Week Four Saint

Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), also Theresa, was the foundress of the Discalced Carmelites and one of the first two women to be named a Doctor of the Church (with Catherine of Siena). She is also the patron saint of Spain. Born Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda near Ávila, Spain, of a large, aristocratic Castilian family with Jewish ancestry, she entered the Carmelite monastery of the Incarnation at Ávila in 1535 after reading the letters of St. Jerome during a period of convalescence from an illness that may have been psychosomatic. A year after her solemn profession, she fell seriously ill again and had to leave the community for a three-year period of treatment and recovery. Whatever the source of this second illness, however, the cure was extreme and painful: purges and bloodlettings that left her paralyzed for almost a year. Except for that interruption, her first twenty years as a religious were marked by devotion and fidelity to the way of life, but she felt that something was missing and found it very difficult to pray. The atmosphere in the convent was relatively relaxed, and there was much contact between the nuns and the ladies and gentlemen of the town.

In 1554, while praying before a statue of the wounded Christ, she underwent a profound spiritual conversion. She later wrote: “When I fell to prayer again and looked at Christ hanging poor and naked upon the Cross, I felt I could not bear to be rich. So I besought him with tears to bring it to pass that I might be as poor as he.” Identifying herself spiritually with Mary Magdalene and Augustine, whose Confessions deeply influenced her, she received encouragement from Francis Borgia and Peter of Alcántara to accept her mystical and visionary experiences as having their origin in God. Between then and 1560, these experiences became the subject of gossip, and she was exposed to misunderstanding, ridicule, and even persecution. Then, after twenty-five years or more of unreformed Carmelite life, she felt the need to found a house of her own where the primitive Carmelite Rule would be strictly observed.

In 1562, with thirteen other nuns, she established such a convent in Ávila, under the patronage of St. Joseph, and in the same year composed the first draft of her Life, which included a treatise on mystical prayer using the imagery of water. Thereafter, she always signed herself Teresa de Jesus. The first reformed convent would become the prototype for sixteen others she would found in her lifetime. Their mode of life would be marked by personal poverty, signified by the coarse brown wool habit, leather sandals, and beds of straw, manual work, abstinence from meat, and solitude. Teresa herself wore a hair shirt under her habit and nettles for bracelets and carried a scourge, which she used on herself whenever spiritually required. On one occasion she donned a halter and saddle weighted with stones and was led by another nun into the refectory on all fours. But there were also experiences of levitation, and their frequent occurrence led to great envy and resentment on the part of others. Through all of this, Teresa was an extraordinarily gifted administrator, so gifted, in fact, that her most recent biography has observed: “It was a wonder, given the complexities of her personal and business transactions, that Teresa had any spiritual life at all.” She was especially attentive to the task of weeding out unacceptable candidates for convent life. “God preserve us from stupid nuns!” she once declared.

Her many writings were done under obedience, but also with the encouragement of the Dominican Domingo Báñez, one of the most prominent theologians of the time, who became her spiritual director and confessor and who defended her before civil and ecclesiastical tribunals. In 1566 she wrote The Way of Perfection and her Meditations on the Song of Songs. In 1567 she met for the first time a newly ordained priest, John of St. Matthias (later known as John of the Cross), whom Teresa convinced to remain a Carmelite (rather than become a Carthusian) and to collaborate with her in the reform of the order. Not surprisingly, this effort would evoke as much opposition from the unreformed friars as her earlier reforms of Carmelite nuns had done. In 1568 she saw to the inauguration of the first of the reform houses of friars at Duruelo. Between 1562 and 1582 she would found seventeen Discalced convents and this one firary, while traveling across the rugged Castilian countryside by mule. After 1576, however, he reform program also came to an end. So virulent was the resistance that John of the Cross was kidnapped and imprisoned, and her closest friend and superior of the Discalced friars, Father Jerome Gracián, was placed under house arrest, while the papal nuncio to Spain derided her as “an unstable, restless, disobedient and contumacious female.” Teresa appealed to the king, Philip II, for support. As a result of it, peace was made in 1580 when the Discalced Carmelites were given their own province separate from the Calced. This proved to be the first step toward complete independence as a distinct order in 1594.

In 1577 she began the composition of her masterpiece, The Interior Castle, a disguised autobiography written in the third person, while her Life was in the hands of the Inquisition. The book describes the mystical life through the symbolism of seven mansions, with the first three mansions as the premystical journey to God and the next four mansions as growth in the mystical life. With the imagery of the Song of Songs in the background, Teresa saw spiritual betrothal occurring in the sixth mansion and spiritual marriage in the seventh. For her, the test of growth in the mystical life was love of neighbor. Although she was profoundly contemplative, she led an active life not only as a reformed of Carmelite life, but also as an adviser to and correspondent with countless people of every station in life.

Teresa died on October 4, 1582, at the convent of Alba de Torres, while on her way back to Ávila from Burgos, where she had made her last foundation. The nuns who were present at her death testified that a luscious, paradisiacal scent emanated from her body, and later, when one of her confessors ordered her grave there to be opened, her body was still intact and redolent of lilies. The confessor severed various parts of her body to be distributed among her powerful admirers, and her cult spread rapidly throughout Spain. One of her hands ended up with Generalissimo Franco, leader of Spain, who kept it by his bed until his death in 1975. The most famous artistic representation of her is a sculpture by Bernini (1598–1680) in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.

Teresa of Ávila was beatified in 1614 and canonized in 1622 (along with Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Philip Neri, and was one of the first two women to be named a Doctor of the Church, by Pope Paul VI in 1970 in recognition of her outstanding contribution to mystical theology and Christian spirituality. Her feast, which was extended to the universal Church in 1688, is on the General Roman Calendar and is also celebrated by the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the USA. Ordinarily, the feast day would correspond with the day of death, October 4, but in 1582, on the very day after her death, the Gregorian reform of the calendar was adopted and ten days were omitted from the month of October.

McBrien, Richard P. Lives of the Saints: from Mary and St. Francis of Assisi to John XXIII and Mother Teresa. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001. 421–24.

St. Teresa of Ávila,
who lived a life marked by the steadfastness of fasting, penitence, and sacrifice, 
pray for us.

St. Teresa of Ávila,
who suffered ridicule and persecution for your openness to the work of God in your life, 
pray for us.

St. Teresa of Ávila,
who opened yourself to the mystical healing touch of Christ,​​​​​​​
pray for us.