Today we celebrate the memorial of St. Teresa Benedicta neé Edith Stein. Born to a Jewish family in what was then part of the German Empire, she converted to Christianity and entered the Carmelite order.
The National Socialists Party came to rise in a time of political and economic crisis, and slowly without most ordinary Germans being aware developed into what we think of when we hear the word Nazi. Their initial steps seems reasonable and logical.
They did not begin by exterminating Jews. They began to slowly redefine who was really German.
In the end being born in the empire was not enough to make her German, and by their new strict standards her baptism did not make her Christian. Slowly over time they had refined German to mean only people like them, and in their eyes she was a filthy Jew foreigner. She was picked up, deported and died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
Today we turn to St Teresa and pray that through her intercession every shadow of racism may be eradicated from our world.
