Saint of the Day, August 9

Saint Teresa Benedicta (1891–1942), born Edith Stein in a German-Jewish family in Breslau, became one of the foremost philosophers of the early twentieth century as the favorite disciple of Edmund Husserl. Her reading of the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila in 1921 led to her baptism the following year; in 1933, when the Nazis barred her from university teaching, she entered the Carmel of Cologne, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Transferred to the Carmel of Echt in Holland for safety, she was seized after the Dutch bishops protested the deportation of Jews, and gassed at Auschwitz with her sister Rosa on 9 August 1942. John Paul II canonized her in 1998 and named her one of the six patron saints of Europe.