Saint Teresa of the Andes

She was born in Santiago on July 13, 1900, and baptized Juana Enriqueta Josefina of the Sacred Hearts Fernández Solar; the people who knew her called her Juanita. ¹ Her parents were Miguel Fernández and Lucía Solar, and she grew up with three brothers and two sisters, her maternal grandfather and a crowd of aunts, uncles and cousins. ¹ The Holy See describes the family as well-off and faithful. ¹

The Discalced Carmelites' General Curia adds what that biography leaves out. Her father managed his property badly and lost much of his fortune, which strained the marriage; her brother Lucho gave up the faith, and her brother Miguel led a rather Bohemian life. ⁴ It says that in the middle of all this she was the one who watched over everybody, and that she treated the household's employees with unusual affection, teaching them the catechism. ⁴

She was a day pupil at the school of the Sacred Heart sisters from 1907. ¹⁴ She dated the beginning of her spiritual life to the age of six: "It was shortly after the 1906 earthquake that Jesus began to claim my heart for himself," she wrote in her diary. ¹

The Holy See's biography is frank about her temperament. "She was proud, self-centred, stubborn, with all the defects that these things suppose, as is the common lot," it says; where she differed was in fighting every impulse that did not come from love. ¹ It places the change at the age of ten, when she prepared for her first Communion, which the General Curia dates to September 11, 1910. ¹⁴ The Holy See says that from that day she received interior locutions that stayed with her for the rest of her life. ¹

At fifteen, it says, she made a vow of virginity for nine days, and kept renewing it. ¹ Around the same time she was sent to board at the school, which she hated; the General Curia quotes her, "boarding would reduce me to ashes", and says she resolved to be an exemplary pupil anyway as a way of giving herself to God's will. ⁴

She was also, in the Holy See's words, cheerful, sympathetic, communicative and fond of sport. ¹ The General Curia describes a happy young sportswoman who loved the outdoors, taught catechism to poor children and helped the missions. ⁴

The sources tell her decision differently. The Holy See says that at fourteen she decided to become a Discalced Carmelite, and that Jesus told her in an interior revelation that she would be one. ¹ The General Curia says that at seventeen she read Teresa of Jesus, came to know the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity, and began writing to Mother Angélica, prioress of the Carmelites at Los Andes, but remained unsure for some time whether to join the Sacred Heart sisters or Carmel. ⁴ Franciscan Media credits Thérèse's autobiography with clarifying the path she would follow. ³

According to the General Curia, her doubts ended when she met the community at Los Andes on January 11, captivated by the nuns' simplicity and spontaneity. ⁴ She had left school when her sister Lucía married. Her mother tested the vocation in various ways, her brothers tried to talk her out of it, and her parents gave their permission. ⁴

On May 7, 1919, she entered the small Monastery of the Holy Spirit at Los Andes, about 90 kilometers from Santiago. ¹ She received the habit on October 14 and took the name Teresa of Jesus. ¹

In the monastery she read John of the Cross. ⁴ She also kept up a correspondence with family and friends, which the General Curia calls a real apostolate and Franciscan Media an apostolate of letter-writing. ³⁴ Vatican News quotes one of those letters, in which she said of Jesus, translated here, "That madman of love has driven me mad." ⁵ Franciscan Media quotes her diary: "I am God's. He created me and is my beginning and my end." ³

The Holy See says she had known for a long time that she would die young, and told her confessor so a month before she died. ¹ The General Curia says she fell gravely ill in Holy Week 1920, and the Holy See names the illness as typhus. ¹⁴ Franciscan Media places her death itself in Holy Week. ³ On April 7, in danger of death, she made her religious profession; she still had six months of novitiate to complete before she could lawfully have done so. ¹ Franciscan Media puts it as having "quickly took her final vows". ³

She died on the evening of April 12, 1920, a Monday, as a Discalced Carmelite novice. ¹⁵ Franciscan Media gives her age when she fell ill as twenty; the Holy See says she was three months short of her twentieth birthday. ¹³

John Paul II beatified her in Santiago on April 3, 1987, and the Washington Province of the Discalced Carmelite friars says he proposed her as a model for young people. ¹⁸ He canonized her in Rome on March 21, 1993, in the same Mass as Claudine Thévenet. ²⁵ Speaking in Spanish, he said that her short life, eleven months of it as a Carmelite, offered a secular society, in words translated here, "the limpid witness of an existence that proclaims to the men and women of today that in loving, adoring and serving God lie the greatness and the joy, the freedom and the full realization of the human creature." ² Her life, he said, cries out quietly from the cloister, "God alone suffices!" ²

He quoted her letters: "When I love, it is forever. A Carmelite never forgets," and "The Carmelite is the sister of the priest." ² Vatican News adds Pope Francis's words to young Chileans, that she "made the holiness of Christ her own, and that is why she was a saint." ⁵

The Holy See calls her the first Chilean saint, the first Discalced Carmelite nun canonized outside Europe, and the fourth Saint Teresa of Carmel, after those of Ávila, Florence and Lisieux. ¹ John Paul II called her the first fruit of holiness of the Teresian Carmel in Latin America, and the Washington Province the first Discalced Carmelite of Latin America to be canonized. ²⁸ Her remains are at the shrine of Auco, at Rinconada de Los Andes; Franciscan Media estimates 100,000 pilgrims a year, and Vatican News describes a 27-kilometer youth pilgrimage each October across the hills from her family's summer house to her tomb. ¹³⁵

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for her, so none is given here. ¹³⁴ Vatican News says that because she died so young, her witness speaks especially to young people. ⁵

Franciscan Media keeps her as its saint of the day on April 12, the day she died. ³ In Chile her feast is July 13, her birthday: the Diocese of San Felipe, where her shrine is, calls July 13 her liturgical feast and keeps a novena before it. ⁶ The shrine itself says the Church chose her birthday for her great annual feast, an exception to the custom of keeping a saint on the day of death, and admits it does not know why. ⁷

"Externally this is all there is to this young girl from Santiago de Chile," the Holy See's biography says, and then asks the obvious question, "What was accomplished?" Its answer is living, believing, loving. ¹ She died before she could make her vows in the ordinary way. ¹

She began with a temper and a will that the Holy See does not soften, and the change it describes was work rather than a gift handed over at once. ¹ She disliked boarding school and stayed. ⁴

Much of what she gave was in letters to people she loved, written from a cell. ³⁴ "A Carmelite never forgets," she wrote, and John Paul II quoted the line when he canonized her. ²