Ordered to Alba de Tormes, St. Teresa leaves Medina fasting

MEDINA DEL CAMPO, Castile, this week, September 1582 AD — Saint Teresa of Ávila left the convent she founded at Medina del Campo this week in a carriage the Duchess of Alba had sent for her, having eaten nothing since the day before, and bound for a town she had not chosen. It was her second foundation, made on the feast of the Assumption fifteen years ago.

St. Teresa is sixty-seven. In twenty years she has founded and governed seventeen houses of nuns. She has been on the road since the end of July, coming home from the newest of those houses at Burgos, and for months she has had a violent fever and an open wound in her throat that almost stops her swallowing. What she wanted was Ávila, where she is prioress of St. Joseph’s and where her niece Teresita was to receive the veil from her. What the Duchess of Alba wanted was St. Teresa at Alba de Tormes: a visit promised her a year ago, and the saint’s presence as a blessing on her daughter-in-law, who is about to give birth. Neither woman settled it. Father Antonio de Jesús, vicar provincial of her reformed friars, settled it, and he settled it for Alba, because a nun under obedience goes where her superior sends her.

At Valladolid, in the days before, her own relatives were trying to overturn the will of her dead brother, Don Lorenzo de Cepeda. The prioress of that convent was María Bautista de Ocampo, the daughter of St. Teresa’s cousin, and she took the relatives’ side against her. St. Teresa left Valladolid on September 15, blessing the community as she went.

She reached Medina this week, and Father Antonio de Jesús was waiting for her, the first Carmelite friar to take up her reform, with the order to go on to Alba at once. It was very hard for her to take. Reaching Ávila mattered enormously to her, and now she was to give the journey up for a duchess’s sake. She obeyed anyway, as she had obeyed all her life. Her niece Teresita says she accepted the change in perfect peace once the order was given.

That evening, in the refectory, she drew the attention of Mother Alberta Bautista, the prioress of the house, to a small matter that needed putting right. Under the constitutions St. Teresa wrote for these houses, a sister does not correct another sister for a fault she sees; correction belongs to the prioress, who has sisters appointed to give it in her name. Mother Alberta, who was in poor health, took the remark as an injury and turned cold toward her. It grieved St. Teresa. She could not eat her supper, and she lay awake all that night.

She did not eat in the morning either. They helped her into the carriage the duchess had sent to fetch her, and no food had come with it. She went out through the gate of her own foundation on the road to Alba. She was worn out and ill the whole way.

The letter she had begun at Valladolid went into the post at Medina that morning, to Mother Catalina de Cristo, the prioress at Soria. She had added a line to it after she reached Medina:

“We are now in Medina and so busy that I cannot say more than that the trip went well…”