Insulted over her brother's will, St. Teresa leaves Valladolid blessing the nuns

VALLADOLID, Castile, September 15, 1582 AD — St. Teresa of Ávila left the Carmelite house at Valladolid today, blessing the community as she went and praising the poverty she had seen the nuns keep. She had spent the past weeks there, in a house of her own order. Its prioress had taken the side of the relatives who are trying to overturn her dead brother’s will, and their lawyer had come to the convent and insulted her to her face.

Her brother, Don Lorenzo de Cepeda, died at Ávila on June 28, 1580 AD. He left four hundred ducats to build a side chapel at St. Joseph’s convent in that city, where he was to be buried. The house had no income of its own and lived on alms, and St. Teresa had been its prioress since September of last year. After his death his family, the Cepedas — her own relatives — tried to overturn the will.

She had left Burgos at the end of July with her niece Teresita and Venerable Anne of St Bartholomew, who nursed her. She meant to go straight to Ávila. Father Jerónimo Gracián, who governed the order’s province, kept her a month at Palencia instead, and then sent her on to Valladolid through the August heat. She had had a violent fever for months, and an open wound in her throat that almost stopped her swallowing. “God willed that the whole journey should be a succession of sufferings,” Anne of St Bartholomew said.

María Bautista de Ocampo, the prioress who took her in at Valladolid, was the daughter of one of St. Teresa’s cousins, and had paid a large part of what it cost to found that house. In the quarrel over the will she sided with the Cepedas, and she treated St. Teresa unkindly.

During the stay the family’s lawyer called on St. Teresa at the convent. He told her that she was not what she appeared to be, and that many people out in the world would have behaved far better than she did.

She answered him in one sentence: “May God reward you for the favour you are doing me.”

Today, as the visit ended, she broke off a letter to Catalina de Cristo, the prioress of Soria, and carried it away to finish on the road. “I can not enlarge any more, for we are about to leave for Medina,” she wrote. “I’m feeling as usual.”

Then she blessed the nuns and said goodbye. “My daughters, it consoles me greatly on leaving this house to witness the perfection practised in it, and the poverty and mutual charity in which you live,” she told them. She told them not to go through the duties of their life out of routine but to put their whole heart into them, and to aim higher every day. The last thing she said to them was, “Desire to do great things: this is very beneficial, even when we cannot carry our wishes into action.”