St. Teresa of Avila

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“Let nothing trouble you, let nothing make you afraid. All things pass away. God never changes. Patience obtains everything. God alone is enough.”

Saint Teresa of Avila

Born at Avila, Old Castile, Spain on March 28, 1515; died at Alba de Tormes, October 4, 1582; canonized in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV; proclaimed Doctor of the Church in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.

Saint Teresa mother died when she was 14, leaving Teresa with her father, a holy man with serious intellectual interests.

On reading works of Saint Jerome, she decided to enter religious life, at the age of 20, believing it to the the safest path to salvation for someone like her. She suffered a serious illness in her youth from which she never fully recovered, it caused physical suffering for the rest of her life.

For her first twenty years in the convent, Teresa, in her own words, lived a mediocre prayer life. She said she had tried mental prayer but discontinued it because she could not tear herself away from the pettiness and worldliness of her conversations and desires, such as her desire to be held in good esteem by others.



However, an intense prayer experience before an image of Christ crucified helped her renounce her worldy attachments. Soon after, God began visiting her with tremendous “intellectual visions and locutions.”

The visions were so numerous and intense that it was thought they were the work of the devil. But on being examined by Saint Francis Borgia and Saint Peter of Alcantara, they were discerned to be God’s mystical action in her soul.

Her account of her spiritual life in her autobiography is extraordinary, even for a mystic. Her experience of intimate union with God manifested in her “spiritual espousals” and “mystical marriage,” and the “transverberation of her heart” (her heart was pierced as if by a surgeon’s knife while she was in prayer; upon her death it was discovered to have a scar – in an age when open heart surgery obviously did not exist – thus confirming what she recounted).

She also had a vision of the place destined for her in hell in the event that she be unfaithful to grace, which determined her to seek a more perfect life.

On August 24, 1562 she founded the convent of Discalced Carmelite Nuns, a reform of the Carmelite order so radical and strict that it caused much violent opposition. With the grace of God she prevailed and founded many other similar convents.

She befriended Saint John of the Cross and with him undertook similar reforms with the Carmelite friars.

Teresa died on October 4, 1582, having suffered to the end with painful illnesses and exhausted from carrying out God’s work. Her body and her transverberated heart are still incorrupt in Alba, Spain, where she died.

St. Teresa's writings on mystical theology are unique among spiritual writers in that she she is intensely personal, her system going exactly as far as her experiences, but not a step further.

On September 27, 1970 she was proclaimed the first ever woman Doctor in the history of the Church by Pope Paul VI.

“O my God! Source of all mercy! I acknowledge Your sovereign power. While recalling the wasted years that are past, I believe that You, Lord, can in an instant turn this loss to gain. Miserable as I am, yet I firmly believe that You can do all things. Please restore to me the time lost, giving me Your grace, both now and in the future, that I may appear before You in "wedding garments." Amen.”
Saint Teresa of Avila

Taken from www.catholicnewsagency.com