Patronage
2 saints are venerated as patrons of World Youth Day, led by Teresa of Calcutta (feast day September 5).
1910 — 1997 · Feast day: September 5
Mother Teresa — the 'Saint of the Gutters' — heard a call within a call to serve the poorest of the poor in Kolkata's slums. She founded the Missionaries of Charity to bring the abandoned dying off the streets and care for them with dignity, while secretly enduring a decades-long 'dark night of the soul' without faltering in her work.
October 12, 1891 — August 9, 1942 · Feast day: August 9
Edith Stein was a Jewish philosopher who served as a Red Cross nurse during WWI, earned her doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1916, and converted to Catholicism in 1922 after a single night reading Teresa of Ávila. She entered the Carmelite order in 1933, was seized by the Gestapo in the Netherlands in 1942, and was killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz on August 9 — her feast day.