Feast of St. Teresa of Ávila, Virgin, Doctor of the Church

Published: October 15, 2016

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily during the promotion and memorial Mass for the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock on Saturday, Oct. 15, 2016.

Bishop Taylor

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Teresa of Ávila and I can't think of a more appropriate saint to call to mind as we celebrate this promotions and memorial Mass.

She was a member of the Carmelite order, which traces its origins historically to the hermits who gathered around Mount Carmel, which many of you have visited in the course of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Probably many of you remember the famous Stella Maris Carmelite Monastery that is still there today. The original hermits came there either as pilgrims or crusaders and chose Mount Carmel because it was the traditional home of Elijah, the prophet.

This was the very time when the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem was founded and its members participated in the Crusades. So maybe some of those earliest Carmelites came to the Holy Land as part of our order.

And, of course, their goal was to win the Muslim-ruled Holy Land back for Christ. The crusaders sought to do so militarily, while the Carmelites sought to do so spiritually.

St. Teresa, of course, came along 500 years later in a part of what had been Muslim-ruled Spain. It had been won back for Christ militarily and in which the crusader spirit was still very much alive.

Indeed, the story goes that at age 7 she ran away from home with her little brother, intending to go to Morocco to be martyred for the faith by the Moors. That was before her vocation to Carmel and her subsequent vocation to undertake reform of a Carmelite order that, over time, had lost its spiritual focus.

But as we now know, violence begets violence — in the Holy Land as well as anywhere else — and the only path forward is a spiritual path, a path of encounter. Hence our pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Hence our dialogue with Muslims.

But I might add here that the Catholic Church has many reasons to be indebted to St. Teresa. One is that she beat the Protestants to the punch. That is, she and others succeeded in reforming the Catholic Church of Spain from within.

For this reason, the Protestant reformers did not find Spain to be fertile ground for their efforts. The abuses so prevalent in the Church in other countries had been largely eliminated in Spain by this reform from within.

So at the same time that northern Europe was in so much religious turmoil, the already-reformed Spanish Church became the strongest proponent of the counter-Reformation, the reform of the rest of the Church from within following the Council of Trent. And the foundation laid by St. Teresa, along with St. John of the Cross and St. Ignatius Loyola, were a big part of the reason why.

Here in Arkansas we are blessed with the wonderful presence of Carmelite men and women. We have a monastery with 14 cloistered contemplative Carmelite nuns who pray for us constantly, a community of Carmelite friars at Marylake Monastery who offer retreats and spiritual direction and two convents of active Missionary Carmelites of St. Teresa who work to build up the Church in our Spanish-speaking communities.

Their witness and our shared origins in the Holy Land inspires us to greater faithfulness in our own lives and greater concern for the welfare of those who live in the land of Jesus' birth today.

So I commend to you, all of you, not just those who will be receiving promotions this weekend. I commend to you the example of St. Teresa, that you may continue to grow in spiritual depth.

She once said: "Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul." Do that and you will be on the right path. And I commend to the intercession of St. Teresa those who have died and whom we are remembering in a special way in this memorial Mass.

We who unite ourselves to the sepulchre of Jesus remain united also to the members of our order who have died in Christ and rest in their own sepulchers, their own graves, today.

May their sepulchers — and one day our own — be holy sepulchers as well. "Give them eternal rest, O Lord. And may your light shine on them forever."