Father Corapi's Biography

In the Acta Sanctorum, October, vol. vii, a short life is printed with the usual commentary. See also DCH., vol. iii, pp. 686—687.

ST THECLA, whom the Roman Martyrology names today, was one of the nuns sent by St Tetta, abbess of Wimborne, into Germany to help in the mission of St Boniface. She probably went at the same time as her kinswoman St Lioba, under whom she certainly was for a time at the abbey of Bischofsheim, until St Boniface made her abbess of Ochsenfurt. At the death of St Hadeloga, foundress and first abbess of the nunnery of Kitzingen on the Main, St Thecla was called to preside over that house as well, which she did for many years with conspicuous devotion and holiness. The name Thecla does not appear in the extant list of abbesses of Kitzingen, but it would seem that she is referred to under the name of Heilga, that is, “the Saint”. Both to her spiritual children and to the rough German women among whom they lived the holy abbess ever gave an example of humility, gentle­ness and charity. During the Peasants’ War of the sixteenth century the relics of St Thecla and her predecessors in the abbey church were shamefully abused and scattered from their shrines.

The Bollandists in the Acta Sanctorum, October, vol. vii, have brought together a few scattered references to this abbess.

898 Euthymius the Younger, Abbot miraculous powers and the gift of prophecy (AC)

THIS holy monk was a Galatian, born at Opso, near Ancyra. He is called “the Thessalonian” because he was eventually buried at Salonika, or “the New” or “Younger”, apparently to distinguish him from St Euthymius the Great who lived four hundred years earlier. Euthymius at his baptism received the name of Nicetas. At an early age he married, and had a daughter Anastasia, but when he was still only eighteen, in the year 842, he left his wife and child (in circumstances that, as reported, look curiously like desertion) and entered a laura on Mount Olympus in Bithynia. For a time he put himself under the direction of St Joan­nicius, who was then a monk there, and afterwards of one John, who gave him the name of Euthymius. When he had trained him for a time, John sent him to lead the common life in the monastery of the Pissidion, where Euthymius advanced rapidly in the ways of holiness.

Some time after the death of Joseph St Euthymius was told in a vision that he had contended as a solitary long enough; he was to move once more, this time to a mountain called Peristera on the east of Salonika. There he would find the ruins of a monastery dedicated in honour of St Andrew, now used for folding sheep: he was to restore and re-people it. Taking with him two monks, Ignatius and Ephrem, he went straight to the place and found as it had been said. At once he set about rebuilding the church and dwellings were also made for the monks, who rapidly increased in number and fervour, and St Euthymius was their abbot for fourteen years. Then he paid a visit to his home at Opso and gained there a number of recruits, male and female, including some of his own family. Another monastery was built for the women; and when both houses were thoroughly established St Euthymius handed them over to the metropolitan of Salonika and went to pass the rest of his days in the solitude of Athos once more. When he knew that death was approaching he summoned his fellow-hermits to celebrate with him the feast of the translation of his patron St Euthymius the Great; then, having said farewell to them, he departed with the monk George to Holy Island, where five months later he died peacefully on October 15 in the year 898.

The life of St Euthymius was written by one of his monks at Peristera, Basil by name, who became metropolitan of Salonika. He narrates several miracles of his master, of some of which he was himself a witness and even a beneficiary, and as an example of the saint’s gift of prophecy he tells how, while he was in retreat after having been shorn a monk, Euthymius came to him and said, “Though I am utterly unworthy to receive enlightenment from on high, nevertheless, as I am responsible for your direction, God has shown me that love of learning will draw you from the monastery and you will be made an archbishop.”— “And later” , says Basil, “the call of ambition made me choose the noisy and troubled life of a town before the peace of solitude.”

The name of this St Euthymius does not seem to occur in the synaxaries and, except for a reference under October 15 in Martynov’s Annus ecciesiasticus graeco-slavicur, his existence was hardly known in the West until Louis Petit published the Greek text of the life in the Revue de l’Orient chrétien, vol. vi (1903), pp. 155—205 and 503—536. The life, with the Greek office for the feast, was also published separately in 1904. The reference to the “hollow tower” which he occupied at Salonika shows, as Delehaye points out (Les Saints Stylites, pp. cxxix—cxxx), that Euthymius was at one time a “stylite”. See also E. von Dobschutz in the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, vol. xviii (1909), pp. 715—716.

1582 ST TERESA OF AVILA, VIRGIN, F0UNDRESS OF THE DISCALCED CARMELITES

Her mother died when she was fourteen, and “as soon as I began to understand how great a loss I had sustained I was very much afflicted and so I went before an image of our Blessed Lady and besought her with tears that she would be my mother”. Teresa and Rodrigo began to spend hours reading romances and trying to write them themselves. “These tales”, she says in the Autobiography, “did not fail to cool my good desires, and were the cause of my falling insensibly into other defects. I was so enchanted that I could not be content if I had not some new tale in my hands. I began to imitate the fashions, to take delight in being well dressed, to have great care of my hands, to make use of perfumes, and to affect all the vain trimmings which my position in the world allowed.” The change in Teresa was sufficiently noticeable to disturb the mind of her father, and he placed his daughter, who was then fifteen, with a convent of Augustinian nuns in Avila where many young women of her rank were educated.

Her prudence and charity and, not least, her personal charm, gained her the esteem of all that knew her, and an affectionate and grateful disposition inclined her to return the civilities which others showed her. By an irregular custom of her convent quite common in Spain in those days, visitors of all kinds were freely received and mixed with, and Teresa spent much time in conversing with seculars in the parlour of the monastery

She began to neglect mental prayer, and persuaded herself that this was a part of humility, as her unrecollected life rendered her unworthy to converse so much or so familiarly with God. She also said to herself that there could be no danger of sin in what so many others, more virtuous than she, did and for her neglect of meditation she alleged the infirmities to which she was subject. But she adds,

   When her father died his confessor, a Dominican friar, pointed out to Teresa the dangerous state she was in. At his instance she returned to the practice of private prayer and never again abandoned it. But she had not yet the courage to follow God perfectly, or entirely to renounce dissipating her time and gifts. During all these years of wavering and yet of gradually increasing strength and growing purpose, St Teresa tells us she never tired of listening to sermons, “however bad they were”; but in prayer her thoughts were “more busied about desiring that the hour resolved to be spent in prayer might come quickly to an end, still listening when the clock would strike, than upon better things”.
Becoming more and more convinced of her own unworthiness, she had recourse to the two great penitents, St Mary Magdalen and St Augustine, and with them were associated two events decisive in fixing her will upon the pursuit of religious perfection. One was the reading of St Augustine’s Confessions the other was a movement to penitence before a picture of our suffering Lord, in which

After she had finally withdrawn herself from the pleasures of social intercourse and other occasions of dissipation and faults (which she exceedingly exaggerated), St Teresa was favoured by God very frequently with the prayer of quiet, and also with that of union, which latter sometimes continued a long time with great increase of joy and love, and God began to visit her with intellectual visions and interior communications. The warning of certain women who had been miserably duped by imagination and the Devil much impressed her and, though she was persuaded her graces were from God, she was perplexed, and consulted so many persons that, though binding them to secrecy, the affair was divulged abroad, to her mortification and confusion. One to whom she spoke was Francis de Salsedo, a married man who was an example of virtue to the whole town. He introduced to her Dr Daza, a learned and virtuous priest, who judged her to be deluded by the Devil, saying that such divine favours were not consistent with a life so full of imperfections as she claimed hers to be. Teresa was alarmed and not satisfied, and Don Francis (to whom the saint says she owed her salvation and her comfort) bade her not to be discouraged. He recommended that she should consult one of the fathers of the newly-formed Society of Jesus, to whom she made a general confession in which, with her sins, she gave him an account of her manner of prayer and her extra-ordinary favours. The father assured her these were divine graces, but told her she had neglected to lay the true foundation of an interior life. On his advice, though he judged her experiences in prayer to be from God, she endeavoured for two months to resist and reject them. But her resistance was in vain.

The Carmelite nuns, and indeed those of other orders as well, were very much relaxed from their early austerity and enthusiasm in sixteenth-century Spain. We have seen how the parlour at Avila was a sort of social centre for the ladies and gentlemen of the town, and that the nuns went out of their enclosure on the slightest pretext those who wanted an easy and sheltered life without responsibilities could find it in a convent. The size of the communities was both a cause and an effect of this mitigation there were 140 nuns in the convent at Avila, and the result afterwards wrung from St Teresa the cry,

  This state of things was taken for granted, there was no rebuking consciousness among religious at large that the nature of their daily life fell far short of what was required by their pro­fession according to the mind of their founders, so that when a Carmelite of the Incarnation house at Avila, her niece, began to talk of the possibility of the founda­tion of a small community bound to a more perfect way of life the idea struck St Teresa not as a very natural one but as an inspiration from Heaven.
   She had been a nun for 25 years: she now determined to undertake the establishment of such a reformed convent, and received a promise of immediate help from a wealthy widow, Doña Guiomar de Ulloa. The project was approved by St Peter of Alcantara, St Louis Bertrand, and the Bishop of Avila, and Teresa procured the licence and approbation of Father Gregory Fernandez, prior provincial of the Carmelites but no sooner had the project taken shape than he was obliged by the objections which were raised to recall his licence. A storm fell upon Teresa through the violent opposition which was made by her fellow nuns, the nobility, the magistrates and the people. Father Ibañez, a Dominican, secretly encouraged her, and assisted Doña Guiomar to pursue the enterprise, together with Doña Juana de Ahumada, a married sister of the saint, who began with her husband to build a new convent at Avila in 1561, but in such a manner that the world took it for a house intended for herself and her family. Their son Gonzalez, a little child, was crushed by a wall which fell upon him while playing around this building, and he was carried without giving any signs of life to Teresa, who, taking him in her arms, prayed to God and after some minutes restored him perfectly sound to his mother, as was proved in the process of the saint’s canonization. The child used afterwards often to tell his aunt that it was her duty to forward his salvation by her prayers, seeing it was owing to her that he was not long ago in Heaven.

Eventually a brief arrived from Rome authorizing the establishment of the new convent.

Strict enclosure was established with almost perpetual silence, and the most austere poverty, at first without any settled revenues; the nuns wore habits of coarse serge, sandals instead of shoes (whence they are called “discalced”), and were bound to perpetual abstinence. At first St Teresa would not admit more than thirteen nuns to a community, but in those which should be founded with revenues, and not to subsist solely on alms, she afterwards allowed twenty-one. The prior general of the Carmelites, John Baptist Rubeo (Rossi), came to Avila in 1567, and was charmed with the foundress and the wise regulations of the house. He gave St Teresa full authority to found other convents upon the same plan, in spite of the fact that St Joseph’s had been established without his knowledge or leave, and she even received from him a licence for the foundation of two houses of reformed friars (“Contemplative Carmelites”) in Castile.
St Teresa passed five years in her convent of St Joseph with thirteen nuns, being herself the first and most diligent, not only at prayer but also in spinning, sweeping the house or any other work.
 “I think that they were the most quiet years of my life”, she writes. “I there enjoyed the tranquility and calmness which my soul has often since longed for. . .His divine Majesty sent us what was necessary without asking, and if at any time we were in want (which was very seldom) the joy of these holy souls was so much the greater.”
She is not content with vague generalities, but records such enticing details as of the nun who obediently planted the cucumber horizontally and of the water, which was piped into the house from a source, that the plumbers said was too low.

At this time Pope St Pius V appointed visitors apostolic to inquire into relaxa­tions in religious orders with a view to reform, and he named a well-known Domin­ican, Peter Fernandez, to be visitor to the Carmelites of Castile. At Avila he not surprisingly found great fault with the convent of the Incarnation, and to remedy its abuses he sent for St Teresa and told her she was to take charge of it as prioress. It was doubly distasteful to her to be separated from her own daughters and to be put from outside at the head of a house which opposed her activities with jealousy and warmth. The nuns’ at first refused to obey her; some of them went into hysterics at the very idea. She told them that she came not to coerce or instruct but to serve, and to learn from the least among them.

Having won the sympathy and affection of the community, she had less difficulty in establishing discipline according to its rules. Too frequent callers were forbidden (to the annoyance of certain gentlemen of Avila), the finances of the house were put in order, and a more truly claustral spirit reigned—a characteristically Teresian performance. When making a foundation at Yeas St Teresa met for the first time Father Jerome Gracián, and was easily persuaded by him to extend her activities to Seville; he had just preached the Lent there, and was himself a friar of the reform. With the exception of the first, no one of her convents was so hard to establish as this. Among the difficulties was a disappointed novice who delated the new nuns to the Inquisition as Illuminati, and worse.

The Carmelite friars in Italy had, in the meantime, become afraid of the progress of the Spanish reform lest, as one of their number said, they should one day be compelled to set about reforming themselves, a fear which was shared by their mitigated brethren in Spain. The prior general, Father Rubeo, who had hitherto favoured St Teresa, now sided with the objectors and upheld a general chapter at Plasencia which passed several decrees gravely restricting the reform.  The new nuncio apostolic, Philip de Sega, dismissed Father Gracián from his office of visitor to the Discalced Carmelites, and St John-of-the-Cross was im­prisoned in a monastery; St Teresa herself was told to choose one of her convents to which to retire and to abstain from further foundations. While recommending her undertaking to God, she did not disdain to avail herself of the help of her friends in the world. These interested the king, Philip II, on her behalf, and he warmly espoused her cause. The nuncio was called before him and sternly rebuked for his activities against the discalced friars and nuns, and in 1580 an order was obtained at Rome to exempt the Reformed from the jurisdiction of the mitigated Carmelites, so that each should have their own provincial. Father Gracian was elected for the Reformed.

By the time of the separation between the two observances of the Carmelite Order in 1580 St Teresa was sixty-five years old and quite broken in health. During her last two years she saw her final foundations, making them seventeen in all: foundations that had been made not only to provide homes of contemplation for individuals but as a work of reparation for the destruction of so many monas­teries by Protestantism, notably in the British Isles and Germany. A cruel trial was reserved for her last days. The will of her brother Don Lorenzo, whose daughter was prioress at Valladolid, was in dispute and St Teresa was drawn unwillingly into the proceedings. A lawyer was rude to her, and to him she said, “Sir, may God return to you the courtesy you have shown to me”. But before the conduct of her niece she was speechless and impotent: for the prioress of Valladolid, hitherto an irreproachable religious, showed her aunt the door of the convent of which she was foundress and told her never more to return to it. St Teresa wrote to Mother Mary-of-St-Joseph, “I beseech you and your daughters not to wish or pray for me to live longer. Ask on the contrary that I may go to my eternal rest, for I can be of no more use to you.”

The last foundation, at Burgos, was made under difficulties, and when it was achieved in July 1582 St Teresa wished to return to Avila, but was induced to set out for Alba de Tormes, where the Duchess Maria Henriquez was expecting her. Bd Anne-of-St-Barthol­omew describes the journey, not properly prepared for and the foundress so ill that she fainted on the road one night they could get no food but a few figs, and when they arrived at Alba St Teresa went straight to bed. Three days later she said to Bd Anne, “At last, my daughter, the hour of death has come”. She received the last sacraments from Father Antony de Heredia, who asked her where she wished to be buried. She only answered, “Is it for me to say? Will they deny me a little ground for my body here?” When the Blessed Sacrament was brought in she sat up in bed, helpless though she was, and exclaimed, “0 my Lord, now is the time that we may see each other!” Apparently in wonder at the things her Saviour was showing her, St Teresa-of-Jesus died in the arms of Bd Anne at nine in the evening of October 4, 1582. The very next day the Gregorian reform of the kalendar came into force and ten days were dropped, so that it was accounted October 15, the date on which her feast was ultimately fixed. Her body was buried at Alba de Tormes, and there it remains. She was canonized in 1622.