Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), Virgin and Martyr

Edith Stein was born in 1891 in Breslau, the youngest child of a Jewish family. She studied philosophy under Edmund Husserl and became his assistant, but as a woman was refused a university post. In 1921, after reading through the night the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, she decided to become a Catholic and was baptized on 1 January 1922. Barred from teaching by the Nazi laws of 1933, she entered the Carmel in Cologne as Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In 1938 she moved to the Carmel at Echt in the Netherlands. After the Dutch bishops publicly condemned the deportations of Jews, the occupiers arrested Catholics of Jewish origin; Edith and her sister Rosa were taken on 2 August 1942 and killed at Auschwitz on 9 August. She was canonized in 1998.