by Wyatt North
“Those who can enclose within the little paradise of the soul Him who created heaven and earth, may well believe they are in a good road, and that they shall not fail to arrive at length at the fountain of life, because they will make great progress in a short time.”
– St. Teresa of Avila
After founding convents for women all over Spain, Teresa secured the help of John of the Cross and Anthony of Jesus to establish houses for men. The first convent of Discalced Carmelite Brethren was established in 1568. It was followed by four more houses for men between 1571 and 1576. The growing popularity of Teresa’s reforms resulted in increased opposition from the older Carmelite order. They forbade her to found any more convents, and she was forced to voluntarily retire to one of her own houses. She chose to retire to St. Joseph’s, the first convent she founded, back in 1562, but inquisitions were launched against the friends who had helped her spread her reforms. It took several years of letter-writing to get King Philip II to have the inquisitions halted in 1579 and establish protections for continued reform efforts. Teresa was finally able to emerge from her forced retirement and continue her life’s work.
“There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.”
– St. Teresa of Avila
Teresa spent 20 years of her life traveling throughout Spain spreading her reforms and establishing convents for Discalced Carmelite nuns and men’s cloisters. In 1582, she fell ill on one of her journeys and died at the age of 67. Her last words were “My Lord, it is time to move on. Well then, may your will be done. O my Lord and my Spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another." Only 40 years after her death she was canonized by Pope Gregory XV and was named Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970, at the same time as St. Catherine of Siena, making them the first two women to be awarded that honor.
“Truth suffers, but never dies.”
– St. Teresa of Avila
In 1970, St. Teresa of Avila was named a Doctor of the Church, the Doctor of Prayer—a fitting honor for one who struggled so mightily to learn how to pray. The autobiography she penned during her five years of seclusion after founding her first convent described how the soul ascends toward union with God in four stages: 1) Devotion of Heart, 2) Devotion of Peace, 3) Devotion of Union, and 4) Devotion of Ecstasy. Her description of each stage is based on her own personal experiences and spiritual growth. Devotion to the Heart captures the struggles of the soul to focus inwardly through mental prayer. Devotion of Peace is the surrender of human will to God, though the soul is not yet immune to distraction. Devotion of Union is a mystical and ecstatic state in which the soul is absorbed in God, conferring a blissful peace. In the final stage, Devotion of Ecstasy, the soul is no longer conscious of the body, and the body, in a trance-like state may levitate off the ground, as Teresa is reported to have done on several occasions during Mass.
“Love to be real, it must cost—it must hurt—it must empty us of self.”
– St. Teresa of Calcutta
During all the years that she worked with the poor, Mother Teresa struggled with a profound spiritual darkness. The more she longed to feel God’s love, the harder it was for her to feel any connection to Him. She called this darkness the “painful night” of her soul, yet nobody, not even those closest to her, knew what she was experiencing. Her postulator likened it to the “dark night of the soul” described by St. John of the Cross or St. Therese of Lisieux’s “night of nothing.” Mother Teresa’s “painful night” allowed her to share in Jesus’ spiritual agony on the Cross and longing for love, even as she shared in the lonely desolation of the poor and sought a deeper relationship with God. This darkness began shortly after she received her “call within a call” through a series of mystical experiences in which Jesus revealed His sorrow over the plight of the poor and the fact that they did not know Him. After twenty years of teaching, she heeded Jesus’ call to establish the Missionaries of Charity to serve the poorest of the poor.
“I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish He didn't trust me so much.”
– St. Teresa of Calcutta
The first half of Mother Teresa’s religious life was relatively uneventful. Albanian-born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu left home at age 18 to join the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, better known as the Sisters of Loreto, in Ireland and took the name Sister Mary Teresa in honor of St. Therese of Lisieux. The following year she was sent to India, and in 1931 was assigned to teach at St. Mary's School for girls, which she did happily until she was called by Jesus to found the Missionaries of Charity. She worked alone initially, walking through the poorest sections of Calcutta and rendering whatever aid she could. One after another of her former St. Mary’s students joined her, and the Missionaries of Charity had its official beginning in 1950. It was followed in 1963 by the Missionaries of Charity Brothers, in 1976 and 1979 by the contemplative branch of the Sisters and the Brothers respectively, and in 1984 by the Missionaries of Charity Fathers. She also founded several organizations to allow those without religious vocations to participate in her work among the poor. By the time of her death in 1997, there were nearly 4,000 members in 610 foundations in 123 nations.
“Joy is a net of love by which we catch souls.”
– St. Teresa of Calcutta
For many people living today, St. Teresa of Calcutta is a familiar figure. We saw photos of the diminutive nun in her white, blue-bordered sari accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979 “for the glory of God and in the name of the poor.” Again and again, we saw Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s name on lists of the most admired people, including in the top spot in the 1999 Gallup’s List of the Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, ahead of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy. Her 2016 canonization by Pope Francis was televised live and streamed online. Yet she was not without her critics. Many claimed that her service to the poor wasn’t aimed at helping them as much as it was intended to make converts for the Church. But Mother Teresa’s mission was not to eliminate poverty in India, or in any of the other places in the world where the Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded, had a presence. Rather, it was to serve God among “the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for” and to help them know God’s love. And that is exactly what she did.
“For me prayer is a surge of the heart, it is a simple look towards Heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”
– St. Therese of Lisieux
St. Therese of Lisieux is one of the most popular of all the saints because people find it easy to relate to her. She lived a simple life, wrote plainly, and showed that simple acts done with love enabled one to grow in holiness. She had a childlike quality, an innocence and purity of heart, which was not surprising given the fact that she entered religious life as a child of fifteen and would have done so even earlier if she had been permitted to. Though she’d been raised in a devout family, had older sisters who had already entered convents, and had been practicing mental prayer since she was eleven without ever having been taught how, Therese said that Jesus truly came into her heart when she was fourteen on Christmas day. As the youngest of five sisters, motherless from the age of four, she was the pampered “baby,” and prone to tantrums. But on that day, an incident that would have normally triggered a tantrum suffused her with love.
“You cannot be half a saint; you must be a whole saint or no saint at all.”
– St. Therese of Lisieux
When Therese was ten, she contracted an illness that caused her temperature to soar. She was so ill that her survival was in question. She hated having people sitting at her bedside staring at her like, as she put it, “a string of onion.” Her sisters were praying to a statue of the Blessed Virgin in her room, and she began to pray along with them. When she saw Mary smile at her, she was cured instantly. Those who witnessed the event told others, and soon Therese was being bombarded with questions that struck her as trivial.
What was she wearing? What did she look like? She refused to answer them, and her interrogators spread the rumor that she lied about seeing Mary just to get attention.
“One must have passed through the tunnel to understand how black its darkness is.”
– St. Therese of Lisieux
By the time Therese was an adolescent, three of her sisters had entered convents, leaving only her sister Celine at home with her and their father. Pauline was a Carmelite, as was Marie, and Leonie joined the Poor Clares. Therese wanted to join Pauline and Marie in the Carmelite convent, but the superior refused her entry because of her age. So did the bishop, but Therese was nothing if not determined and persistent. Her father and Celine took her to Rome, thinking it would distract her, but Therese had another plan. The family was given an audience with the pope, but they were all instructed not to speak to him. Therese, however, shouted out to the pope, begging him to allow her to enter the Carmelite convent and was physically carried out by two guards. Fortunately for Therese, the Vicar General had witnessed the incident and so admired her bravery that he approved her admission to the convent.
“What beauty? I don’t see my beauty at all; I see only the graces I’ve received from God. You always misunderstand me; you don’t know, then, that I’m only a little seedling, a little almond.”
– St. Therese of Lisieux
Therese’s adjustment to life as a cloistered nun was a difficult one. Not long after she entered the convent, her father suffered the first of several strokes that resulted in both physical and mental impairment, and he was confined to an insane asylum. She was distraught at not being able to leave the convent to visit him. In her grief, she found it hard to pray. She not only felt powerless to help her father, but also unable to do anything great enough to show God the depth of her love for Him. Small of stature and unable to do great deeds, she concluded that if she did enough small deeds and made enough small sacrifices, she could prove her love. She wrote, “Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.”
“Let us go forward in peace, our eyes upon heaven, the only one goal of our labors.”
– St. Therese of Lisieux
Therese showed her love for God through obedience, sacrifice, and by showing love for everyone around her. She did things she didn’t want to do, ate things she didn’t want to eat, was nice to sisters she didn’t like, begged forgiveness for things she didn’t do, and ultimately agreed, when her sister Pauline was elected prioress, to remain a perpetual novice. Therese not only aspired to be holy, but to become a saint: “God would not make me wish for something impossible and so, in spite of my littleness, I can aim at being a saint.” The way for her to get to heaven, she concluded, was by making love her vocation.”
True love is found only in complete self-forgetfulness, and it is only after we have detached ourselves from every creature that we find Jesus.
– St. Therese of Lisieux
At the age of 23, Therese realized she had the unmistakable symptoms of tuberculosis, but she kept her illness a secret for a year before it became apparent to everyone in the convent. She suffered not only immense physical pain but also the pain of thinking she would die without having accomplished anything and that nobody would remember her. But she had been keeping a journal, and her sister Pauline, who was like a second mother to her, encouraged her to keep writing. After Therese died at age 24, Pauline circulated her writings to other convents, and her “little way” of making small daily sacrifices resonated with ordinary Catholics who wanted to find holiness. In her short time on earth, “little” Therese made a big impact, and she has continued to do so ever since. She was canonized as St. Therese of Lisieux (the town she grew up in) in 1925.
“Obedience unites us so closely to God that in a way transforms us into Him, so that we have no other will but His. If obedience is lacking, even prayer cannot be pleasing to God.”
– St. Thomas Aquinas
The custom among well-to-do families in 13th century Italy was for the youngest son to enter a monastery. Thomas’s parents, of minor nobility, entrusted his education to the Benedictines and assumed he would join the Benedictine order in time. But when Thomas had completed his early education, he informed his parents that he had decided to join the recently founded Dominican order, a decision made largely due to the influence of a Dominican preacher he met at the university in Naples. In fact, he had already secretly become a Dominican in 1244. His parents were so opposed to the idea that they had his brothers kidnap him and bring him home, where he was held captive for a year while they tried to change his mind. His family did everything they could think of to separate Thomas from the Dominicans, including hiring a prostitute to seduce him. As the story goes, Thomas fended her off with a fireplace iron. His mother eventually realized they were waging a losing battle and decided to live with her son’s decision, though she didn’t want to let the rest of the family know she had given in. In 1244, she allowed him to “escape.”
In the life of the body, a man is sometimes sick, and unless he takes medicine, he will die. Even so in the spiritual life a man is sick on account of sin. For that reason he needs medicine so that he may be restored to health; and this grace is bestowed in the Sacrament of Penance.
– St. Thomas Aquinas
From 1245 to 1272, Thomas completed his education, was ordained as a Dominican priest, became a master teacher, and wrote prolifically on Catholic theology—both scholarly texts for advanced students and his most famous but unfinished work, Summa Theologica, aimed at beginning students. His studies, teaching, and preaching took him to Naples, Paris, and Cologne. He was in great demand by both universities and religious institutions. At the request of the Dominicans, he established a university in Naples and served as regent master. Not long after, for some unexplained reason, Thomas stopped writing and teaching, saying only that “All that I have written seems like straw to me.” He died less than three months later, in March 1274.
“The Blessed Eucharist is the perfect Sacrament of the Lord's Passion, since It contains Christ Himself and his Passion.”
– St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas had, and continues to have, a tremendous influence on ecclesiastical architecture. In his writings on beauty, he identified three qualities that all beautiful things have in common: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. Integritas refers to wholeness—having everything that is essential and nothing that isn’t. Consonantia has to do with proportionality; the dimensions of a beautiful thing are appropriate to its purpose and the “goal that God had in mind for it.” Claritas is radiance, or the light that radiates from a thing of beauty and illuminates purpose and meaning. This aesthetic underlies the design of churches today just as it did in the 13th century.
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”
– St. Thomas Aquinas
There are few medieval writers whose philosophical works are still read, studied, and debated today, and St. Thomas Aquinas is one of them. During his 48 years on earth, he wrote 60 works of various lengths. His prodigious output was due in part to having an incredible memory for everything he had ever read and studied. St. Antoninus described Thomas’s mind as being like a huge library. He was also given the great grace of, in his own words, “understanding whatever I have read.” Thomas was also a master of multi-tasking, often dictating several works to as many as five scribes at a time.
“Charity is the form, mover, mother and root of all the virtues.”
– St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas described charity as a form of friendship, but without the caveats imposed by Aristotle and other philosophers, such as the notion that friendship can only exist between beings who are equal in dignity. According to Thomas, charity is above all a friendship with God. God shares his own friendship,
his love, with us, though we are far below Him in dignity. We in turn share it with others, even our enemies, for the sake of God. It does not require us to have anything in common with those we are charitable toward other than the love God has for all his creation. The love that God calls upon us to have for sinners is the essence of charity.