Saint Who?
Saints Who Were Poets
Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
Religious and martyr († 1942)Feast: August 9
Born in Breslau (at the time in Germany, now in Poland) in 1891, Edith Stein abandoned her Jewish faith when she was thirteen. An excellent student, she became an assistant to the influential philosopher Edmund Husserl. After encountering the works of Teresa of Ávila and Ignatius of Loyola, Stein was baptized a Catholic in 1922.
At the advice of her spiritual directors, she labored in academia for the next decade, including translating Newman and Aquinas. When Nazi policies barred her from teaching, she was able to follow her heart’s desire: the life of a Carmelite nun. “Human activities cannot help us,” she told her prioress, “but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it.” She took the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
In the convent, Teresa began to study and write afresh. She wrote two beautiful meditative poems, “Novena to the Holy Spirit” and “I Will Remain with You,” a rich meditation on the saving presence of Christ in the Eucharist: “All we can do is be amazed and stammer and fall silent/ Because intellect and words fail.” In her last theological work, Science of the Cross, she wrote, “All genuine art is revelation, and all artistic creation is sacred service.” Teresa was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. She was declared a patroness of Europe in 1999.
Lord Jesus Christ, through the prayers of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, may your presence in the Eucharist give us strength to embrace the cross.
