Saint Teresa of Jesus

Virgin and Doctor of the Church

Feast Day

October 15

Life

1515–1582

Canonized

1622

Doctor of the Church

1970

Order

Order of Discalced Carmelites

Born

Avila, Castile, Spain

Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born at Avila in Castile on 28 March 1515. She entered the Carmelite monastery of the Incarnation at Avila in 1535 and lived there twenty-seven years in a relaxed observance. From about 1554, after a renewed conversion before an image of the suffering Christ, she experienced an intense interior life of mystical prayer that she would later describe with surgical precision in her writings.

In 1562, with the support of Saint Peter of Alcántara and against considerable opposition, she founded at Avila the monastery of San José, the first house of the reformed (Discalced) Carmelite observance, restoring strict enclosure, poverty and silence. Over the next twenty years she founded sixteen further reformed monasteries of women throughout Spain. With Saint John of the Cross she launched in 1568 the parallel reform of the Carmelite friars. The conflict between the Discalced and the Calced (mitigated) Carmelites was acute; in 1580 a separate province of Discalced Carmelites was canonically established.

Her writings, composed under obedience for her nuns, are pillars of Catholic mystical theology: the Life (1565), the Way of Perfection (1566), the Foundations (1573-1582), and her masterpiece, the Interior Castle or Mansions (1577). She died at Alba de Tormes during a foundation visit on the night of 4-15 October 1582 (the date of the Gregorian calendar reform, which excised ten days). Pope Gregory XV canonized her in 1622, and Pope Saint Paul VI declared her the first woman Doctor of the Church on 27 September 1970.