Word: avila
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...Teresa of Avila,* the 16th century mystic, never liked the picture that was painted of her at 60 by the pious but uninspired Fray Juan de la Miserias. "God forgive you, Fray Juan," she told him, "for having painted me so very ugly and stiff." But for more than three centuries Fray Juan's painting was the only likeness of St. Teresa the world had ever seen...
...Spanish town of Avila (pop. 24,400) was in an uproar last week. "Sacrilegious!" muttered the patrons of the coffee houses on the Plaza de Santa Teresa. "Blundering lie!" thundered the head of the tourist committee. Mayor Jose Maria Martis wrote furious letters to the Bishop of Salamanca, the Cardinal Primate of Spain, the Superior General of the Discalced Carmelites in Rome and the Spanish government. He, and almost everyone else in Avila, wanted a book suppressed and its author reprimanded- if not shot at dawn...
...book in question was Volume One of a scholarly biography of the great 16th Century mystic, St. Teresa of Avila. Its author was the learned father superior of Saragossa's monastery of the Discalced Carmelites, which had been St. Teresa's own order...
...crime of Fray Efren de la Madre de Dios, in the eyes of Avila, had been to state flatly that St. Teresa was not born in Avila (where tourists are shown the very room she first opened her eyes in) but at her family's winter place in Gottarendura, some eight miles away. And, as if this were not enough, Fray Efren claimed that Teresa's grandfather had lived under a cloud for having converted himself and his family to Judaism (probably for business reasons), though later, under the urgings of the Inquisition, he repented and rejoined...
Though action, and particularly rebellious action, went much against his grain, his friend St. Teresa of Avila enlisted him in her crusading reform of the Carmelite order. Anti-reform monks kidnaped and imprisoned him in a cell in Toledo's Carmelite priory for eight months, where he was taken out once a day to eat crusts and water on the refectory floor, and kneel while the monks tried to change his mind by walking in a circle around him, lashing his bare back with leather whips...