MEMORIAL OF SAINT TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS (SAINT EDITH STEIN), VIRGIN AND MARTYR AND SAINT ROMANUS, MARTYR ~ FEAST DAY – AUGUST 9TH: Today, we celebrate the Memorial of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, (St. Edith Stein), Virgin and Martyr and Saint Romanus, Martyr. Through the intercession of our Blessed Mother Mary and the Saints on this feast day, we humbly pray for the sick and dying, especially those suffering from cancers and other terminal diseases. We also pray for the poor and needy, for peace, love and unity in our families and our world. And we continue to pray for our Holy Father, the Clergy, for vocations to the priesthood and religious life, for the Church, for persecuted christians, for the conversion of sinners, and Christians all over the world.🙏
SAINT TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS (ST. EDITH STEIN), VIRGIN AND MARTYR: St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as St. Edith Stein (1891-1942) was 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. St. Teresa was born Edith Stein to Jewish parents in Breslau, Poland on October 12, 1891 – a date that coincided with her family’s celebration of Yom Kippur, the Jewish “day of atonement.” Edith Stein was the youngest child of a large Jewish family. Edith’s father died when she was just two years old, and she gave up the practice of her Jewish faith as an adolescent about the age of 14. As a young woman with profound intellectual gifts, Edith gravitated toward the study of philosophy and became a pupil of the renowned professor Edmund Husserl in 1913. Through her studies, the non-religious Edith met several Christians whose intellectual and spiritual lives she admired. After earning her degree with the highest honors from Gottingen University in 1915, she served as a nurse in an Austrian field hospital during World War I. She returned to academic work in 1916, earning her doctorate after writing a highly-regarded thesis on the phenomenon of empathy. She remained interested in the idea of religious commitment, but had not yet made such a commitment herself.
In 1921, while visiting friends, Edith spent an entire night reading the autobiography of the 16th century Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila. “When I had finished the book,” she later recalled, “I said to myself: This is the truth.” She was baptized into the Catholic Church on the first day of January, 1922. Edith intended to join the Carmelites immediately after her conversion, but would ultimately have to wait another 11 years before taking this step. Instead, she taught at a Dominican school, and gave numerous public lectures on women’s issues. She spent 1931 writing a study of St. Thomas Aquinas, and took a university teaching position in 1932. In 1933, the rise of Nazism, combined with Edith’s Jewish ethnicity, put an end to her teaching career. After a painful parting with her mother, who did not understand her Christian conversion, she entered a Carmelite convent at Cologne in 1934, taking the name “Teresa Benedicta of the Cross” as a symbol of her acceptance of suffering. “I felt,” she wrote, “that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take upon themselves on everybody’s behalf.” She saw it as her vocation “to intercede with God for everyone,” but she prayed especially for the Jews of Germany whose tragic fate was becoming clear. There she completed a synthesis of Thomist Philosophy and modern thought entitled, Finite and Eternal Being.
Four years later, after living in the Cologne Carmel (1934-1938), because of the ramification of politics in Germany, Teresa was sent to Echt, Holland, Netherlands There she wrote Science of the Cross, the life of St. John of the Cross from a phenomenological perspective. “I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death,” she wrote in 1939, “so that the Lord will be accepted by His people and that His kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world.” After completing her final work, the study of St. John of the Cross entitled “The Science of the Cross,” St. Teresa Benedicta was arrested along with her sister Rosa (who had also become a Catholic), and the members of her religious community, on August 7, 1942. The arrests came in retaliation against a protest letter by the Dutch Bishops, decrying the Nazi treatment of Jews. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942. She was killed in the gas chambers of the camp. St. Teresa was beatified in 1987 at the Cologne cathedral by Pope John Paul II and canonized on October 11, 1998, by the same Pontiff and proclaimed her a co-patroness of Europe the next year.
PRAYER: God of our fathers, You led St. Teresa Benedicta, Your Martyr, to acknowledge Your Crucified Son and to intimate Him even in death. Grant, through her intercession, that all people may come to know Christ the Savior and through Him attain Your eternal vision. Amen 🙏
SAINT ROMANUS, MARTYR: St. Romanus was as a soldier in the legion of emperor Valerian in Rome, at the time of the arraignment and interrogation of Saint Lawrence who had been imprisoned for his refusal to surrender the treasury of the Roman Church to the Empire. St. Romanus was marveled at St. Lawrence virtuous courage and heroic patience during his persecution. Seeing the joy and constancy and the absolute silence of that holy martyr during Lawrence’s first torments, St. Romanus could not understand how a creature of flesh and blood could be thus tormented without opening his mouth to complain. St. Romanus was so inspired that he was moved to embrace the Faith, he approached the holy Martyr, St. Lawrence and asked to be received into the Faith and at that very moment. Addressing himself to Saint Lawrence, still on the rack, he asked to become a Christian.
St. Lawrence was untied and imprisoned, and later was able to respond to the pressing request of the soldier, Romanus who brought him in prison the water for his baptism. St. Lawrence gave the necessary instructions to St. Romanus and baptized him in the prison. This brave Roman soldier then publicly proclaimed his conversion to Christianity to his fellow-soldiers, and he was immediately arrested and convicted. St. Romanus was summoned before the tribunal, for everyone soon learned of his conversion. He said fearlessly and joyfully, there as he had said elsewhere, I am a Christian! He was condemned and immediately achieved the crown of martyrdom by being beheaded on August 9, 258, the day before the execution of St. Lawrence. The body of Saint Romanus was buried by a priest in a cavern on the road to Tiburtina outside the walls of Rome, but his remains were translated to Lucca, where they are kept under the high altar of a beautiful church which bears his name.
PRAYER: Almighty and ever-living God, graciously pour out Your Spirit upon us. Let our hearts be filled with that true love which enabled Your holy Martyr Romanus to overcome all bodily torments. Amen 🙏