Antonio Sagardoy OCD / Linz
On March 21, 1993, Teresa de los Andes was canonized in Rome. The “New Terese” comes from Chile and connects our order in a special way with Christians in Latin America. Father Antonio introduces her to us.
At the beginning of my meeting with Teresa de los Andes, I wanted to uncover something magnificent in her life. I read her letters, one after another, hoping to find something extraordinary. But there was nothing of the sort in her short, exactly twenty-year life. Teresa had no special tasks or functions. She is neither a founder of monasteries nor a figure of social revolution nor a theologian with charismatic, new ideas. When she died, her monastic life had barely begun...
And yet I was not disappointed: Although I found no super-performances or “mystical gifts” in Teresa's life, I stood before her with the certainty that I was in the presence of a magnificent person. Her life was entirely ordinary. However, there was something unusual in this ordinariness: the maturity of her statements and the deep dimension of her steps and actions. I read the words of a teenage girl at the ages of 17 and 19 and shook my head in amazement and admiration...
Juana Fernández Solar, born on July 13, 1900, in Santiago de Chile, was one of seven children from an influential family well-known in the academic and scientific circles of the city. She led the life of a well-off girl in then Chile: loved and spoiled, engaged in teaching music, sports, swimming, horseback riding, and vacationing by the sea... The death of her grandfather, a respected doctor, brings a painful turn: the family’s financial situation deteriorates dramatically, parents have to leave their estate, and the father is forced to take a job elsewhere, away from the family. Juana and one of her sisters consequently go to boarding school. The peer pressure there, which insists that they speak French even during breaks, which is very unpleasant for the students at the moment, proves to be a blessing: Teresa comes into contact with the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux. In the Carmelite from Europe, recently deceased, she discovers a deep spiritual affinity. A desire grows within her to also become a Carmelite. However, her weak health forces her to doubt the realization of this intention for a long time. Completely misunderstood by her family and in prayer for a long time without comfort, she finally enters the Carmel de los Andes at not even nineteen years old. Her monastic life as Teresa of Jesus will last only eleven months. During her illness with typhus, her health deteriorates very quickly. "In articulo mortis" (in the face of death), she makes her religious vows after three weeks of postulancy and only six weeks of novitiate. Four days later, on April 12, 1920, she dies among her fellow sisters.
An incomplete diary and a number of letters form her spiritual legacy. In Latin America, these writings have become a source of spiritual nourishment for many people. I do not want to conceal that we encounter a language in them that, when read with a European mentality at the end of the 20th century, seems inflated and sentimental, rather unsteady; her religion may seem immature to us at times and, for many ears, simplistic. I would not want to neglect or obscure this impression, but I think that it is worth listening to this South American girl.
The spiritual dimension that Juanita places into each step of her youthful ordinary day exemplifies what matters: not great performances, but ordinary deeds, carried out in intimate connection with Christ, give life its value. Perhaps this uncomplicated truth belongs to the prophetic mission of our new saint, who apparently accomplished nothing extraordinary.
I would like Jesus to become your intimate friend, to whom you can open your tired and suffering heart. Who, my dear old man, understands the depth and strength of your worries better than our Lord? My dear father, how much your life would change if you often came to him as a friend! Do you think Jesus would not accept you?
Teresa de los Andes
(from a letter to her father, written during the novitiate in the Carmel [1920])
(By the same author, a notebook has been published with a detailed biography and many texts from the written legacy of this new saint from the Carmel:
Antonio Sagardoy OCD, Teresa de los Andes. Meine Jugend gehört Gott [My Youth Belongs to God], Vienna 1992.)
A new Teresa, Carmel impulses II, 1993
Translated by Dr. Vojtěch Pola.
