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September 2 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

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Teresa's reform under siege · Part 1 · ÁVILA, Castile, October 1577 AD

Nuns forbidden to elect Saint Teresa of Ávila elect her twice

Fifty-five nuns of the convent where St. Teresa spent twenty-eight years voted for her against their superiors' orders, and the friar who governs the house declared all fifty-five excommunicated.

A plain whitewashed convent chapter room in which a Carmelite nun drops a folded paper slip into a small wooden urn on a table, watched by some eighteen nuns seated along wooden stalls on either side.
The chapter room of the Convent of the Incarnation at Ávila, where the nuns cast their votes for St. Teresa of Ávila against their superiors' orders, October 1577 AD.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of Spanish Golden Age oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on Retrato de Santa Teresa de Jesús (Fray Juan de la Miseria, 1576, Convento de las Teresas, Seville) View source artwork.

The nuns of the Convent of the Incarnation at Ávila have elected Saint Teresa of Ávila their prioress twice this month, after their superiors forbade the choice and then ordered a second vote. Fifty-five of them are under sentence of excommunication for their votes, barred from Mass and from speaking to anyone outside the walls. St. Teresa is sixty-two, and held the same office in the house for three years before resigning it in 1574 AD.

4 min read

An oil painting of a small whitewashed room under bare beams: a plain heavy wooden table strewn with parchment patents, some rolled and some hanging over the edge with red wax seals on cords, beside a seal matrix, an inkwell and a quill; the chair behind the table is empty and a small dark crucifix hangs on the bare wall.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of Spanish Golden Age oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on Retrato de Santa Teresa de Jesús (Fray Juan de la Miseria, 1576, Convento de las Teresas, Seville) — see the original. No person is depicted. View source artwork.

Teresa's reform under siege · Part 1 · MADRID, October 1577 AD

The Pope's envoy who protected St. Teresa's convents dies at Madrid

Monsignor Nicolás Ormaneto, the Pope's representative at the court of King Philip II, died at Madrid on June 18, 1577 AD. Ormaneto had shielded the convents and friaries St. Teresa of Ávila founded from the Carmelite superiors who wanted those houses back under their control, and the friars of her reform held their powers from his commission. His successor reached Madrid in August and has dealt severely with those friars.

4 min read

More in this edition

A painting of a gaunt, bearded man in a long coarse sackcloth garment holding a wooden staff in the foreground of a dusty stony road, with a file of travellers standing bare-headed beside their donkeys and a friar carrying a crucifix walking toward them, the pale walls of Jerusalem on a ridge in the distance.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of mid-sixteenth-century Spanish and Roman oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait of Ignatius of Loyola (Jacopino del Conte (1510/1515-1598), 1556 AD, painted on the day of his death, Curia Generalizia of the Society of Jesus, Rome; catalogued by the Fondazione Federico Zeri, Bologna) View source artwork.

event · JERUSALEM, Ottoman Palestine, September 4, 1523 AD

St. Ignatius enters Jerusalem at midday after a year begging across Europe

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a Basque nobleman of thirty-two who was a soldier until a cannon ball broke his leg two years ago, reached Jerusalem at midday this week. He had begged his way across Europe for a year to get there, on a road left nearly empty after Rhodes fell to the Turks last Christmas. He has asked the Franciscans who keep the holy places to let him stay.

4 min read

An empty upper room in grey daylight from a tall shuttered window: a long table under a heavy cloth bearing a thick stack of handwritten papers, an open register, an inkstand with two quills and a stick of sealing wax, and a small oval medal lying flat near the edge; a plain wooden chair stands apart facing the table, and a black crucifix hangs on the bare plaster wall.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a 19th-century French monochrome photograph. No person appears in the picture and no reference image of any person was used. The paper's reference photograph of St. Catherine Labouré is "The only known photograph of Catherine Laboure, taken just before her death in 1876" (unidentified photographer, 1876, Daughters of Charity Mother House, Paris). View source artwork.

A formal church investigation into the origin of the oval medal that more than a million people now wear opened in Paris on February 16, 1836 AD, under M. Quentin, the vicar general of the diocese. Its chief witness is Fr Jean-Marie Aladel, the confessor of the Daughter of Charity to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared in 1830 AD, Saint Catherine Labouré, whose name he has promised never to speak. Fr Aladel told the promoter what St. Catherine Labouré reported to him, why he doubted her at first, and what Mgr de Quélen then allowed.

4 min read

A black-and-white photograph looking up a stony unmetalled mountain road to a small whitewashed church with a bell above its door and a two-storey convent block beside it, with a low stone-walled town on the bare limestone slope below and the sea on the far horizon.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a 1916 black-and-white large-format plate photograph, reconstructed from historical descriptions of the friary, the road and the mountain; no person appears and no reference likeness was used. The paper's reference portrait of St. Pio is Padre Pio showing the stigmata — detail of the sitting of 19 August 1919 (Placido (Ferdinando) Bux, 19 August 1919, Wikimedia Commons; from the Frati Minori Cappuccini di San Giovanni Rotondo).

place · SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO, Apulia, this week, September 1916 AD

St. Pio returns to the mountain friary he will never leave

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was assigned this week to the Capuchin friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a mile and a half above San Giovanni Rotondo on the flank of Monte Gargano. Seven friars live there, and he is to teach the seminary students and direct them. The permission was granted provisionally, but apart from the absences the army and his superiors force on him he will not spend a single day away from the building for the remaining fifty-two years of his life.

4 min read

A marble statue of a young woman lying on her side on a slab, her head wrapped and turned away, her hands bound at the wrists, robes falling in deep folds, set in a dark niche.

The cardinal who holds the title of St. Cecilia's church in Trastevere, digging under the high altar, broke into a vault with two marble coffins in it. Pope Clement VIII, sick in the hills outside Rome, sent Cardinal Cesare Baronius to examine what was inside, and Baronius and a lawyer named Antonio Bosio wrote down what they saw. In the second coffin were three bodies whose injuries match, one by one, the deaths described in the only account of St. Cecilia's martyrdom, a book written more than two hundred years after it.

5 min read

Today in the Church

Wednesday of the 22nd week in Ordinary Time

On this day in the Church

  • 1889 Sister Julienne of the Ursulines of Brive, whose tuberculosis six doctors had certified incurable, was cured at Lourdes, and seven doctors afterwards attested the cure before the Bureau des Constatations.Source
  • 1978 Pope Leo XIV, then a young American friar, made his first profession in the Order of Saint Augustine, the order that keeps the relics of St. Monica at Rome.Source

Quote of the day

“I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions.”
— St. Teresa of Ávila, at Toledo, 1577 AD, The Interior Castle, First Mansions, ch. I. 2 (trans. the Benedictines of Stanbrook, rev. Benedict Zimmerman, O.C.D., 1921)