St Teresa of Avila: "For ever, for ever, for ever"

Becoming more and more convinced of her own unworthiness, she had recourse to the two great penitents, St Mary Magdalen and St Augustine.

(A.D. 1582)

St Teresa, one of the greatest, most attractive and widely appreciated women whom the world has ever known, and the only one to whom the title doctor of the Church is popularly, though not officially, applied, speaks with loving appreciation of her parents. The one was Alonso Sanchez de Cepeda, the other Beatrice Davila y Ahumada, his second wife, who bore him nine children; there were three children by his first marriage, and of this large family St Teresa says, “all, through the goodness of God, were like our parents in being virtuous, except myself”. She was born at or near Avila in Castile on March 28, 1515, and when only seven took great pleasure in the lives of the saints, in which she spent much time with a brother called Rodrigo, who was near the same age. They were much impressed by the thought of eternity, and they used to repeat often together, “For ever, for ever, for ever”, admiring the victories of the saints and the everlasting glory which they possess; “For ever they shall see God.” The martyrs seemed to them to have bought Heaven very cheaply by their torments, and they resolved to go into the country of the Moors, in hopes of dying for their faith. They set out secretly, praying as they went that they might lay down their lives for Christ. But when they had got as far as Adaja they were met by an uncle, and brought back to their frightened mother, who reprimanded them; whereupon Rodrigo laid all the blame on his sister.

Teresa and the same little brother then wanted to become hermits at home, and built themselves hermitages with piles of stones in the garden, but could never finish them. Teresa sought to be much alone, and had in her room a picture of our Saviour discoursing with the Samaritan woman at the well, before which she often repeated the words, “Lord, give me of that water that I may not thirst”. Her mother died when she was fourteen, and “as soon as I began to understand how great a loss I had sustained I was very much afflicted; and so I went before an image of our Blessed Lady and besought her with tears that she would be my mother”. Teresa and Rodrigo began to spend hours reading romances and trying to write them themselves. “These tales”, she says in the Autobiography, “did not fail to cool my good desires, and were the cause of my falling insensibly into other defects. I was so enchanted that I could not be content if I had not some new tale in my hands. I began to imitate the fashions, to take delight in being well dressed, to have great care of my hands, to make use of perfumes, and to affect all the vain trimmings which my position in the world allowed.” The change in Teresa was sufficiently noticeable to disturb the mind of her father, and he placed his daughter, who was then fifteen, with a convent of Augustinian nuns in Avila where many young women of her rank were educated.

After a year and a half spent in this convent Teresa fell sick, and her father took her home, where she began to deliberate seriously about undertaking the religious life, in regard to which she was moved both by emotional attraction and repulsion. It was by the reading of a book that she was enabled to make up her mind and to fix her will, and this book was, very characteristically, the Letters of St Jerome, whose realism and fire found an answering echo in her Castilian spirit. She told her father that she wished to become a nun, but he would by no means give his consent: after his death she might dispose of herself as she pleased. Fearing she might relapse, though she felt a severe interior conflict in leaving her father, she went secretly to the convent of the Incarnation of the Carmelite nuns outside Avila, where her great friend, Sister Jane Suarez, lived.

“I remember … that whilst I was going out of my father’s house, I believe the sharpness of sense will not be greater in the very instant or agony of my death than it was then. … There was no such love of God in me at that time as was able to quench that love which I bore to my father and my friends.”

She was then twenty years old and, the step being taken, Don Alonso ceased to oppose it. A year later she was professed. An illness, which seized her before her profession, increased very much after it, and her father got her removed out of her convent. Sister Jane Suarez bore her company, and she remained in the hands of physicians. Their treatment only made her worse (she seems to have been suffering from malignant malaria), and she could take no rest day or night. The doctors gave her up, and she got worse and worse. Under these afflictions she was helped by the prayer which she had then begun to use. Her devout uncle Peter had put into her hands a little book of Father Francis de Osuna, called the Third Spiritual Alphabet. Taking this book for her guide she applied herself to mental prayer, but for want of an experienced instructor she made little solid progress. But after three years’ suffering Teresa was restored to bodily health.

Her prudence and charity and, not least, her personal charm, gained her the esteem of all that knew her, and an affectionate and grateful disposition inclined her to return the civilities which others showed her. By an irregular custom of society quite common in Spain in those days, visitors of all kinds were freely received and mixed with, and Teresa spent much time in conversing with seculars in the parlour of the monastery. She began to neglect mental prayer, and persuaded herself that this was a part of humility, as her unrecollected life rendered her unworthy to converse so much or so familiarly with God. She also said to herself that there could be no danger of sin in what so many others, more virtuous than she, did; and for her neglect of meditation she alleged the infirmities to which she was subject. But she adds,

“This reason of bodily weakness was not a sufficient cause to make me give up so good a thing, which requires not corporal strength, but only love and custom. In the midst of sickness the best of prayer may be made; and it is a mistake to think that it can only be made in solitude.”

When her father died his confessor, a Dominican friar, pointed out to Teresa the dangerous state she was in. At his instance she returned to the practice of private prayer and never again abandoned it. But she had not yet the courage to follow God perfectly, or entirely to renounce dissipating her time and gifts. During all these years of wavering and yet of gradually increasing strength and growing purpose, St Teresa tells us she never tired of listening to sermons, “however bad they were”; but in prayer her thoughts were “more busied about desiring that the hour resolved to be spent in prayer might come quickly to an end, still listening when the clock would strike, than upon better things”. Becoming more and more convinced of her own unworthiness, she had recourse to the two great penitents, St Mary Magdalen and St Augustine, and with them there were associated two events decisive in fixing her will upon the pursuit of religious perfection. One was the reading of St Augustine’s Confessions; the other was a movement to penitence before a picture of our suffering Lord, in which “I felt St Mary Magdalen come to my assistance … from that day I have gone on improving much ever since in my spiritual life”.

After she had finally withdrawn herself from the pleasures of social intercourse and other occasions of dissipation and faults (which she exceedingly exaggerated), St Teresa was favoured by God very frequently with the prayer of quiet, and also with that of union, which latter sometimes continued a long time with great increase of joy and love, and God began to visit her with intellectual visions and interior communications. The warning of certain women who had been miserably duped by imagination and the Devil much impressed her and, though she was persuaded her graces were from God, she was perplexed, and consulted so many persons that, though binding them to secrecy, the affair was divulged abroad, to her mortification and confusion. One to whom she spoke was Francis de Salsedo, a married man who was an example of virtue to the whole town. He introduced her to Dr Daza, a learned and virtuous priest, who judged her to be deluded by the Devil, saying that such divine favours were not consistent with a life so full of imperfections as she claimed hers to be. Teresa was alarmed and not satisfied, and Don Francis (to whom the saint says she owed her salvation and her comfort) bade her not to be discouraged. He recommended that she should consult one of the fathers of the newly-formed Society of Jesus, to whom she made a general confession in which, with her sins, she gave him an account of her manner of prayer and her extraordinary favours. The father assured her these were divine graces, but told her she had neglected to lay the true foundation of an interior life. On his advice, though he judged her experiences in prayer to be from God, she endeavoured for two months to resist and reject them. But her resistance was in vain.

Another Jesuit, Father Balthasar Alvarez, told her she would do well to beg of God that He would direct her to do what was most pleasing to Him, and for that purpose to recite every day the Veni Creator Spiritus. She did so, and one day whilst she was saying that hymn she was seized with a rapture, in which she heard these words spoken to her within her soul, “I will not have you hold conversation with men, but with angels”. The saint afterwards had frequent experience of such interior speeches and explains how they are even more distinct and clear than those which men hear with their bodily ears, and how they are also operative, producing in the soul the strongest impressions and sentiments of love, and filling her with an assurance of their truth, with joy and with peace. Whilst Father Alvarez was her director she suffered grievous persecutions, and indeed during two of them, extreme desolation of soul intermixed with gleams of great comfort and enlightenment. It was her desire that all her heavenly communications should be kept secret, but they became a common subject in conversation, and she was censured and ridiculed as deluded or an hypocrite. Father Alvarez, who was a good man but timorous, durst not oppose the tide of disapproval, though he continued to hear her confessions. In 1557 St Peter of Alcantara came to Avila, and of course visited the now famous, or notorious, Carmelite. He declared that nothing appeared to him more evident than that her soul was conducted by the Spirit of God; but he foretold that she was not come to an end of her persecutions and sufferings. If the various proofs by which it pleased God to try Teresa served to purify her virtue, the heavenly communications with which she was favoured served to humble and fortify her soul, to give her a strong disrelish of the things of this life, and to fire her with the desire of possessing God. In raptures she was sometimes not content with drawing the soul to Himself, but He must needs draw up the very body too, even whilst it is mortal and composed of so unclean a clay as we have made it by our sins. During these raptures or ecstasies the greatness and goodness of God, the excess of His love, the sweetness of His service, are placed with a clearness which can be in no way expressed. The desire she understands, she says, “I lost the fear of death, of which I had formerly a great apprehension.” During this time took place such things as the Desire of Heaven with espousals, mystical marriage, and extraordinary manifestations.

Of this last she gives the following account (transverberatio) of the saint’s heart, her left side, in bodily form.

“I saw an angel close by me. Though I have visions of angels frequently, I yet see them only by an intellectual vision, such as I have spoken of before. … He was not large, but small of stature, and most beautiful—his face burning, as if he were one of the highest angels, and in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the end of the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it.”

The saint’s desire of this excessive pain that she might be speedily united to God was tempered by her desire to suffer for His love, and she writes,

“It seems to me there is no reason why I should live but only to suffer, and accordingly this is the thing which I beg with most affection of God. Sometimes I say to Him with my whole heart: Lord, either to die or to suffer; I beg no other thing for myself.”

After the death of St Teresa her heart was found to bear a long and deep mark, as it were a scar; and her response to this remarkable happening was in the following year (1560) to make a vow that she would in everything do always that which seemed to be the most perfect and best pleasing to God. To bind oneself by vow to such an undertaking is an action so humanly rash that it can only be justified by the successful keeping of it. St Teresa kept her vow.

The account which this saint has given in her Autobiography of these visions, revelations and raptures carries with it the intrinsic marks of evidence. It is not possible attentively to peruse it and not be convinced of the sincerity of the author, by the genuine simplicity of the style, scrupulous care, and fear of exaggerating, characteristics which appear in all her writings. Her doctrine is called by the Church, in the prayer of her festival, caelestis, “heavenly”. In it secret places of the soul are laid open. The most elusive matters, which experience alone can teach but no words utter, are explained with greater perspicuity than the subject seems capable of bearing; and this was done by a relatively uneducated woman, in the straightforward vernacular of Castile, which she had learnt “in her mother’s womb”, the rough tongue of the folk of Avila; a woman who wrote alone, without the assistance of books, without study or acquired abilities, who entered upon the recital of divine things with reluctance, submitting everything without reserve to the judgement of her confessor, and much more to that of the Church, and complaining that by this task she was hindered from spinning. She undertook to write about herself only out of obedience to her confessor: “Obedience is put to the test in different commands”, she said. And nothing seems a clearer proof of how perfectly St Teresa was imbued with sincere humility than the artless manner in which she constantly, and not on certain occasions only, speaks of herself with depreciation. When she was attacked at Seville and someone asked her how she could hold her peace, she answered with a smile, “No music is so pleasing to my ears. They have reason for what they say, and speak the truth.” Her patience under sickness, provocation and disappointment; her firm confidence in God and in her crucified Redeemer under all storms and difficulties; and her undaunted courage in bearing incredible hardship and persecution are themselves a practical commentary on the words. The necessity of the spirit of prayer, the way it is practised, and the nature of its fruits are set out incomparably in her writings. These works were written during the years in which she was actively engaged in the most difficult business of founding convents of reformed Carmelite nuns and friars, quite apart from their nature and contents, are significant of St Teresa’s vigour, industry and power of recollection. She wrote the Way of Perfection for the direction of her nuns, and the book of Foundations for their edification and encouragement, but the Interior Castle may be said to have been written for the instruction of the Church. In it she is a doctor of the spiritual life.

The Carmelite nuns, and indeed those of other orders as well, were very much relaxed from their early austerity and enthusiasm in sixteenth-century Spain. We have seen how the parlour at Avila was a sort of social centre for the ladies and gentlemen of the town, and that the nuns went out of their enclosure on the slightest pretext; those who wanted an easy and sheltered life without responsibilities could find it in a convent. The size of the communities was both a cause and an effect of this mitigation; there were 140 nuns in the convent at Avila, and the result afterwards wrung from St Teresa the cry, “Experience has taught me what a house full of women is like. God preserve us from such a state!” This state of things was taken for granted, there was no rebuking consciousness among religious at large that the nature of their daily life fell far short of what was required by their profession according to the mind of their founders, so that when a Carmelite of the Incarnation house at Avila, her niece, began to talk of the possibility of the foundation of a small community bound to a more perfect way of life the idea struck St Teresa not as a very natural one but as an inspiration from Heaven. She had been a nun for 25 years: she now determined to undertake the establishment of such a reformed convent, and received a promise of immediate help from a wealthy widow, Doña Guiomar de Ulloa. The project was approved by St Peter of Alcantara, St Louis Bertrand, and the Bishop of Avila, and Teresa procured the licence and approbation of Father Gregory Fernandez, prior provincial of the Carmelites; but no sooner had the project taken shape than he was obliged by the objections which were raised to recall his licence. A storm fell upon Teresa through the violent opposition which was made by her fellow nuns, the nobility, the magistrates and the people. Father Ibañez, a Dominican, secretly encouraged her, and assisted Doña Guiomar to pursue the enterprise, together with Doña Juana de Ahumada, a married sister of the saint, who began with her husband to build a new convent at Avila in 1561, but in such a manner that the world took it for a house intended for herself and her family. Their son Gonzalez, a little child, was crushed by a wall which fell upon him while playing around this building, and he was carried without giving any signs of life to Teresa, who, taking him in her arms, prayed to God and after some minutes restored him perfectly sound to his mother, as was proved in the process of the saint’s canonization. The child used afterwards often to tell his aunt that it was her duty to forward his salvation by her prayers, seeing it was owing to her that he was not long ago in Heaven.

Eventually a brief arrived from Rome authorizing the establishment of the new convent. St Peter of Alcantara, Don Francis de Salsedo and Dr Daza had persuaded the bishop to concur, the new monastery of St Joseph was set up by his authority, and on St Bartholomew’s day in 1562 mass was celebrated in the chapel and the saint’s niece and three other novices taking the habit. Hereupon great excitement broke out in the town. Masses of people with some trepidation, “thinking they would certainly put me in prison”, and she went in to give an explanation of her conduct before the prioress and Father Angel de Salazar, the prior provincial, in which, she admits, they had a certain case against her. However, Father Angel promised she should return to St Joseph’s when the popular excitement had died down. The people of Avila looked on the new foundation as uncalled for, were nervous of suspicious novelties, and feared that an unendowed convent would be too heavy a burden on the town. Both the mayor and magistrates would have had the new monastery demolished, had not Father Bañez, a Dominican, dissuaded them from so hasty a resolution. Amidst slanders and persecution the saint remained calm, recommending to God His own work, and was comforted by our Lord in a vision. In the meantime Francis de Salsedo and other friends of the new establishment deputed a priest to go before the royal council to plead for the convent, the two Dominicans, Ibañez and Bañez, reasoned with the bishop and the provincial, the public clamour abated, and at the end of four months Father Angel sent Teresa to the new convent, whither she was followed by four other nuns from the old house.

Strict enclosure was established with almost perpetual silence, and the most austere poverty, at first without any settled revenues; the nuns wore habits of coarse serge, sandals instead of shoes (whence they are called “discalced”), and were bound to perpetual abstinence. At first St Teresa would not admit more than thirteen nuns to a community, but in those which should be founded afterwards, and not to subsist solely on alms, she afterwards allowed twenty-one. The prior general of the Carmelites, John Baptist Rubeo (Rossi), came to Avila in 1567, and was charmed with the foundress and the wise regulations of the house. He gave St Teresa full authority to found other convents upon the same plan, in spite of the fact that St Joseph’s had been established without his knowledge or leave, and she even received from him a licence for the foundation of two houses of reformed friars (“Contemplative Carmelites”) in Castile. St Teresa passed five years in her convent of St Joseph with thirteen nuns, being herself the first and most diligent, not only at prayer but also in spinning, sweeping the house or any other work. “I think that they were the most tranquil years of my life”, she writes. “There I enjoyed the tranquillity and calmness which my soul has often since longed for. … His divine Majesty sent us what was necessary without asking, and if at any time we were in want (which was very seldom) the joy of these holy souls was so much the greater.” She is not content with vague generalities, but records such enticing details as of the nun who obediently planted the cucumber horizontally and of the water which was piped into the house from a source that the plumbers said was too low.

In August 1567 Teresa went to Medina del Campo and, having conquered many difficulties, founded there a second convent. The Countess de la Cerda earnestly desired to found a convent of this order at her town of Malagon, and Teresa went to see her about it, incidentally paying a visit to Madrid which she describes as “boring”. When this convent was safely launched she went to Valladolid and there founded another. St Teresa made her next foundation at Toledo. She met great obstacles, and had no more than four or five ducats when she began. But she said, “Teresa and this money are indeed nothing: but God, Teresa and these ducats suffice”. Here a young woman who had gained a reputation of virtue petitioned to be admitted to the habit, and added, “I will bring my Bible with me.” “What!” said the saint, “your Bible? Do not come to us. We are poor women who know nothing but how to spin and to do as we are told.” At Medina del Campo she had met with two Carmelite friars who were desirous to embrace her reform, Antony-of-Jesus (de Heredia), then prior there, and John Yepes (afterwards John-of-the-Cross). As soon, therefore, as an opportunity offered itself she founded a convent for men at a village called Duruelo in 1568, and in 1569 a second at Pastrana, both in extreme poverty and austerity. After these two foundations St Teresa left to St John-of-the-Cross the care of all other foundations that should be made for men. At Pastrana she also established a nunnery. When Don Ruy Gomez de Silva, who had founded these houses at Pastrana, died, his widow wished to make her religious profession there, but claimed many exemptions and would still maintain the dignity of princess. Teresa, finding she could not be brought to the humility of her profession, ordered the nuns, lest relaxations should be introduced, to leave that house to her and retire to a new one in Segovia. In 1570 St Teresa founded a convent at Salamanca where with another nun she took possession of a house which had been occupied by some students, who had had “little or no regard for cleanliness”. It was a large, rambling and eerie place, and when night fell the other nun became very nervous. As they lay down on their piles of straw (“the first furniture I provided when I founded monasteries, for having this I reckoned I had beds”), St Teresa asked her what she was looking about at. “I was wondering”, was the reply, “were I to die here now what would you do alone with a corpse?” St Teresa admits the remark startled her, for, though she did not fear dead bodies, they always caused her “a pain at her heart”. But she only replied, “I will think about that when it happens, sister. For the present, let us go to sleep.”

In July of this year she had a revelation while at prayer of the martyrdom at sea of Bd Ignatius Azevedo and his companions of the Society of Jesus, among whom was her own relative, Francis Perez Godoy. She had a clear vision as it were both to her eyes and ears of what took place and she at once told it in detail to Father Balthasar Alvarez. When the news of the massacre reached Spain a month later, he recognized the minute accuracy of the account already given to him by St Teresa.

At this time Pope St Pius V appointed visitors apostolic to inquire into relaxations in religious orders with a view to reform, and he named a well-known Dominican, Peter Fernandez, to be visitor to the Carmelites of Castile. At Avila he not surprisingly found great fault with the convent of the Incarnation, and to remedy its abuses he sent for St Teresa and told her she was to take charge of it as prioress. It was doubly distasteful to her to be separated from her own daughters and to be put from outside at the head of a house which opposed her activities with jealousy and warmth. The nuns at first refused to obey her; some of them went into hysterics at the very idea. She told them that she came not to coerce or instruct but to serve, and to learn from the least among them. “My mothers and sisters, our Lord has sent me to this house by the voice of obedience, to fill an office of which I was far from thinking and for which I am quite unfitted. … I come solely to serve you. … Do not fear my rule. Though I have lived among and exercised authority over those Carmelites who are discalced, by God’s mercy I know how to rule those who are not of their number.” Having won the sympathy and affection of the community, she had less difficulty in establishing discipline according to its rules. Too frequent callers were forbidden (to the annoyance of certain gentlemen of Avila), the finances of the house were put in order, and a more truly claustral spirit reigned—a characteristically Teresian performance.

When making a foundation at Veas St Teresa met for the first time Father Jerome Gracián, and was easily persuaded by him to extend her activities to Seville; he had just preached the Lent there, and was himself a friar of the reform. With the exception of the first, no one of her convents was so hard to establish as this. Among the difficulties was a disappointed novice who delated the new nuns to the Inquisition as Illuminati, and worse.

The Carmelite friars in Italy had, in the meantime, become afraid of the progress of the Spanish reform lest, as one of their number said, they should one day be compelled to set about reforming themselves, a fear which was shared by their mitigated brethren in Spain. The prior general, Father Rubeo, who had hitherto favoured St Teresa, now sided with the objectors and upheld a general chapter at Plasencia which passed several decrees gravely restricting the reform. The new nuncio apostolic, Philip de Sega, dismissed Father Gracián from his office of visitor to the Discalced Carmelites, and St John-of-the-Cross was imprisoned in a monastery; St Teresa herself was told to choose one of her convents to which to retire and to abstain from further foundations. While recommending her undertaking to God, she did not disdain to avail herself of the help of her friends in the world. These interested the king, Philip II, on her behalf, and he warmly espoused her cause. The nuncio was called before him and sternly rebuked for his activities against the discalced friars and nuns, and in 1580 an order was obtained at Rome to exempt the Reformed from the jurisdiction of the mitigated Carmelites, so that each should have their own provincial. Father Gracián was elected for the Reformed. “The separation has given me one of the greatest pleasures and consolations I could receive in this life, for the order has had to endure more troubles, persecutions and trials in twenty-five years than I have space to tell. Now we are all at peace, Calced and Discalced, having no one to disturb us in the service of our Lord.”

St Teresa was certainly endowed with great natural talents. The sweetness of her temperament, the affectionate tenderness of her heart, and the liveliness of her wit and imagination, poised by an uncommon maturity of judgement and what we should now call psychological insight, gained the respect of all and the love of most. It was no mere flight of fancy which caused the poet Crashaw to refer both to “the eagle” and to “the dove” in St Teresa. She stood up when need be to high authorities, ecclesiastical and civil, and would not bow her head under the blows of the world. It was no hysterical defiance when she bade the prior provincial, Father Angel, “Beware of fighting against the Holy Ghost”; it was no authoritarian conceit that made her merciless to a prioress who had made herself unfit for her duties by her austerities. It is as the dove that she writes to her erring nephew, “God’s mercy is great in that you have been enabled to make so good a choice and to marry so soon, for you began to be dissipated when you were so young that we might have had much sorrow on your account. From that you see how much I love you.” She took charge of this young man’s illegitimate daughter, and of his sister, who was seven years old: “We ought always to have a child of this age among us.” Her wit and “forthrightness” were sublimely good-tempered, even when she used them, as sword or hammer, to drive in a rebuke. When an indiscreet man praised the beauty of her bare feet she laughed and told him to have a good look at them for he would never see them again. “You know what a number of women are when they get together”, or “My children, these are just women’s fads”, she would say when her subjects were fussy and tiresome.

In criticizing an essay by her good friend Francis de Salsedo she was quick to point out that “Señor de Salsedo keeps on repeating throughout his paper: ‘As St Paul says’; ‘As the Holy Ghost says’, and ends up by declaring he has written nothing but nonsense. I shall denounce him to the Inquisition.” The quality of St Teresa is seen very clearly in her selection of novices for the new foundations. Her first requirement, even before any promise of a considerable degree of piety, was intelligence. A person can train herself to piety, but more hardly to intelligence, by which quality she meant neither cleverness nor imagination, but a power of good judgement. “An intelligent mind is simple and submissive; it sees its faults and allows itself to be guided. A mind that is deficient and narrow never sees its faults, even when shown them. It is always pleased with itself and never learns to do right.” “Even though our Lord should give this young girl devotion and teach her contemplation, if she has no sense she never will come to have any, and instead of being of use to the community she will be a burden.” “May God preserve us from stupid nuns!” Nobody was ever less sentimental.

By the time of the separation between the two observances of the Carmelite Order in 1580 St Teresa was sixty-five years old and quite broken in health. During her last two years she saw her final foundations, making them seventeen in all: foundations that had been made not only to provide homes of contemplation for individuals but as a work of reparation for the destruction of so many monasteries by Protestantism, notably in the British Isles and Germany. A cruel trial was reserved for her last days. The will of her brother Don Lorenzo, whose daughter was prioress at Valladolid, was in dispute and St Teresa was drawn unwillingly into the proceedings. A lawyer was rude to her, and to him she said, “Sir, may God return to you the courtesy you have shown to me”. But before the conduct of her niece she was speechless and impotent: for the prioress of Valladolid, hitherto an irreproachable religious, showed her aunt the door of the convent of which she was foundress and told her never more to return to it. St Teresa wrote to Mother Mary-of-St-Joseph, “I beseech you and your daughters not to wish or pray for me to live longer. Ask on the contrary that I may go to my eternal rest, for I can be of no more use to you.” The last foundation, at Burgos, was made under difficulties, and when it was achieved in July 1582 St Teresa wished to return to Avila, but was induced to set out for Alba de Tormes, where the Duchess Maria Henriquez was expecting her. Somewhere describes the journey, not properly prepared for and so fatigued with it that she fainted on the road; one night they could get no food but a few figs, and when they arrived at Alba St Teresa went straight to bed. Three days later she received the last sacraments from Father Antony de Heredia, who asked her whether she wished to be buried. She only answered, “Is it for me to say? Will they deny me a little ground for my body here?” When the Blessed Sacrament was brought in she sat up in bed, helpless though she was, and exclaimed, “O my Lord, now is the time that we may see each other!” Apparently in wonder at the things her Saviour was showing her, St Teresa-of-Jesus died in the arms of Bd Anne at nine in the evening of October 4, 1582. The very next day the Gregorian reform of the kalendar came into force and ten days were dropped, so that it was accounted October 15, the date on which her feast was fixed. Her body was buried at Alba de Tormes, and there it remains. She was canonized in 1622.

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints