The icon below shows St Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) with an inscription in German, which is translated as: ‘The innermost essence of love is self-offering. The entryway to all things is the Cross’. She bore this out in her own life and death, when she died on this day in Auschwitz in 1942, exactly eighty years ago.

May she pray for us in our own lives of self-offering, and may God bless you this day.