All are called to be saints.
Large numbers of saints have been added tot he liturgical calendar by Saint Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict. Francis has continued this trend. The calendar of saints before was full enough - although many fewer saints were mentioned specifically in the liturgical calendar. So why?
Most of the earlier saints were simply not well known - many we have only a birth date or date of martyrdom. And scraps of legend. They also did not particularly well represnet the people of the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries, life was so different back in the 3rd Century! So a number of more modern saints is usefull and proper. It is certain that a LOT more saints are about us then we take notice of - the person in the post office queue next to you might well be one. Even one if us is called to be a saint, by virtue of our baptism. But some saints do become worthy of notice, as their lieves teach us something of how to live or lives in modern times.
Edith Stein certianly does.
She was born into a practising Jewish family. She had a distinguished career as a philosopher and received a doctorate at the University of Freiburg, but her academic career was impeded because she was a woman.
Reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila brought about her conversion to Catholicism and she was baptized on 1 January 1922. She taught at a Dominican girls’ school and studied Catholic philosophy. She became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster but was thrown out of her post in 1933 as a result of the Nazi régime’s anti-Semitic legislation.
She entered a Carmelite monastery in Cologne and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her order moved her to the Netherlands to keep her safe from the growing Nazi threat. While a Carmelite she wrote an important philosophical book, seeking to combine the phenomenology of her former teacher Edmund Husserl with the philosophy of Aquinas, and she also wrote on St John of the Cross.
On 20 July 1942 the Dutch Bishops’ Conference had a statement read in all churches condemning Nazi racism. In retaliation the authorities ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts to Christianity. Teresa Benedicta was taken to Auschwitz and killed on 9 August 1942.