Saint Teresa is elected to run her first convent, and refuses

ÁVILA, Castile, September 1581 AD — The nuns of St Joseph’s have elected Saint Teresa of Ávila their prioress this month, and she refused the office in front of them. She is sixty-six, and she gave her age and her need of rest as the reason. She holds the office anyway, because Fray Jerónimo Gracián, the provincial who governs her reform, commanded her under obedience to take it. Six years ago, on the road to Seville, St. Teresa made a personal vow of obedience to Gracián.

St Joseph’s is the house she founded nineteen years ago, the first of her reform, and by this summer it had slipped badly. The nuns had grown slack about the rule and the house had run out of money, and both distressed her. They wanted her to govern them and she wanted to be left alone, and Gracián could settle it with a word.

She built the house to have nothing. In 1562 AD her brother-in-law Juan de Ovalle bought a small house in the city in his own name, so that the plan should not be found out. On St Bartholomew’s Day, August 24 of that year, St. Teresa gave the habit there to four poor orphans, taken in without a dowry. The Blessed Sacrament was reserved in the house the same day. She put the monastery under Don Álvaro de Mendoza, the Bishop of Ávila, rather than under her own Carmelite provincial.

The community was never to be more than thirteen. It was to have no settled income at all. She had that confirmed by the Pope’s own authority, so that it could never be changed, and the nuns have lived since on alms, helped by a house of Poor Clares nearby. In the Way of Perfection, the book she wrote for these same nuns in this house, she told them what that meant in practice: “you have forgone a regular income; forgo worry about food as well.”

Those were the quiet years. St. Teresa called them the most tranquil of her life, and of the twenty years she has spent founding houses, five all but nine days passed in this one. Then the foundations took her away for most of the years since. The nuns’ confessor, Father Julián Dávila, let them off the rule and the constitutions whenever they asked. The house grew less fervent, and then it grew poor.

St. Teresa had founded her fifteenth monastery at Soria in June, and she left it on August 16. She came home by Segovia and Villacastín, and reached Ávila on September 5. The city stands high and cold above the Adaja, inside its walls, full of religious houses and noble families. The Incarnation, the house she left for this one, stands outside the town walls; St Joseph’s is inside the city, a small house among other houses.

Gracián came from Salamanca, where he had been founding a college for the friars, and was told what had become of the house. With his consent, and because the nuns asked for it, the prioress Mary of Christ gladly gave up her office. The community then voted for St. Teresa. She would not accept, and said why: she was old and she wanted rest. Gracián commanded her to take the office, and then told her to kiss the ground. She did, and the nuns began the Te Deum, the Church’s hymn of thanksgiving, and led her to the prioress’s seat in the choir.

To make the load lighter Gracián gave her Mary of St Jerome as her subprioress. What had gone wrong in the house began to mend from the day St. Teresa walked into it. She now has charge of thirteen places, no income, and a community that cannot pay its way.