50 Fun Facts About Teresa of Avila

Which phenomenon, reported by witnesses during her raptures, embarrassed Teresa of Avila when it happened at prayer?

Levitation was reported during her raptures, sometimes in the middle of Mass. She treated it as an embarrassment and asked her fellow nuns to hold her down.

Teresa of Avila died on the very night in 1582 that Catholic lands skipped ten days by adopting which calendar?

Gregorian reform meant Thursday 4 October was followed directly by Friday 15 October. That is why her death is dated to either day and her feast falls on the 15th.

Which 20th-century ruler kept a relic of Teresa of Avila's hand until he died, after his troops seized it in war?

Francisco Franco kept the hand after his forces took it from Republican troops in the Spanish Civil War. The relic is now kept in the Spanish town of Ronda.

Which Italian sculptor carved the marble Ecstasy of Saint Teresa as the altarpiece of the Cornaro family's chapel?

Gian Lorenzo Bernini also designed the chapel around it, with marble members of the Cornaro family watching from theatre boxes. He was free for the job because the new pope had shunned him.

In 1970 Teresa of Avila became the first woman given which title, held by saints whose writings shaped doctrine?

Doctor of the Church had been an all-male honour until Teresa received it. Within that company she is known as the Doctor of Prayer.

Teresa of Avila founded the Discalced Carmelites, whose name comes from a Latin word meaning to go without what?

Shoes were set aside as a mark of the stricter life she wanted, so her followers became known as the barefoot Carmelites.

At age seven, Teresa of Avila ran away from home with her brother Rodrigo hoping to find what among the Moors?

Martyrdom was the goal, an idea she took from the lives of the saints she loved to hear. An uncle spotted the pair just outside town and brought them home.

The small orange sweets sold in Avila in honour of Saint Teresa are made mainly from which ingredient?

Egg yolks give yemas de Santa Teresa their name, yema being Spanish for yolk. An Avila pastry shop began selling them under her name in 1860.

Which younger Spanish friar and poet joined Teresa of Avila's reform and helped found its first house for men?

John of the Cross was planning to join another order when she asked him to follow her instead. Opponents of the reform later imprisoned him, and he began one of his finest poems in his cell.

Which Dan Brown novel makes the sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa one of four Altars of Science on a trail of clues?

Angels & Demons sends Robert Langdon to the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, where the statue marks the altar of fire. The 2009 film rebuilt the church on a larger set to fit its cranes.

The marble Ecstasy of Saint Teresa stands above an altar in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in which city?

Rome is home to the statue, in a church that belongs to the Discalced Carmelites, the order Teresa founded. A relic of her right foot is kept in the same city.

Which medieval Italian mystic received the same papal title as Teresa of Avila in 1970, the first women so honoured?

Catherine of Siena received the honour only days after Teresa. She never lived in a convent, choosing an active life of prayer and letter-writing in the world.

Which German philosopher, later murdered at Auschwitz, became a Catholic after reading Teresa of Avila's autobiography?

Edith Stein read the book during a summer holiday in 1921 and later entered a Carmelite convent herself. She took Teresa as part of her own religious name.

Teresa of Avila is called the great Teresa to tell her apart from which later nun known as the Little Flower?

Thérèse of Lisieux died of tuberculosis at 24, three centuries after her namesake. Vita Sackville-West compared the two Carmelites in a joint study, The Eagle and the Dove.

The Carmelite order that Teresa of Avila reformed takes its name from a mountain range in which present-day country?

Israel is home to Mount Carmel, which rises above the port of Haifa. The order grew from hermits who settled on the mountain in the Crusader era.

Avila, home town of Teresa, is a World Heritage Site best known for which medieval feature ringing its old centre?

Defensive walls with more than 80 towers still form a complete circuit around old Avila. Tradition dates their start to 1090, over four centuries before Teresa was born.

Teresa of Avila's paternal grandfather was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition for allegedly returning to which faith?

Judaism was the family's former faith: her grandfather Juan Sánchez was a converso, a Jew who had converted under pressure. Her father, a child at the time, grew up to be one of Avila's wealthiest men.

Teresa of Avila credited her recovery from near-fatal illness to which saint, whose name she gave her first convent?

Joseph was the patron she thanked when she recovered after a long paralysis, and San José in Avila became the first house of her reform in 1562.

Which work by Augustine of Hippo comforted Teresa of Avila because its saintly author had once been a sinner too?

Confessions reached her in a new Spanish translation and eased her constant worry over her own faults. As a girl she had been schooled by Augustinian nuns in Avila.

In the vision of Teresa of Avila known as the transverberation, a seraph repeatedly pierced her with what weapon?

A golden lance tipped with fire is how she described it, leaving her burning with love of God. The scene is the one frozen in marble in the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

Which book by Teresa of Avila pictures the soul as a crystal globe holding seven mansions with God at the centre?

The Interior Castle was written in 1577 as a guide for her Carmelite sisters, each mansion a stage on the way inward. Outside it, the vision showed darkness, toads and vipers.

In her autobiography, Teresa of Avila compares four stages of prayer to four ways of doing which everyday task?

Watering a garden begins as hard labour, with the gardener hauling water up from a deep well. That first stage stands for meditation, the most effortful kind of prayer.

Which George Eliot novel opens with a Prelude about Teresa of Avila and likens its heroine Dorothea Brooke to her?

Middlemarch casts Dorothea as a Teresa born in the wrong century, with no great cause to give her life to. Eliot's Prelude says the saint found her epic life in reforming a religious order.

Which French philosopher argued in The Second Sex that Teresa of Avila was perhaps the only woman to live for herself?

Simone de Beauvoir singled her out among the women of history as one who rose to the level of any man of her age.

A Columbia philosopher argues which French thinker borrowed his famous evil deceiver argument from Teresa of Avila?

René Descartes wrote his Meditations decades after Teresa, whose books on inner reflection were widely read. Christia Mercer made the case in a 2016 paper on his debt to her.

Visions of Ecstasy, a 1989 short film about Teresa of Avila, was refused a British certificate on which legal ground?

Blasphemy has been the British film board's reason for refusing only this one work. The film finally got an 18 certificate in 2012, four years after the law was repealed.

Teresa of Avila was canonised in 1622 alongside which Basque ex-soldier, the author of the Spiritual Exercises?

Ignatius of Loyola was one of five saints declared that day, alongside Francis Xavier, Philip Neri and Isidore the Farmer.

In the 1620s Teresa of Avila was proposed as co-patron of Spain beside which apostle, whose backers won the argument?

James, known in Spain as Santiago, kept the title after a debate that ran through the decade. Her supporters had argued that Spain needed a modern patron to face Protestantism.

Letters from Teresa of Avila to which Spanish king helped get Inquisition cases against her allies dropped in 1579?

Philip II wanted Spain's religious orders reformed and welcomed her foundations. His support let the Discalced Carmelites start founding houses again after three years of obstruction.

Legend says Teresa of Avila once owned a wax-coated statue of the Child Jesus now venerated in which European capital?

Prague's Carmelite friars were given the statue by a princess in 1628, long after a Spanish bride had carried it to Bohemia. A family legend says Teresa gave it to the bride's mother.

Before entering a convent, the teenage Teresa of Avila was enamoured of which popular kind of medieval fiction?

Tales of knighthood were the popular fiction of her youth, and she was devoted to them. Her mother's death when she was fourteen turned her toward a more serious piety.

After her mother died when she was fourteen, Teresa of Avila turned to which figure as a spiritual mother?

The Virgin Mary became the centre of her devotion in her grief. The Carmelite order she later joined is itself dedicated to Mary, as Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

Researchers reading the detailed accounts Teresa of Avila left of her raptures have speculated she had which condition?

Epilepsy of the temporal lobe is the tentative suggestion, possible only because she wrote down almost everything that happened to her. Such a medical record is rare for her century.

Teresa of Avila and her Carmelite reform belong to which era of Catholic renewal in the century of Martin Luther?

The Counter-Reformation was Catholicism's answer to Protestantism, and reformers like her were among its leading spiritual figures. She opened her first convent the year before the Council of Trent closed.

Father Gracián kept a finger of Teresa of Avila as a relic until which raiders seized him and made him ransom it?

Barbary corsairs took him in 1593 on a voyage from Sicily, and by his own account he redeemed the finger with a few rings and 20 reales. He spent two years as a captive in Tunisia.

Teresa of Avila fell fatally ill on a journey from Burgos and died in which town, where her tomb still stands?

Alba de Tormes kept her body only after a tug of war: it was moved to Avila in 1585 and the Duke of Alba had it brought back the next year. A pope then ordered that it stay.

Which Spanish actress played Teresa of Avila in the 2007 biopic Theresa: The Body of Christ, directed by Ray Loriga?

Paz Vega starred in a film that Spain's bishops disliked, criticising its erotic treatment of the saint's visions.

Which Spanish pop star's 2025 album Lux includes Sauvignon Blanc, a song inspired by Teresa of Avila?

Rosalía recorded Lux with the London Symphony Orchestra. The song draws on the saint's rejection of material possessions in favour of spiritual love.

Which Flemish painter and diplomat depicted Teresa of Avila's Vision of the Holy Spirit in a work now in Rotterdam?

Peter Paul Rubens painted her within decades of her death, before she had even been declared a saint. Another of his portraits of her hangs in Vienna.

Which American composer split the role of Teresa of Avila between two singers in the opera Four Saints in Three Acts?

Virgil Thomson composed it in 1928, and its 1934 premiere in Hartford broke ground with an all-Black cast before a Broadway run.

Francis Borgia, who assured Teresa of Avila that her visions were divinely inspired, belonged to which religious order?

Jesuits were still a young order then, and Borgia, a former duke and the great-grandson of a pope, went on to lead them as superior general.

Which Franciscan friar became adviser to Teresa of Avila and encouraged her to found her first reformed convent?

Peter of Alcantara slept so little that he became the patron saint of night watchmen. Teresa's own writings are the source of much that is known about his life.

In 1626 a parliament elected Teresa of Avila, without a single vote against, as co-patron of which Spanish kingdom?

Castile's parliament acted at the king's request, and the pope confirmed the choice the following year. Her home town lies in the old kingdom's heartland.

Artists usually show Teresa of Avila in a Carmelite habit, holding a book and which other object?

A quill pen marks her out as a writer, and a dove sometimes hovers nearby as a sign of the Holy Spirit.

Besides an arm, which organ of Teresa of Avila is displayed as a relic in the town where she is buried?

Her heart is kept in a church museum there along with her left arm. Other relics travelled further: a hand reached Lisbon and a finger went to Paris.

Teresa of Avila spent over two decades as a nun in which easy-going Avila convent before founding a stricter house?

The Incarnation drew a daily stream of well-born visitors, which she came to feel drowned out prayer. She had entered it at twenty, to her father's disappointment.

Teresa of Avila persuaded a young Carmelite friar, her future partner in reform, not to leave for which silent order?

Carthusians live in solitary, silent contemplation, which is what appealed to him. She asked him to delay and follow her instead, and he stayed for good.

The Carmelites whom Teresa of Avila joined honour which Old Testament prophet as a spiritual father, not a founder?

Elijah and his disciple Elisha are honoured as the order's spiritual fathers, making it one of the few religious orders that names no charismatic founder of its own.

An uncle showed young Teresa of Avila the Letters of which Church Father, the reading that decided her to be a nun?

Jerome persuaded her, through his letters, that convent life was the safest course, though she felt little pull toward it. She left home without her father's consent to join.

Ordered into retirement by her order's leaders in 1576, Teresa of Avila withdrew to her convent in which Spanish city?

Toledo was where she waited out the ban on new foundations, which held until her appeals to the king brought relief.