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International Colloquium ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Passion According to Teresa of Avila Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) experienced and wrote about what we call mysticism at a time when Spain’s glory and power – that of the Conquistadors and the Golden Age - began its decline. Moreover, Erasmus and Luther were shaking up traditional beliefs; new Catholics such as the Allumbrados attracted Jews and women, the Inquisition banned books in Castilian and trials to determine the « limieza de sangre » multiplied. The daughter of a « christiana vieja » and a « converso », Teresa, in her childhood, witnessed the case brought against her father’s family in which they had to prove they were truly Christian and not Jewish. Teresa’s own “case” as a nun practicing orison, the mental prayer of amorous fusion with God through which she experienced ecstasy, would be investigated by the Inquisition. Yet this was before the Counter Reformation discovered the extraordinary complexity of her experience as well as its usefulness to the Church which sought to marry asceticism (demanded by the Protestants) to the intensity of the supernatural (propitious to popular faith). Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda was beatified in1614 (thirty-two years after her death), canonized in 1622 (« saint » forty years after her death), and would become in 1970, in the wake of Vatican II, the first woman Doctor of the church, alongside Catherine of Sienna.
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