Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul, by Cathleen Medwick. New York: Knopf, 1999.

The sixteenth-century Spanish nun Teresa of Avila had an immense impact in the New World. In 1622, the year she was canonized, Archbishop Perez de la Serna named her patron saint of Mexico City, and in convents throughout the Spanish colonies Carmelite nuns wrote autobiographies in imitation of Teresa's Life. Teresa continues to be a favorite among Latin American Catholics, and so Cathleen Medwick's new biography is of interest not only on both sides of the Atlantic, but also in both hemispheres.

In a period in which religion had in large part degenerated into pomp and ritual, Teresa advocated a return to interiority, mental prayer, and a simplified life-style. In Teresa's time convents were often overcrowded and disorderly. The "mitigated rule," which was practiced in Carmelite convents throughout Spain, allowed the inhabitants of religious houses considerable freedom; nuns entertained guests and left the convent to pay visits. Many religious houses were scandal ridden. The environment was hardly conducive to true spirituality.

In an effort to return to a purer form of Christianity, Teresa created the Discalced Carmelites and founded seventeen convents of the "primitive" or "unmitigated" rule-- that is, convents whose spiritual practices required strict adherence to the practices of the first Carmelites. Nuns could not receive visitors or leave the premises. Except during recreational periods, silence was to be maintained. Discalced Carmelite nuns were to wear coarse brown sackcloth instead of the soft black serge worn by other Carmelite sisters, and eat meat (usually fowl) only once a week. They were to devote themselves to prayer and to practical activities such as spinning and weaving. Furthermore, the new convents were to be founded in poverty, that is, without the patronage of a powerful noble.

Of Jewish background, Teresa abolished the use of titles and last names that might distinguish sisters in terms of their class and ethnicity. Teresa's brothers had gone to the New World to seek their fortunes, and some aided her financially in her efforts to establish convents. She also received help from several affluent conversos, or New Christians--people whose ancestors, like Teresa's, had converted after the monarchy forced Jews to embrace the majority religion or to leave Spain.

Teresa met with tremendous resistance in her efforts to reform the Carmelite...