had been named. Years earlier, writing on the teaching of the great mystic Saint John of the Cross, she wrote this:
"One can only gain a knowledge of the cross if one has thoroughly experienced the cross. I have been convinced of this from the first moment onwards and have said with all my heart: Ave, Crux, Spes unica (I welcome you, O Cross, our only hope)."
When you and I hear the name Aushwitz, we think only of hopeless suffering, cruelty and death. But in the suffering Saint Teresa Benedicta endured is found the Cross, our only hope. For it is only when we are joined to the Cross of Christ that life makes any sense at all.
As Saint Francis tells us in his famous, it is only in for it is in giving that we receive, in denying ourselves that we find ourselves, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are raised to eternal life.
