The man who came to insult a sick old nun

VALLADOLID, Castile, September 15, 1582 AD — St. Teresa of Ávila had been ill for months. She was sixty-seven. A very high fever would not leave her, and she had an open wound in her throat that almost stopped her swallowing.

At the end of July she left Burgos. Her niece Teresita went with her, and so did Venerable Anne of St Bartholomew, who nursed her.

She wanted to go straight to Ávila. But Father Jerónimo Gracián, the provincial, kept her a month at Palencia and then sent her on to Valladolid, through the August heat. “God willed that the whole journey should be a succession of sufferings,” Anne of St Bartholomew said.

The convent at Valladolid was a house of her own order. The prioress there, María Bautista de Ocampo, was the daughter of one of St. Teresa’s cousins. She had paid a large part of what it cost to start that house. But she had taken the family’s side in the quarrel over St. Teresa’s dead brother’s will, and she treated St. Teresa unkindly.

The brother was Don Lorenzo de Cepeda, and he had died at Ávila on June 28, 1580 AD. In his will he left four hundred ducats to build a side chapel at the convent of St. Joseph in that city. He was to be buried there. St. Joseph’s had no money coming in and lived on what people gave it. After Don Lorenzo died, the Cepedas tried to have the will cancelled. They were St. Teresa’s own family.

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While she was staying there, the lawyer working for the Cepedas came to the convent to see her. He told her that she was not the person she seemed to be. He told her that many people out in the world would have behaved far better than she had.

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

Today she left Valladolid for Medina del Campo. She was in the middle of a letter to Catalina de Cristo, the prioress of Soria, and she broke it off 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 do the work of their day out of habit. They were to put their whole heart into it and 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.”