Saint Edith Stein

Edith was born in 1891, which makes her a Saint that lived in our times, not hundreds of years ago.  Edith was born into a Jewish family and she did not grow up believing that Jesus was the Son of God.  She was a very smart student and she loved philosophy, which is the study of all sorts of things that people think about, like the meaning of life.  Through her studies she became interested in the teachings of the Catholic Church and in 1922 she was baptized into the Catholic Church in Germany, believing that Jesus was the Son of God who came to save us.  After living the Catholic faith for 11 years, Edith felt that God was calling her to become a sister and devote her whole life to Jesus, and so she joined the Carmel convent in Cologne, Germany.  She took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross when she became a sister.  When the Nazis took power in Germany, they tried to get rid of all the Jewish people in Germany, and so Sr. Teresa (Edith) was sent to a Carmel convent in Holland.  Soon the Nazis took power over Holland too, and Sr. Teresa (Edith) along with another Jewish Sister where taken to a concentration camp in Auschwitz, where the Nazis treated all their prisoners very, very badly.  She died there in 1942, when she was only 51 years old.  Even though she died in such a horrible place, her Sainthood reminds us that God will always win over evil in the world.