Although she is regarded today as one of the most influential women in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) faced hostility and suspicion throughout her lifetime. She was hauled before the Inquisition, mocked for her intense mystical experiences, and denounced by a church official as “an unstable, restless, disobedient and contumacious female.”
Still, despite the ridicule she endured, Teresa founded a new religious order and left a legacy as a leading theologian of Catholic mysticism.
The future saint was born Doña Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada to a struggling noble family in the Spanish province of Ávila. She was the granddaughter of a convert from Judaism who had been condemned by the Inquisition for supposedly practicing his old religion in secret. Teresa received a strict Catholic upbringing and embraced the faith so zealously that she tried to run away from home at age seven to seek martyrdom fighting the Moors.
A rebellious teenager, Teresa entered the Carmelite convent in Ávila at age twenty. At the time, many nunneries functioned as holding pens for unmarried, disobedient daughters of the gentry and were not entirely devoted to religious training. Three years later, however, she fell seriously ill, an experience that triggered her deepening interest in religion.
Determined to reform convent life into a more serious religious undertaking, she founded the first Discalced Carmelite convent in Ávila in 1562. Teresa and a handful of followers wore rags, slept on straw mattresses, and whipped themselves with scourges as self-punishment.
At about the same time, Teresa began to experience the mystical ecstasies and convulsions for which she became well known and which she believed brought her into union with God. By the time she died, Teresa had overcome her critics to start seventeen more convents across Spain. Her writings on Christian mysticism—the quest to create a deeply felt, spiritual experience of God—proved a major influence on later theologians.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Teresa is one of only three women to hold the title of Doctor of the Church, the highest distinction for Catholic theologians. The others are Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) and Saint Therese of Lisieux (1873–1897).
- Canonized by Pope Gregory XV (1554–1623) in 1622, Teresa is the patron saint of headache sufferers, lace, and Spain.
- After Teresa’s death, her body was divided into pieces and distributed to her followers, a relatively common practice with Roman Catholic saints. The pieces became valuable relics; twentieth-century Spanish dictator Francisco Franco (1892–1975) acquired four of the fingers of her left hand and kept them by his bed.
