+ St Teresa Benedicta, Edit Stein, was
the youngest of seven children in a Jewish family. She was born October 12,
1891 at Breslaw, Germany (which is now Wroclaw, Poland). Losing her interest
and faith in Judaism by age 13, Edith being a brilliant student and philosopher
with an interest in phenomenology, studied at the Universities of Gottingen and
Breisgau, Germany.
She earned her doctorate in
philosophy in 1916 at the age of 25. Witnessing the strength of faith of
Catholic friends, Teresa was led to an interest in Catholicism, which led to
studying a catechism on her own, which led to “reading herself into” the
Catholic Faith. She converted to Catholicism in Cologne, Germany, and was
baptized in St. Martin’s Church, on January 1, 1922.
From there Edith’s
God-initiated vocation to the fullness of faith continued, and she entered the
Carmelite Order in 1934, taking the name Teresa
Benedicta of the Cross. She became a teacher in the Dominican school in
Speyer, Germany and lecturer at the Educational
Institute in Munich, Germany. However, anti-Jewish pressure from the Nazis
forced her to resign both positions.
Teresa Benedicta was a
profound spiritual writer, her major work being The Knowledge of the Cross. Being both Jewish and Catholic, she was
smuggled out of Germany and assigned to Echt, Netherlands in 1938. When the
Nazis invaded the Netherlands, she and her sister Rose, also a convert to
Catholicism, were captured and sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz
where they died in the ovens like so many others of their own people. As they
left the convent, Teresa took Rosa’s hand and said, “Come, Rosa, we are going
for our people!” They died on August 9, 1942. Teresa was beatified May 1, 1987
by Pope John Paul II at the Cologne Cathedral, and canonized by him October 11,
1998 in Rome.
Our gospel passage today
reminds us to not be afraid of those who
can kill the body, but only those who can kill the soul. God our Father
knows all our comings and goings and he knows the kind of life that we each can
glorify him by living – even if it includes much suffering, and even the death
of the body. But what endures is the life of the soul – and the spiritual good
health and prosperity of this aspect of us must be our primary objective in
life, so that we are ever ready to use our spiritual faculties at their maximum
capacity to serve our bodily needs, even if it is to embrace martyrdom! And
St. Paul reminds us in the
first reading that apparent sorrowing,
chastisement and even death are really opportunities for rejoicing, freedom and
life – if we unite ourselves to the Cross of Christ and embrace the day as
it comes!
Blessed
are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the
Kingdom of heaven.
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