Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 9, 2025 / 04:00 am

On Aug. 9 the Catholic Church remembers St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as Edith Stein. St. Teresa converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the course of her work as a philosopher and later entered the Carmelite order. She died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1942.

Stein was born on Oct. 12, 1891 — a date that coincided with her family’s celebration of Yom Kippur, the Jewish “day of atonement.” Stein’s father died when she was just 2 years old, and she gave up the practice of her Jewish faith as an adolescent.

As a young woman with profound intellectual gifts, Stein gravitated toward the study of philosophy and became a pupil of the renowned professor Edmund Husserl in 1913. Through her studies, the nonreligi

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