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Saint Teresa of Ávila (Credit : Eduardo Balaca, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Teresa of Ávila OCD (1515 - 1582), also called Saint Teresa of Jesus, was a Carmelite nun and prominent Spanish mystic and religious reformer.

Active during the Counter-Reformation, Teresa became the central figure of a movement of spiritual and monastic renewal, reforming the Carmelite Orders of both women and men. The movement was later joined by the younger Carmelite friar and mystic Saint John of the Cross, with whom she established the Discalced Carmelites. A formal papal decree adopting the split from the old order was issued in 1580.

A Woman for God ...  A Woman for Others ...

Teresa was a woman “for God,” a woman of prayer, discipline, and compassion. Her heart belonged to God. Her ongoing conversion was an arduous lifelong struggle, involving ongoing purification and suffering. She was misunderstood, misjudged, and opposed in her efforts at reform. Yet she struggled on, courageous and faithful; she struggled with her own mediocrity, her illness, her opposition. And in the midst of all this she clung to God in life and in prayer. Her writings on prayer and contemplation are drawn from her experience: powerful, practical, and graceful. She was a woman of prayer; a woman for God.

Teresa was a woman “for others.” Though a contemplative, she spent much of her time and energy seeking to reform herself and the Carmelites, to lead them back to the full observance of the primitive Rule. She founded over a half-dozen new monasteries. She traveled, wrote, fought—always to renew, to reform. In herself, in her prayer, in her life, in her efforts to reform, in all the people she touched, she was a woman for others, a woman who inspired and gave life.

Legacy

Teresa’s most famous work is certainly the Interior Castle, the soul's journey in search of God through seven particular steps of elevation, alongside her Way of Perfection, and the Book of Her Foundations, as well as numerous maxims, poems and prayers.

Tireless despite her constant health struggles, Saint Teresa of Avila died in Alba de Tormes in 1582, during one of her journeys.

Forty years after her death, in 1622, Teresa was canonized by Pope Gregory XV. On 27 September 1970 Pope Paul VI proclaimed Teresa the first female Doctor of the Church in recognition of her centuries-long spiritual legacy to Catholicism. She is celebrated on October 15.

Article by Catholic Time Staff