A Carmelite reformer became the first woman Doctor
Teresa of Ávila, born 28 March 1515, remade Carmelite life during the Counter-Reformation and, with John of the Cross, launched the Discalced branch. Her Life, Interior Castle, and Way of Perfection map mystical ascent. Canonized in 1622, she was named the first female Doctor of the Church in 1970.
Grandfather Juan Sánchez was a converso once condemned by the Inquisition, and her father, a rich wool merchant, bought a knighthood. Her mother Beatriz died when Teresa was fourteen, deepening Marian devotion. At seven she fled toward imagined martyrdom with brother Rodrigo until an uncle fetched them. In 1534, against her father's wishes, she entered Ávila's Convent of the Incarnation on former Jewish burial ground. Harsh mortification left her bedridden nearly a year; she credited Joseph with recovery and began reporting ecstasies, later eased by reading Augustine's Confessions.
Friends feared diabolical illusion until Jesuit Francis Borgia backed her. A 1559 vision of a seraph piercing her heart, the transverberation, inspired Bernini's marble group in Rome, which some find eroticised beside earlier Teresa art. She dispensed counsel through the grille, sometimes levitating to her embarrassment; modern researchers reading her detailed self-reports have speculated about temporal lobe epilepsy.
Dismayed by lax enclosure among the Incarnation's 150 nuns and its stream of fashionable visitors, she founded the poor little convent of St. Joseph's in 1562, winning papal backing for absolute poverty and barefoot observance the next year. From 1567 a patent from the Carmelite General let her travel Spain founding houses, and in 1568 John of the Cross and Anthony of Jesus opened the first reformed friary at Duruelo. The old observance struck back in 1576, ordering her into retirement at Toledo, until letters to Philip II got Inquisition cases dropped in 1579; a papal decree formalised the split in 1580.
By her death seventeen convents, and as many men's houses, traced to her reform. Her autobiography, written to defend her raptures, charts four stages of prayer, and The Interior Castle pictures the soul as seven mansions.
Source: Teresa of Ávila
