Chapter XXX

The Foundation of the Convent of the Blessed Trinity at Soria, in 1581. The first mass was said on the Day of our Father Saint Elisha.

While I was at Palencia, making the above-mentioned foundation, a letter was brought me from Doctor Velasquez, Bishop of Osma. With him, at the time when he was Professor and Canon of the Cathedral at Toledo, and when I was troubled by certain fears, I had sought communication, because I knew him to be a most learned man and a great servant of God. So I besought him to hear my confession and take upon him the care of my soul. Although he was a very busy man, yet when I begged this for the love of our Lord and he saw my necessity, he did it so willingly that I was surprised; and he was my confessor and director all the time I was at Toledo, which was a long while. I told him of the state of my soul quite plainly, as I always do. He did me so much good that from that time I began to suffer less from those fears. It is true that there was another cause for this, not to be told here. Still he did me a great and real good, because he reassured me by means of passages from Holy Scripture, which is the thing that has most weight with me, when I am certain that he who makes use of them thoroughly understands them. I well knew this of him; and knew his good life too.

He wrote me this letter from Soria, where he was staying. He told me that a lady whose confession he heard there had spoken to him about founding a convent of our nuns, and that he approved of it: that he had promised to persuade me to go and make the foundation there, and that I must not leave him in the lurch: that if I thought it suitable I must let him know, and he would send for me. I was much pleased: for, let alone its being a good foundation to make, I wanted to tell him some matters concerning my soul, and to see him; for I bore him a great affection for the good he had done me.

The lady foundress' name was Dona Beatriz de Veamonte and Navarre, for she was sprung from the Kings of Navarre. She was the daughter of Don France's de Veamonte, of illustrious and high descent. She had been married some years, and was left with no children and great wealth, and had an ardent desire to found a convent of nuns. When she mentioned this to the Bishop and he told her of the Order of our Lady, the Barefoot Carmelites, it was so exactly what she wanted that she was in great haste to carry it out. She is a person of gentle disposition, generous and lowly; in a word, a true servant of God. She owned at Soria a good solidly built house in a very good situation; and she said she would give us that together with whatever might be needed for the foundation: and with this she gave a sum of money which at two per cent, would bring in five hundred ducats a year. The Bishop offered to give a very good parish church all built of hewn stone, close at hand, which we could make use of with a covered way. He could rightly do this because there were many churches in the town, and this one was poor, so that he could join the parish to another church. In his letter he set forth all this. I discussed it all with the Father Provincial, who was there at the time; and he and all my friends there decided to write by a special messenger to say they might come to fetch me, because the foundation at Palencia was accomplished. And I was much pleased about this, for the reasons I have given.

I began to collect the nuns whom I was to take with me. There were seven, because the foundress wished to have more rather than fewer, and a lay sister, and my companion and myself. A very suitable person came for us without delay. I told him that I would take with me two Barefoot Fathers: so I took Father Fray Nicolas of Jesus Maria¹, a Genoese, a man of great discretion and perfection. He was over forty when he took the habit, I think: at any rate he is so now, and that was not long ago. But the progress he has made in this short time shews clearly that our Lord chose him to come to the aid of the Order in those troublous times of persecution. He was a great help: for of the others who could have helped, some were banished, some in prison. Having been, as I have said, such a short time in the Order, he held no office, and so less notice was taken of him; this was the work of God's providence, that such valuable help might be left me². He is so discreet that he was able to stay in the monastery of the Mitigation at Madrid, as it were for other businesses, and hid ours so well that they never found out what he was there for, and so let him stay. We wrote to each other continually, for I was in the monastery of St Joseph at Avila, and discussed what was to be done; for this was a relief to him. It shews how badly off our Order was, that so much was made of me, as the saying is, " For want of better people³." In all those vicissitudes I made proof of his discretion and perfection; so he is one of those whom I greatly love in the Lord and highly esteem in our Order.

Well, he and a companion went with us at once. I had little difficulty on this journey, because the Bishop's envoy caused us to travel in great comfort, and helped us to obtain good lodgings: for when once we were within the diocese of Osma, the Bishop is so much beloved that people gave .us good lodgings on hearing that it was his errand we were on. The weather was fine, and our stages were short: so there was no toilsomeness, but only pleasure; for it gave me the greatest pleasure to hear what people said of the Bishop's sanctity. We arrived at Burgo⁴ the day before the Octave of Corpus Christi. We made our Communion there next day, Thursday, the Octave Day, and we dined there, because we could not reach Soria next day. That night we spent in a church, because there was no other lodging, but we were none the worse for it. Next day we heard mass there, and we arrived at Soria about five in the evening. The saintly Bishop was at a window of his house when we passed by: and thence he gave us his blessing, which was a great comfort to us; for the blessing of a Bishop and a saint is not to be lightly esteemed.

Our lady foundress was waiting for us at the door of her house, for it was there that the monastery was to be established. We did not see how to get in, the crowd was so great. This was nothing new; for the world is so fond of novelties that, wherever we go, there are such crowds that, if we did not wear veils over our faces, it would be a great annoyance: with our veils, it is not unbearable. Dona Beatriz had had a large hall very well fitted up for saying mass, because the covered way to the church which the Bishop had given us had yet to be made: and without delay it was said next day, the festival of our father Saint Eliseus. The foundress provided us most amply with all that we needed, and settled us in those quarters, where we were enclosed, until the passage was made; that is, until the Transfiguration. On that day the first mass was said in the church, with great solemnity and with a large congregation. A father of the Company of Jesus preached, the Bishop having already gone to Burgo — for in his work he never loses a day nor an hour — although he was not in good health, for he had lost the sight of one eye. This sorrow I had there: for I felt it such a grievous pity that eyesight so valuable in the service of our Lord should be lost. The Lord's judgements are His own. This must have been allowed in order to give His servant more to gain; for he ceased not to labour as before: and in order to try his submission to His will. He told me that it gave him no more concern than if it had befallen his neighbour: and that he sometimes felt he would not be sorry if he lost the sight of the other; for then he would go and serve God in a hermitage with no more responsibility⁵.

This had always been what he felt himself called to before he was made Bishop; and he sometimes spoke to me of it, having almost made up his mind to give up everything and be gone. I could not bear him to do this, because I thought he would be of great use in the Church of God, and so I wished him to be what he is now. For all that, on the day when he was offered the bishopric, when he sent to tell me, it at once put me into great perturbation, imagining I saw him under a heavy burden, and I did not know what to do with myself or how to keep quiet. I went into the choir to commend him to our Lord. His Majesty calmed me at once, telling me that it would be greatly to His service; and so indeed it is continually shewn to be. In spite of the disease of the eye and other painful infirmities, and his round of work, he fasts four days in the week and does other penances; his food is by no means luxurious. When he visits the diocese, he goes on foot: his servants cannot bear it, and have complained to me. The servants must lead a good life or not remain in his service. He does not entrust important affairs to his Vicars-general, but they go through his own hands: and so I think do all. During the first two years he was at Osma he underwent a fierce persecution of false accusations, which amazed me, for he is upright and just in administering justice. This has now been coming to an end: for although they have been to court and to wherever they thought they could do him injury, they have little power to harm him, because the good he is doing in all the diocese is getting to be well known. And he has borne it

promoted in 1583 to the metropolitan see of Santiago, and being in very bad health, he obtained permission to resign. The King wished to assign him a pension of 12,000 ducats, but 6,000 was all he could be made to accept. He died in 1587, and his body was taken to his native place, Tudela de Duero. all so perfectly that he has put them to shame, doing good to those who he knew were doing evil to him⁶. For all that he has to do, he does not fail to find time for prayer.

I seem to have been carried away in speaking the praises of this saintly man — and I have said but a small part — but that it may be known who it was that began the foundation of the Convent of the Blessed Trinity at Soria, and that its future nuns may take comfort from that, it has been no waste of time. The nuns who are there now know it well. Although he did not give the endowment, he gave the church; and, as I say, it was he who put it into the heart of our foundress, who was, as I have said, a very good Christian, virtuous and humble.

Well, when we had made the passage to the church and arranged everything needful for our enclosure, it became necessary for me to go to the Convent of St Joseph at Avila: so I started at once in the great heat, and such road as there was, was very bad for wheeled conveyances. There went with me a prebendary of Palencia, named Bibera. He had been extremely helpful to me in the work of making the covered way, and in everything else; Father Nicolas of Jesus Maria having departed as soon as the papers relating to the foundation were done with, because he was greatly needed elsewhere. Bibera had business to transact at, Soria when we went there, and he went with us. From that time forth God gave him such an effectual desire to do us good that we may well commend him to God amongst the benefactors of the Order. I did not want anyone else to go with me and my companion, because he was so careful that he sufficed, and the quieter the better for me in travelling.

In this journey I paid for the comfort in which I had travelled to Soria; for although our driver knew his way to Segovia, he did not know the carriage road, and so the youth took us into places where we often had to alight, and led the cart along deep precipices where it almost went over. If we engaged guides, they took us just so far as where they knew there was a plain road; and left us, saying they had another engagement, just before the way became difficult. Before reaching any lodging place, as we did not know the country, we had to endure the sun for long hours, and often the danger of the cart's overturning. I was sorry for our escort: for sometimes when we had been told we were on the right way, we had to turn and retrace our steps. But his goodness was so deeply rooted that I do not think I ever saw him out of temper: which made me marvel and thank God that temptations have so little power where anyone is radically good. I thank God that He was pleased to deliver us from the dangers of that journey.

On the eve of St Bartholomew we arrived at Segovia, where our nuns were in anxiety because of the delay; which indeed was great, the journey having been what it was. There they made much of us; for God never sends me trouble but He repays me at once. I rested there a week or more. But this foundation was made with so little trouble that the journey back is not worth thinking of, for it was nothing.

I came away well content, because it seemed to me a neighbourhood where, by God's mercy, the foundation will be to His service, as indeed is being shewn already. May He be praised and blessed for ages upon ages. Amen. Deo gracias⁷.

Footnotes

1. The celebrated Father Doria, afterwards first Vicar-general of the Order in Spain. ↩

2. The Dorias were bankers and contractors, and the King of Spain had borrowed heavily of them: so Nicholas Doria had considerable influence at court. ↩

3. St Theresa is referring to the old proverb, " For want of a better, my husband is mayor." ↩

4. Burgo de Osma, the seat of the Episcopal palace and Cathedral of the diocese to which Soria belongs, Soria having only a Collegiate church. T. F. 16 ↩

5. In the end Senor Velasquez' desire was accomplished. Having been ↩

6. The proceedings were largely on account of the attempts made to have a cathedral at Soria. See Loperaez, History of the Diocese of Osma. ↩

7. From this conclusion it is apparent that she wrote the two preceding chapters soon after making the foundations at Palencia and Soria; and thought to have ended the book with them, having made her last Foundation. ↩