Saint Teresa of Jesus Jornet Ibars

She was born at Aytona, in the province of Lérida in Catalonia, on January 9, 1843, to Francisco Jornet and Antonia Ibars, who worked the land. ³⁵⁶ She was baptized the next day. ³ Pius XII said she was born as the Angelus rang, and that even as a child in Aytona she would leave her own house without bread so that no one should go hungry. ² While still young she was taken to Lérida by her aunt Rosa, and es.catholic.net says she would bring poor people home to her aunt's house there. ³⁵

She trained as a teacher, at Fraga by the Dicastery's account, at Argensola by es.catholic.net's, and at nineteen was posted as a teacher to Argensola, near Barcelona. ³⁵ There she worked in the schools of Francisco Palau, the Carmelite friar later beatified, whom the Dicastery calls her great-uncle and es.catholic.net her uncle. ³⁵ She joined his Carmelite tertiaries. ¹⁵

Paul VI described the girl from Aytona and Lérida, the student and teacher of Fraga and Argensola, searching for her vocation among the Carmelite tertiaries and the Poor Clares of Briviesca. ¹ es.catholic.net says she asked to be admitted to the Poor Clares at Briviesca, near Burgos, but could not take her vows because the laws of the time forbade it. ⁵ Pius XII put it gently, in words translated here from the Spanish: in all those places she "never felt she had found her definitive path." ²

The way opened by chance. ⁶ The congregation's biography tells how, in June 1872, she was bringing her mother home from the hot springs at Estadilla and stopped at Barbastro, where they met a priest, Pedro Llacera. ³⁶ When he learned they were Palau's relatives he asked about Teresa's plans, and told her about a project of his friend Saturnino López Novoa, choirmaster of Huesca Cathedral: an institute of Spanish sisters devoted entirely to poor old people of both sexes. ⁶ The same book says she was convinced at once that this was the work God was calling her to. ⁶

On October 11, 1872, she moved to Barbastro with her sister María and a friend, Mercedes Calzada, to join the first aspirants in a rented house known as the Pueyo. ³⁵⁶ Pius XII noted that they arrived on the eve of the feast of Our Lady of the Pillar. ² On January 27, 1873, the little group, with Teresa named superior, took the religious habit, and the Dicastery counts that day as the founding of the Little Sisters of the Abandoned Poor, later renamed the Little Sisters of the Abandoned Elderly. ³⁵

A group of Catholics in Valencia offered to support the young community, and she accepted. ⁵ There she took Our Lady of the Forsaken, the patroness of Valencia, as the patroness of the work, and bought the former Augustinian convent that became the mother house. ²⁵⁶ Pius XII said that she wanted to leave every house of the institute under that title of Mary. ²

Paul VI said she guided the new institute from Barbastro to Valencia and Zaragoza and then across much of Spain, from where it later spread to the Americas. ¹ Pius XII spoke of her journeys from Catalonia to Andalusia and from Valencia to Galicia, which no obstacle and not even her own illnesses could stop, and called her, as her namesake of Ávila had been called, a "wandering nun." ² By 1887, when the Holy See approved the congregation, es.catholic.net says it had 58 houses. ⁵

There were terrible years too. The congregation's biography tells of a cholera epidemic that struck the mother house in Valencia while she lay ill in Burgos, cut off by the quarantine lines: an old man who had insisted on going out was let back in out of pity, and the disease came in with him. ⁶ Twenty-four sisters and seventy old people died. ⁵⁶

Pius XII gathered a handful of her sayings in 1958, and they are translated here from his Spanish. When she had no natural means, she smiled and said, "the poorer, the more benefactors." ² When she had to travel all the time, her rule was "eyes on the ground and heart in heaven." ² When the business of her foundations threatened to swamp her, she summed it up: "God in the heart, eternity in the head and the world under the feet." ² And to anyone who suggested some task was too small to bother with: "Nothing is small when it is done for the glory of God." ²⁵

Pius XII also found in her three schools of spirituality: from the Carmel she learned devotion to Mary, from the daughters of Saint Francis her love of poverty and the poor, and from the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius her longing to make her will one with God's. ²⁵

Her body did not hold out under the life she led. ⁵ When she was forced to stop, she went to the house at Liria, near Valencia, in the hope that the air would help her. ⁵⁶ The congregation's biography records coughing fits, the coughing up of blood and the other signs of tuberculosis, and a letter from the sister nursing her that August: the doctors said she was like a lamp going out. ⁶

On the night of August 25, the book says, she kept asking the two sisters sitting with her what time it was and when they would bring her Communion, and told them to go and eat something, because they must be tired. ⁶ Before dawn on August 26, 1897, as the chaplain was going to fetch the Sacrament, she looked at the sisters around her, smiled and bowed her head. ⁶ She was buried at Liria, with a long procession of the old people from the house; in 1904 her remains were taken to the mother house in Valencia. ⁶ They rest there in the crypt beside the remains of Saturnino López Novoa, who, the Dicastery says, is counted equally with her as founder of the congregation. ³

Pius XII beatified her in Saint Peter's Basilica in April 1958, on the 25th by the Dicastery's record and on the 27th by the congregation's and es.catholic.net's; his address to her pilgrims is dated April 28. ²³⁵⁶ Paul VI canonized her on January 27, 1974, the anniversary of the day in 1873 when the first sisters took the habit at Barbastro. ¹³

In the homily he spoke of the elderly of his own day, surrounded by poverty, indifference, abandonment and loneliness, and told her sisters that their work, inspired "by the spirit of the Gospel and not by mere calculations of efficiency or human comfort," reminded the world that a person can never be treated as merely a profitable tool; the words are translated here from the Spanish. ¹ Her sisters, he said, see in the old a mystical extension of Christ. ¹

The article on es.catholic.net calls her, in Spanish, "Patrona de la ancianidad," patroness of old age. ⁵ None of the other sources consulted for this page names a patronage, and the Holy See texts used here do not use the word, so the page records that one attribution and no more. ¹²³⁴

Saint Teresa Jornet's feast is kept on August 26, the day she died. ³⁴ The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives it as her liturgical memorial, and the Roman Martyrology enters her that day at Liria as the virgin who founded the Little Sisters of the Abandoned Elderly to care for the old. ³⁴

For years nothing she tried was right: teaching, the tertiaries, a convent that the law would not let her enter. ¹⁵ Pius XII saw in her the ability to take up a path when she judged God wanted it and to leave it again "with the same imperturbable peace," words translated from his Spanish. ² It was a stop on a journey home with her mother that settled it. ⁶

The work itself was unglamorous, and Paul VI said so: the care the elderly need is delicate and, humanly speaking, not pleasant. ¹ He knew that some thought young sisters' lives would be better spent elsewhere in the Church, and answered that this is what charity looks like. ¹

Her sayings are practical, the advice of a woman who traveled constantly and had too much to do. ² She seems never to have separated the small tasks from the large ones, and said that nothing done for God is small. ²⁵