Saint Teresa of Ávila

In a rigidly male-dominated society, at a time when the Inquisition was examining every word, a sickly, middle-aged nun of Jewish descent rose up and carried out a reform that shook the Church.

She restored the original spirit of poverty of the Carmelites, in what became the Reformed or Discalced Carmel, and she left some of the greatest works of mystical literature of all time: The Interior Castle, The Way of Perfection, and her Life.

As a child, Teresa was bright, lively and full of imagination. She and her brother Rodrigo were so enthralled by the lives of the martyrs that at seven the two of them ran away from home to go to the land of the Moors and ask to be beheaded as martyrs for Jesus. Their uncle happened to catch the two children outside the city gate and brought them home.

As a teenager, after her mother’s death, Teresa was drawn to romantic tales of chivalry, fine clothes, jewelry and frivolous friends. Worried about his daughter’s future, her father sent her as a boarder to the convent of Our Lady of Grace in Ávila.

With her charm, intelligence and wit, Teresa quickly became the star of the parlor. She spent hours every day talking with visitors, and little by little neglected interior prayer.

At the same time, one serious illness after another struck her: a paralysis left her unable to move for nearly three years, at one point seemingly dead, with a grave already dug for her. Though her body was partly healed through the intercession of Saint Joseph, her soul was still torn for nearly twenty years between the love of God on one side and empty attachments to the world on the other.

In 1567, the Prior General of the Carmelites came on visitation, was deeply impressed by her work, and gave her authority to extend the reform throughout Spain, and permission to found houses for men as well.

It was during this period that she met a gifted young friar, Saint John of the Cross. She passed the fire of reform on to him, and he became her able partner in founding the men’s branch of the Reformed Carmel.

For the next twenty years, that sickly middle-aged woman became a “tireless traveler”. She rode in rattling mule carts all over Spain, through scorching summer sun and winter snow and ice, to found seventeen convents for women.

She faced countless storms: the suspicion of the Inquisition and the fierce opposition of the friars of the old observance — who had John of the Cross imprisoned in a dark cell in Toledo and ordered her confined under house arrest in Toledo.

Yet Teresa always kept her wit and her complete trust. Once, when her mule cart overturned in a muddy stream in a thunderstorm, she looked up to heaven and complained: “Lord, why do You let me suffer so many trials?”, and when she heard the Lord answer in her heart: “Teresa, that is how I treat My friends!”, she replied wittily:

“No wonder You have so few friends!”

She taught her nuns:

“Teresa alone is nothing but a useless zero; but Teresa plus God’s grace and a little money can do anything!”

In “The Interior Castle”, El Castillo Interior, she compares the human soul to a splendid castle made of clear diamond, with seven sets of rooms, seven mansions. The life of prayer is a journey from the outer rooms — full of distraction and sin — gradually toward the deepest center of the castle, the seventh mansion, where the Holy Trinity dwells in the highest mystical union.

She gave a famous definition of prayer:

“Interior prayer is not a matter of thinking much, but of loving much... It is an intimate conversation between friends, taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us!”

In the autumn of 1582, after a grueling journey to Burgos to found a new convent, Mother Teresa was completely exhausted. She made her way to the convent of the Annunciation at Alba de Tormes near Salamanca — the eighth of the seventeen convents she founded in her lifetime, established in 1571. Lying in her sickbed in a small, cramped room of that convent, she knew the day of meeting her Bridegroom had come.

That very night, Spain switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, skipping ten days, so her feast was set for October 15 each year.

Pope Paul V beatified her in 1614, and on March 12, 1622, Pope Gregory XV solemnly canonized Teresa of Ávila, on the same day as Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier and Philip Neri.

On September 27, 1970, Pope Paul VI made history: he solemnly proclaimed Saint Teresa of Ávila the first woman Doctor of the Church. To this day her incorrupt body is kept in a reliquary above the main altar in the very room where she died at Alba de Tormes, along with her heart and left arm, venerated separately as treasured relics. In more than four hundred years, the tomb has been opened publicly for veneration only three times: in 1760, in 1914, and most recently in 2025 for the five hundred and tenth anniversary of her birth. In Ávila, on the very site of the house where she was born, a convent and small museum were built that keep her rosary, her rope sandals and the desk she used for writing.

“Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you; all things are passing, God alone never changes. Patience obtains all things; whoever has God lacks nothing: God alone suffices!”