The Healing Journey

August 9, 2024

“You can be at all fronts, wherever there is grief, in the power of the cross. Your compassionate love takes you everywhere, this love from the divine heart. Its precious blood is poured everywhere, soothing, healing, saving.”
— St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who was born Edith Stein, came from a large prominent Jewish family in Breslau, Germany. Her father died when she was only a toddler.

Edith left behind her Jewish faith and became an atheist at 14 years old. She also became a brilliant philosopher, who studied with some of the greatest minds of her day. She was a protege of Edmund Husserl, a leading phenomenologist. After earning her degree with the highest honors from Gottingen University, she worked as a field nurse in an Austrian hospital during World War I, where she witnessed the horrors of war firsthand.

In 1916, she earned her doctorate and wrote a thesis on the phenomenon of empathy. For a time, she taught at the university.

Then, while visiting friends in 1921, she stayed up the entire night to read the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, the 16th century Carmelite nun.

“When I had finished the book,” she wrote, “I said to myself: This is the truth.” And the truth led her to be baptized into the Church on January 1, 1922. She eventually entered a Carmelite cloister in Cologne, later moving to one in the Netherlands in 1938. She lived there until she was arrested by the Nazis and sent to the prison camp at Auschwitz, where she was executed in a gas chamber with her sister Rosa, who also converted to Catholicism.

Today, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who died a martyr, is recognized as the patron saint of those who have lost a parent. We celebrate her feast on August 9.

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