A Bride On The Cross

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - August 10, 2007

Yesterday the Church celebrated the memorial of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a thoroughly modern saint with one of the most compelling personal stories of recent times.

Born Edith Stein on the Day of Atonement in 1891, she was raised in orthodox Jewish home in Breslau, Germany, as the youngest of eleven children. Despite her soon-widowed mother's attempts to give Edith a good religious formation, at the age of 14 Edith decided that she did not believe in God and made a deliberate decision to stop praying.

For 16 years, study became her pseudo-religion. She was brilliant and easily obtained university degrees in history and German, while spending most of her free time learning philosophy at the feet of the famous phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Under his tutelage she eventually wrote her doctorate summa cum laude and embarked on a university teaching career.

Her conversion happened in stages. The first step was when she saw an ordinary Catholic woman with a shopping basket enter Frankfurt's cathedral, kneel down and pray. "This was something totally new to me," she wrote in her unfinished autobiography. "In the synagogues and in Protestant churches I had visited, people simply went to the services. Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church, as if she was going to have an intimate conversation. It was something I never forgot."

The second step occurred when she went to console the widow of a fellow philosopher. Edith was dreading what to say, but she was overwhelmed by the widow's peace flowing from her Christian faith in the power of the Cross and Resurrection. "This was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it," she remarked. "It was the moment when my unbelief collapsed and Christ began to shine his light on me — Christ in the mystery of the Cross."

The final stage happened four years later when Edith was 29. While vacationing at the home of a fellow professor and his wife, one night she pulled a copy of St. Teresa of Avila's Life from their bookshelves. She could not put it down the rest of the night. When she had finished the great Spanish mystic's autobiography, she said simply, "This is the truth." She went to the local Catholic parish the next day and asked the priest to be baptized.

For years she had been searching for the truth. She discovered that the truth had a name — and from that moment on, she dedicated herself to Truth Incarnate.

After twelve years of teaching, writing, and lecturing on women's issues, she entered the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Cologne. There she became a bride of Christ and, since she knew that her one-flesh union with Divine Bridegroom would lead her to the Cross, asked for and received the name of "Teresa Blessed of the Cross" She saw her blessing in her vocation "to be wedded to the Lord in the sign of the Cross."

As the Nazi menace grew, she was transferred by her superiors to a Carmelite monastery in the Netherlands. "I understood the cross as the destiny of God's people," she wrote. "I felt that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody's behalf."

As her understanding grew — shown in her most famous theological work, "The Science of the Cross" — so did her willingness to take it upon herself for her Jewish people. "Ave, Crux, Spes Unica," she repeated: "I welcome you, O Cross, our only hope."

Her welcome and knowledge of the Cross would soon become a Biblical embrace of her crucified Spouse. After the Dutch bishops publicly condemned Nazism, the Gestapo retaliated by deporting all Jewish converts in the Netherlands to the concentration camps. "Come, we are going for our people," she said as she was being rounded up in Echt. She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chamber 65 years ago yesterday.

Her death in the concentration camp, like Christ's death on the Cross, remains to many a merely a tragic "scandal" and unforgivable "folly," but she saw in it the mysterious "power and wisdom of God" (cf. 1 Cor 23-24).

Her feast day is an occasion for all of us to become scientists of the Cross and its full redemptive power — even in the midst of the world's greatest evils!

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.