Nuns forbidden to elect Saint Teresa of Ávila elect her twice

ÁVILA, Castile, October 1577 AD — The nuns of the Convent of the Incarnation at Ávila have elected Saint Teresa of Ávila their prioress twice this month, and fifty-five of them have been declared excommunicated for their votes.

The Incarnation is a house of Carmelite nuns of the old observance, and it is the house St. Teresa entered as a young woman. She was a nun there for twenty-eight years before she left it. Inside it she was known as Doña Teresa; she took the name Teresa of Jesus only when she went out to the new convent of St. Joseph. She is sixty-two.

The superiors of the house had threatened the nuns against electing St. Teresa. The nuns elected her. Some of the nuns opposed to her appealed to Fray Juan Gutiérrez de la Magdalena, provincial of the Carmelites of the old observance in Castile and the man who governs the house. He came to the convent, ignored the result and ordered the nuns to vote again, choosing only from among the nuns living in the house. St. Teresa is one of them. They chose her again. Fifty-five nuns voted for her. The provincial rejected every one of those votes and told the nuns who had cast them that they were excommunicated.

Fray Juan Gutiérrez came back to the convent another day and called for a fresh election. The nuns told him they had already made one. He told them again that they were excommunicated. Forty-four of them then voted for a nun of the house named Anne of Toledo. The rest told the provincial they would obey Anne of Toledo only as St. Teresa’s deputy, not in St. Teresa’s place. Fray Jerónimo Tostado, vicar of the Order’s general in Spain, confirmed that election at the end of this month. It was on Tostado’s orders that the provincial had come to the house in the first place.

The fifty-five may not hear Mass, and may not speak to anyone outside the walls.

Fray Juan Gutiérrez said the Mass at the opening of St. Teresa’s foundation at Toledo in 1569 AD. He was elected provincial of Castile in 1576 AD, and as provincial he was charged with carrying out the decrees that the Order’s general chapter passed against her reform when it met at Piacenza on May 21, 1575 AD.

In 1562 AD St. Teresa founded the convent of St. Joseph at Ávila under a stricter observance of the Carmelite rule. Houses of nuns and friars have followed from it, and their members are called the Discalced Carmelites. That reform and the Carmelites of the old observance, who keep the milder rule, are now in open quarrel.

The quarrel is about who may govern whom. Pope Gregory XIII ruled in a brief of August 1574 AD that the Carmelites in Spain are to be visited by their prior general, Fray Juan Bautista Rubeo, and the men he deputes. King Philip II was displeased that the matter had not been put to him first. The papal nuncio at Madrid holds the power to visit and reform religious orders in the kingdom. The friars of the old observance want their authority over the reformed houses restored, and they have the sympathy of King Philip II for the claim. The Incarnation is not one of St. Teresa’s houses. Its nuns answer to the friars of the old observance, and this month they voted to put her at their head.

In July she came to Ávila and placed St. Joseph’s, her first house, under the jurisdiction of the Carmelite Order. Until then it had answered to the Bishop of Ávila, Don Álvaro de Mendoza. Fray Juan Gutiérrez, who threw out her election this month, holds his office in that Order.

For the nuns of the old observance she has argued for the opposite arrangement. St. Teresa wrote to Fray Jerónimo Gracián in the middle of December of last year. Monsignor Nicolás Ormaneto, then papal nuncio at Madrid, had made Gracián visitor of the Carmelite friars and nuns of the old observance in Andalusia. Her letter reads: “Oh! how I wish all the nuns were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Calced” — the friars of the old observance — “for that is the source of all the evils, and there is no other remedy for it.” In the same letter she told him: “When we become a separate province, I must dedicate my life to bringing it about.”

St. Teresa has held the office at the Incarnation before, and did not ask for it then. Her superiors ordered her to take it in October 1571 AD, in a house that was not part of her reform, and she took it under obedience. She held it three years, resigned it on October 6, 1574 AD, and went back to St. Joseph’s. In May 1572 AD she made St. John of the Cross confessor to the nuns of the house.

Ormaneto had always defended her reform. He died on June 18. His successor, Monsignor Filippo Sega, reached Madrid in August.

St. John of the Cross is still one of the two chaplains of the Incarnation; the other is Fray Germán de San Matías. At the beginning of last year Fray Alonso de Valdemoro, prior of the friars of the old observance at Ávila, took both men out of the convent by force and carried them off to Medina. Ormaneto had them brought back, and forbade the friars of the old observance to interfere with the Incarnation.