Daily Mass - feast day of Saint Teresa of Ávila

One of the great heroes of the sixteenth-century reformation of the Church (the actual reformation, not that protestant movement) was the Spanish Carmelite Saint Teresa of Jesus, a prolific writer and an eminent Doctor of the Church. She was born at Ávila in 1515 and inspired at an early age by the Lives of the martyr Saints and even tried to run away from home to get to Africa. In her desire to see God, she realised as a child that all things will pass away, while only God remains always; she would only need to be patient. She was later taught by Augustinian nuns and, together with her love for reading, this led her to the life of prayer and recollection. At twenty, she joined the Carmelites at Ávila and, after 1554, began to have mystical experiences, almost simultaneously proceeding to reform her Order. In 1562, she achieved the foundation of the first reformed Carmel at Ávila, and began to work together with the Carmelite friar, Saint John of the Cross, and together they founded the Order of Carmelites Discalced (OCD), with the first house at Duruelo. Her own reformed houses were joined to this one and in 1580, the independent province of the Discalced Order was established by Rome. Teresa died in 1580, on her way back to Ávila, after founding a new convent at Burgos. She was canonised in 1622 by the Holy Father Gregory XV, alongside Francis Xavier, Ignatius of Loyola and Philip Neri - a most blessed company.

With no formal academic training, Teresa was an avid reader, reading the Fathers, and general theology and spirituality. She left us principally a work called the Book of the Lord's Mercies (aka. the Book of Life, 1565), a biography of her direction under Saint John of Ávila. Other popular works are the Way of Perfection (1566), which provided spiritual direction to novices of the Order, and the Interior Castle (1577), a map of the human soul and its progress towards God under the action of the Holy Ghost. In her Book of the Foundations, she documents the life of the new Order. Teresa's main themes include the evangelical virtues as the basis of Christian life, detachment from earthly possessions, humility in the love for truth, and the school of virtues in general. Prayer, she said, was the entrance into the Interior Castle of the human soul; prayer, she said, is being on terms of friendship with God and speaking with Him in private. Prayer progresses from merely vocal prayer and develops into meditation/recollection and arrives at spiritual union with God. She counselled the imitation of Christ through meditation on his life and on the mystery of the Eucharist. 

And that's quite enough. I shall now update the Doctors page.