Saint Teresa of Jesus (of Avila)

Saint Teresa of Jesus (1515-1582) is the fountain of inspiration and orientation and the Mother Foundress of Teresian Carmel. She was born in Avila to the Family of Cepeda y Ahumada, March 28, 1515.

She became a Carmelite nun at the age of 20 in the Monastery of the Incarnaton in the city where she was born. She remained there 27 years until August 24, 1562 when she inaugurated her own new Carmel. Through new and strong ecclesial experiences, she continued by order of the Superior General, Juan Bautista Rubeo, to found 17 foundations in Spain beginning in 1567. One year later, November 28, 1568, she organized with St. John of the Cross the beginning of the new life the Discalced Carmelites in Duruelo, in the province of Avila. At the age of 67 she died "a daughter of the Church" in the Monastery of Alba de Tormes in the afternoon of October 4, 1582.

Her communities were to be "little colleges of Christ", aspiring to live faithfully the evangelic councels, founded on prayer "as a friendship with one whom we know loves us," and a community of equals and friends, giving themselves completely for the good of the Church. The friars were to have the same contemplative heart and dedicate themselves generously to activity in the service of the Church.

A lover of reading since her childhood, she wrote a few books to clarify her conscience before her confessors and spiritual directors or in order to help others on the spiritual path at the request of superiors and her own Carmelite siters. The Book of Life of Autobiography is an x-ray of her interior life in search of God. In this search she clings with cordial apssion to Christ the man, who becomes for her a "living book." The way of Perfection is a book of formation for the first generation of Carmelite nuns, above all in regard to the life of prayer and fraternal life in community according to the new ideals of Carmel. The Interior Castle or The Book of the Mansions is a narration of the process of her mystical experience, centered on Christ and the mystery of the Trinity. In the Book of Foundations she recounts anecdotal history, external and personal, of the monasteries she forunded until Burgos in 1582.

Along with her major works her minor writings, always rich in spiritual content and literary value, should be taken into account. Teresa of Jesus is a write who gives witness to her convictions, her experience and the work of God in her soul. A captivating sincerity runs through all her writings.

An exceptional collection of 500 letters have been conserved. There is manifested a diverse world of addressees with whom she dealt in the Iberian Peninsula, in Rome and in America. Above all, the humanity of daily life spontaneously appears and grand ideals for her soul, the loving entrustment to the divine, to Christ and His Church, embodied with the total naturalness of her relations, her preoccupations and her state of mind.

St. Teresa of Jesus has her own place in the history of Christian mysticism and Spanish literature. She was beatified April 24, 1614 and canonized March 12, 1622. On September 18, 1965, Pope Paul VI named her "Principal Patron of Spanish Catholic Writers of Spain." The same Pope declared her the first woman Doctor of the Church on September 27, 1970.