Heroes of the Catholic Reformation by Joseph Pearce

Author:Joseph Pearce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Published: 2017-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Teresa of Ávila

“Teresa, a native of Ávila in the Kingdom of Castile, was born on the twelfth of March 1515. Her parents were both of ancient and noble families, and such as made a very considerable figure in the world; but their personal merit was what distinguished them much more than the illustrious names of their ancestors.”83 Thus begins the entry on Teresa of Ávila in the anonymously authored eighteenth-century Lives of the Saints that we have been quoting as much for the sheer grandiloquence of the language as for the facts and insights conveyed therein.

Like so many of the heroes of the Catholic Reformation, Teresa was the child of privilege. Yet, as our eighteenth-century biographer notes, it is not the “ancient and noble” pedigree that counts but the “personal merit.” The fact is that these holy heroes forsook the privilege of a comfortable life for the mortifications of a life laid down self-sacrificially for others, specifically for their God and neighbor. This is the very heart of their heroism, a heroism that is nothing less or other than the very heart of love itself. For “unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required.”84

Teresa wrote in in her autobiography that she was grateful to have had parents “who were virtuous and feared God.”85 Her mother made sure that all her nine children said their prayers and that they had a devotion to the Blessed Virgin and the saints. Her father was a bibliophile who had books in Spanish as well as in Latin in his library. The former were purchased, it seemed to Teresa, so that his children could read them too. “It was a help to me that I never saw my parents inclined to anything but virtue.”86

Like so many girls of her age, then and now, Teresa fell into the folly of vanity during her adolescent years. “I began to deck myself out and to try to attract others with my hands and hair, using perfumes and all the vanities I could get — and there were a good many of them, for I was very fastidious.”87 At about this time, when she was around fourteen years old, she fell into bad company in the form of a cousin of similar age whose influence “banished all her good thoughts, and pious inclinations, and was very near engaging her in the same vicious course of life.”88 “If I had to advise parents,” she wrote, “I should tell them to take great care about the people with whom their children associate at such an age. Much harm may result from bad company and we are inclined by nature to follow what is worse rather than what is better.”89

With a hint of melodrama, Teresa’s eighteenth-century biographer wrote that “she stood on the brink of the precipice, and in all human probability would have been lost, had not her vigilant father snatched her from the danger, and placed her in a convent.”90 This may indeed have been so,

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