Nun who said she couldn't teach becomes the Church's teacher

ROME, September 27, 1970 AD — Saint Teresa of Ávila, a Carmelite nun in Spain, wrote a book about her life. In it, she told her confessor what to do if anything she had written went against the Catholic faith: “your reverence must burn it at once—for I give my consent.” The book, called her Life, was reported to the Inquisition. The Inquisition kept it for twelve years, and St. Teresa never got it back. The Inquisitor General told her in person that nothing in it deserved blame.

St. Teresa wrote her books while she was starting one convent after another across Spain. In 1577 AD, at Toledo, she began a book about prayer called the Interior Castle. Its first words were: “Rarely has obedience laid upon me so difficult a task as this of writing about prayer.” She died in 1582 AD.

A question nobody had settled

Four centuries later, the Discalced Carmelites asked Pope Paul VI to name St. Teresa a Doctor of the Church. They were the order she had reformed. Until then, the title had only ever gone to men. Many cardinals, bishops and scholars joined the Carmelites in asking.

A Vatican department called the Sacred Congregation of Rites looked at the request. Its members couldn’t decide whether a woman could be a Doctor at all. At a meeting on December 20, 1967 AD, they asked for that question to be studied. The cardinals and officials who studied it decided that a woman could hold the title. Pope Paul VI agreed with them on March 21, 1968 AD.

Sunday in St. Peter’s

On Sunday, September 27, 1970 AD, crowds came to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome for Mass. They came from every nation, and most of all from Spain, and many cardinals were there. During the Mass, Pope Paul VI called St. Teresa by another of her names, Saint Teresa of Jesus. Then he spoke the words that made it official: “we declare Saint Teresa of Jesus, Virgin of Avila, Doctor of the Universal Church.” He thanked God together with everyone in the church. Then he began his sermon.

Pope Paul VI’s official letter about the title called her “a woman of simple customs and ignorant of literary culture” who “had repeatedly declared her inability to understand and teach.” And yet, the letter said, she was “able to understand, teach and write, inspired by God.”

Later in the sermon, Pope Paul VI said that St. Teresa was the first woman to be given the title. He said that brought to mind words Saint Paul wrote to the Christians of Corinth: “Let women keep silence in the churches.” Those words still meant, Pope Paul VI said, that women were not called to offices of teaching in the Church’s hierarchy. But St. Paul’s command was not being broken. The new title did not give St. Teresa any such office.

What the title did do, Pope Paul VI said, was give her teaching on prayer more weight in the Church and in the world. He read out how St. Teresa described prayer in her Life: “mental prayer is nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who, we know, loves us.”

Pope Paul VI ended the sermon on the words St. Teresa said again and again as she was dying. He called them the summary of her life. In her own Spanish, they were: “En fin, Señor, soy hija de la Iglesia” (After all, Lord, I am a daughter of the Church).