Born: March 28, 1515, Ávila, Spain
Died: October 4, 1582, Alba de Tormes;
canonized 1622; feast day October 15
Saint Teresa of Ávila was a Spanish mystic, influential author, and founder of the religious order of Discalced, or Barefoot, Carmelites, also known as Teresa of Jesus.
Teresa de Cepeday Ahumada was born in Ávila on March 28, 1515. She was educated in an Augustinian convent and, about 1535, entered the local Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation. In 1555, after many years marked by serious illness and increasingly rigorous religious exercises, she experienced a profound awakening, involving visions of Jesus Christ, hell, angels and demons; at times she felt sharp pains that she claimed were caused by the tip of an angel’s lance piercing her heart. Long troubled by the slack discipline into which the Carmelites had relapsed, she determined to devote herself to the reform of the order. Through papal intervention in her behalf, she overcame the bitter opposition of her immediate ecclesiastical superiors and in 1562 succeeded in founding at Ávila the Convent of St. Joseph, the first community of reformed, or Discalced, Carmelite nuns. She enforced strict observance of the original, severe Carmelite rules at the convent. Her reforms won the approbation of the head of the order, and in 1567 she was authorized to establish similar religious houses for men.
Teresa organized the new branch of the old order, with the aid of St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic and Doctor of the Church. Although she was harassed at every step by powerful and hostile church officials yet she helped to establish 16 foundations for women and 14 for men. Two years before her death the Discalced Carmelites received papal recognition as an independent monastic body. Teresa died in Alba de Tormes on October 4, 1582.
Teresa was a gifted organizer endowed with common sense, tact, intelligence, courage and humour, as well as a mystic of extraordinary spiritual depth. She purified the religious life of Spain and, in a period when Protestantism gained ground elsewhere in Europe, strengthened the forces that reformed the Roman Catholic church from within.
Teresa’s writings, all published posthumously, are valued as unique contributions to mystical and devotional literature and as masterpieces of Spanish prose. Among her works are a spiritual autobiography; The Way of Perfection (after 1565), advice to her nuns; The Interior Castle (1577), an eloquent description of the contemplative life; and The Foundations (1573-82), an account of the origins of the Discalced Carmelites. English translations of her complete works appeared in three volumes in 1946.
Teresa was canonized in 1622; she was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, the first woman to be so named, in 1970. Her feast day is October 15.
