Carmelite superior who authorised St. Teresa's reform dies at Rome

ROME, September 4, 1578 AD — Fray Juan Bautista Rubeo, who has governed the whole Carmelite Order from Rome for fourteen years, died here today at the age of seventy. He fell from his mule and broke his leg, and died of the injury.

Rubeo signed the written authority under which Saint Teresa of Ávila founded her convents of nuns and her first two houses of friars. He also shut the province of Andalusia against her, and the quarrel that followed was never settled.

Rubeo — Giovanni Battista Rossi, of Ravenna — was elected head of the Order by the general chapter at Pentecost 1564 AD. Pope Pius IV had already made him vicar-general by a brief of December 16, 1562 AD, ten days after the death of the previous general, Nicholaus Audet. He was born at Ravenna on October 4, 1507 AD. He entered the Order at seventeen and studied at Siena and Padua. He held a chair of divinity at the Roman university, the Sapienza.

For the reformed Carmelite houses in Castile his death is the loss of the one man in Rome whose signature made them lawful. St. Teresa, a Carmelite nun of sixty-three, has been founding convents of nuns under the primitive rule since 1562 AD, and the friars of the reform numbered more than three hundred by last year. Rubeo signed the authority for all of it. He also refused her Andalusia, in writing and more than once, and the decrees his general chapter made against her friars in that province three years ago still stand.

His death comes into the middle of a fight over who governs those houses. Four authorities claim a say. The first is the prior general and his general chapter at Rome. The second is the papal nuncio at Madrid, who can appoint visitors with power over the Order. The third is King Philip II with his royal council. The fourth is the provincials of the old observance in Castile and Andalusia. Monsignor Nicolás Ormaneto, the nuncio who had always defended the reform, died in June of last year. His successor, Monsignor Filippo Sega, reached Madrid that August and has dealt severely with the reformed friars. On August 9, twenty-six days ago, the royal council overrode the nuncio’s jurisdiction and forbade the friars of the reform to obey him.

What he gave her. Rubeo landed in Spain on May 13, 1566 AD, sent by the Pope at King Philip II’s request to make a visitation of the Order. That September he held a chapter at Seville in front of more than two hundred members of the Order. He reached Ávila on April 11, 1567 AD and stayed about four weeks.

St. Teresa was afraid of what Rubeo would do. She had founded St. Joseph’s at Ávila outside the Order’s jurisdiction, under the bishop, and she set down in the Book of the Foundations the two things she feared: “one was that the general might be angry with me, and he had reason to be so, not knowing how matters had come to pass; the other, that he might send me back to the monastery of the Incarnation where the mitigated rule is observed.”

She asked the permission of Bishop Álvaro de Mendoza of Ávila, who was then her superior. She invited Rubeo to St. Joseph’s and received him as though she were still under his authority. St. Teresa wrote afterwards: “I told him everything in all simplicity and truth, for my inclination is to be simple and truthful with my superiors, come what may, for they stand in the place of God.” She wrote of what Rubeo said in reply: “he consoled me greatly, and assured me that he would not order me away.”

He went further than she asked. “He, being well pleased that a work thus begun should be carried on, gave me the fullest authority in writing to found more monasteries, and denounced penalties against the provincial who should stay my hand,” St. Teresa wrote. “I did not ask for this.”

That first patent is dated at Ávila, April 27, 1567 AD. It let her found convents of nuns anywhere in the kingdom of Castile, on condition that she first obtained the consent of the diocesan authority. It set aside the power of the provincial, the vicar and the priors, and put the new houses directly under the general. It let her take two willing nuns from an existing house for each foundation. On May 16 Rubeo wrote from Madrid to close a loophole: by “the kingdom of Castile” he meant both Old and New Castile — and not Andalusia.

She then wrote asking for friars under the same rule. The letter reached him at Valencia, and on August 14, 1567 AD he sent his licence from Barcelona for two houses of Discalced friars. It found her at Medina del Campo, in the middle of her second foundation.

St. Teresa wrote of his departure for Rome: “I was much distressed; I had conceived a great affection for him, and looked on myself as greatly forsaken. He had showed me very great affection himself, and much kindness.”

What he wrote about her. On February 8, 1569 AD Rubeo wrote to the nuns at Medina that St. Teresa “is doing more for the order than all the friars in Spain.” He had not yet heard that the first house of friars, at Duruelo, was open. St. Teresa later recorded that she once asked him to stop requiring foundations of her, and that he refused. His wish, Rubeo wrote back, was “that I should found as many houses as I had hairs on my head.”

Where it broke. In August 1569 AD Pope St. Pius V appointed two Dominicans visitors apostolic of the Spanish Carmelites for four years: Fray Pedro Fernández for Castile and Fray Francisco de Vargas for Andalusia. Their authority came from the Pope, not from the general, so Rubeo’s prohibition on Andalusia did not bind them, and they encouraged the reform to grow there. By 1574 AD Rubeo learned that houses had been founded in Andalusia without his consent, at Granada, La Peñuela and Seville.

The general chapter met at Piacenza on May 21, 1575 AD, with no representative present from Castile or Andalusia, and resolved to deal sharply with the friars of the reform. Later that month, on Trinity Sunday, May 29, St. Teresa founded at Seville, in the province he had closed to her.

She wrote him a long letter from Seville. “I made many inquiries when I went to Veas whether it was in Andalucia or not, for I never meant to go to that province,” she told him, and of the friars who had gone ahead of his permission: “They give good reasons for what they have done, and certainly I can see nothing in them but a wish to be your true children, and to give you no annoyance: still, for all that, I cannot regard them as blameless.”

The chapter’s answer reached her before she left Seville. St. Teresa wrote that the decree came from the definitory, the body of deputies that sits with the general chapter. The decree, as St. Teresa quoted it, ordered her “not only to make no more foundations, but also, on no account whatever, to leave the house I should choose to dwell in, which was something like sending me to prison.” Her last foundation was Caravaca, made on January 1, 1576 AD while she was still at Seville looking for a house. None has been made in the two years and eight months since. Rubeo named Fray Jerónimo Tostado to carry out the chapter’s decree.

What is left. Tostado holds his commission in Spain from Rubeo. St. Teresa described the arrangement in a letter of July 2, 1577 AD: “Tostado is at Madrid as Vicar General, nominated by the most Reverend Father General. Although hitherto the King has not allowed him to undertake the visitation, we do not know what may happen.” Tostado went back to Portugal at the beginning of May this year, and St. Teresa has been more at ease since.

She has said plainly before what happens to her nuns when a commission lapses. Writing in January 1577 AD, while Ormaneto lay dying, she warned that his death would end the commission he had given Fray Jerónimo Gracián as Apostolic Commissary, and that then “our permission to be under the jurisdiction of the Discalced Fathers would not be valid unless he were to declare, while still holding the Apostolic Commission, that we might continue as before.” She ended: “so for charity’s sake, lose no time.”

Two years ago St. Teresa urged that friars of the reform be sent to Rome to put it on a firmer footing. She made many attempts, and it was not done. The prohibition on Andalusia was Rubeo’s own, set down in writing more than once, and the decree confining her was his chapter’s. Both stand, and he is dead.