Saint Teresa of Avila

Virgin and Doctor of the Church
(1515–1582)

Saint Teresa of Avila was born on March 28, 1515, at Avila in Castile, Spain, the daughter of a converso family of Jewish descent that had become devout Catholics. From her childhood she was attracted to prayer and to thoughts of heaven, and she and her brother Rodrigo once ran away from home intending to go to the land of the Moors to be martyred for the faith, only to be brought back by an uncle. At the age of twenty she entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation at Avila, where she would spend nearly thirty years.

The religious life of the convent was comfortable but lax, and Teresa herself passed through a long period of spiritual mediocrity. A decisive turning point came around 1555 when, looking at an image of the wounded Christ, she was overwhelmed with a sense of how poorly she had responded to His love and resolved on a radical conversion. From this point her interior life deepened rapidly, and she began to experience the mystical states, visions, locutions, and the prayer of union and even levitation, that she would later describe with unsurpassed clarity in her autobiographical and mystical writings.

In 1562, at the age of forty-seven, she founded the first of the reformed Carmelite monasteries, dedicated to a stricter observance of poverty, enclosure, and prayer. This foundation, Saint Joseph's in Avila, was the beginning of the Carmelite Reform, which would eventually produce seventeen convents of nuns and fifteen monasteries of friars, the latter founded with the collaboration of Saint John of the Cross. The reform aimed to restore the primitive spirit of Carmel, characterised by solitude, contemplative prayer, and total poverty.

Her writings, The Life, The Way of Perfection, The Interior Castle, and The Book of Foundations, are among the masterpieces of mystical literature in any language. She was the first woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church, together with Saint Catherine of Siena, by Pope Paul VI in 1970. She died on October 4, 1582. Her feast is celebrated on October 15th.