Though Teresa of Avila and Elizabeth Ann Seton grew up in markedly different eras, they faced similar challenges as founders and mystics.
Each saint was shaped, in her own way, by the clash between ancient Catholicism and the new Protestantism that swept through Europe in the early 1500s. Both had to confront age-old prejudices about women: they were often viewed as physically fragile, excessively emotional, and prone to being duped and duping others. And neither of them had access to formal, advanced education.
The result was a meticulous caution about deviating from church doctrine or guiding others ignorantly. Yet despite their fear of getting it wrong, both founded women’s religious communities that were unique for their times and continue to flourish today. Both left writings that have influenced Catholics for generations—Teresa was declared the first female Doctor of the Church. And both lived uniquely intense spiritual lives, despite the efforts of many of their superiors to dampen their zeal.
Teresa was born in devoutly Catholic Spain in 1515, two years before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther was subsequently declared a heretic, excommunicated, and condemned as an outlaw by the Holy Roman Empire. Yet despite all efforts of the Church to stem the Protestant tide, the Reformation spread rapidly throughout northwestern Europe.
Teresa’s Spain resisted; the baleful glare of the Inquisition no doubt served as a major deterrent to would-be reformers. Teresa took the position of most of her fellow Spaniards: the efforts of “the Lutherans,” as she always referred to them, were “great evils,” and a dangerous threat to Christianity itself, for in her mind, the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity were one and the same.
Yet despite her worry about these heretical threats to the Church, she was drawn to “mental” or silent prayer, a practice associated with Protestantism. She was quite aware that good Spanish Catholics were to follow the “level” and “safe” path of vocal prayer and regular Mass, not venture into the realm of mysticism. But she could not resist her craving for solitude, adoration before the tabernacle, and frequent Communion, all indicators of unseemly religious enthusiasm.
Roughly 250 years later, Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born in New York, a key port and major urban center in the American colonies. Along with offering an escape from the rigid social hierarchy of Old Europe, the colonies had become a sanctuary for Protestants seeking religious freedom. Many of these new religious communities feared the influence of Rome, even from a distance, and feared especially the allure of Catholicism’s ancient “superstitions.” In 1774, the year of Elizabeth’s birth, Catholics comprised only 1.6% of the population of all thirteen colonies, in part because so many communities forbade Catholics from settling within them.
As the daughter of an Anglican British loyalist, Elizabeth knew little about the Church. What she gleaned was mostly prejudicial: “Catholics are the offscourings of the people.” Or as her sister described them: “Dirty filthy red-faced.” Her experience of formal religion was limited to the Anglicanism reconstituted in the Episcopal Church after the American Revolution. Though she went faithfully to services, she found little inspiration. Church seemed to be more about teaching ethics and urging parishioners to fulfill their social obligations than about cultivating spiritual experiences such as the ones she’d been having in nature, through reading, or in private prayer; she longed for greater depth.
Both Teresa and Elizabeth were steeped in the traditional view of women as the weaker sex. They were perfectly aware that what may have been seen as great gifts in a man—creative vision coupled with a powerful will—could easily lead to trouble for a woman religious. Teresa often spoke ruefully of her determinacion, or tendency to pursue whatever course she was on, with no holds barred, even when this might attract the notice of the feared Inquisition. And even as Elizabeth’s reputation for sanctity grew and spread throughout Catholic America, she saw herself the way she always had: like “a fiery Horse I had when I was a girl, whom they tried to break by making him drag a heavy cart. . . .”
Unsurprisingly, they both struggled with their religious vows of humble obedience. When Teresa began having visions, she was told by her confessor to assume they were from the devil, and to snap her fingers at them as a sign of contempt. But this excessive fear of the devil, it seemed to her, was a more a sign of her confessor’s insecurity than of great wisdom, so she often didn’t comply. “How these devils frighten us,” she wrote, “because we are asking to be frightened . . . We exclaim ‘The devil! The devil!’ when we could be exclaiming: ‘God!’ ‘God!’ and making the devil tremble.”
Elizabeth was ordered by a solicitous male superior to limit ascetical practices in her community because “the love of penance must yield in our dear infirm sisters to the voice of obedience, for better is obedience than sacrifice.” Yet she knew her sisters longed for greater mortification, so she told them there was another way: they could simply follow their rule exactly, taking no extra rest and even giving up some of their plain food. “Where. . . we are forbidden the use of complete and intire abnegation,” she wrote, “at least let us be able to take our God to witness that we are willing to do more and lament to him that we cannot.”
Yet both women knew that it was one thing to resist foolish orders and another to assume that they always knew better. They needed to make sure they were responding to God’s will and not their own. If they didn’t find excellent spiritual direction for themselves, their greatest gift—the determination that helped them persist in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges—could lead to their downfall and, even worse, to the downfall of those who looked to them for wisdom.
God provided them the help they needed. For Teresa, this turned out to be a “wild-haired, leathery, scolding ascetic of great repute,” the Franciscan Fray Pedro of Alcántara, who explained it all to her—especially the visions so feared by her other confessors. He told her not to worry, but simply to praise God.
In a way nobody else had been able to, Fray Pedro set Teresa’s fears at rest because he recognized immediately who she was and what God was calling her to do. They became close friends, and she consulted with him for years. The old ascetic—who was later canonized—even appeared to her in spirit form shortly before he died, and as she happily reported, “The Lord was pleased to let me have more to do with him since his death than when he was alive.”
The spiritual director Elizabeth longed for arrived during her darkest hour. Her beloved daughter Anna Maria had just died of tuberculosis, an agonizing death that plunged Elizabeth into private terror: perhaps, after all, Anna Maria had not died in a state of grace? Yet she told herself she couldn’t reveal her despair to anybody, particularly the Sisters of her community.
Simon Brute, a brilliant young French priest who trained seminarians, was ordered to counsel the grieving prioress. He read her situation immediately, urging her to stop holding back and give way to her grief. When desperate questions about sin, evil, and grace later threatened to overwhelm her, she opened her heart to him in a long letter she couldn’t write to any of her other advisors. Brute saw that more than anything, Elizabeth needed the theological knowledge she’d never been able to pursue through formal studies. He introduced her to centuries of Catholic writing; the two of them read and discussed countless books, and in the process, became soul friends and spiritual collaborators.
Though church factionalism and internecine prejudice coupled with the prevailing attitude toward women made the lives of these two strong-willed sisters in courage especially challenging, neither St. Teresa of Avila or St. Elizabeth Ann Seton doubted that God would provide the good counsel they needed. And that was because, as Teresa put it, Jesus never despised women, but always, “with great compassion, helped them.”
PAULA HUSTON is a National Endowment of the Arts Fellow and the author of two novels and eight books of spiritual nonfiction. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories and in the annual Best Spiritual Writing anthology. Like Elizabeth Ann Seton, Huston is a convert to Catholicism. In 1999, she became a Camaldolese Benedictine Oblate and is a lay member of New Camaldoli Hermitage’s community of monks in Big Sur, Calif. She’s also a former president of the Chrysostom Society, a national organization of literary Catholic writers.
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