Teresa of the Andes

Teresa of the Andes was born Juana Enriqueta Josefina de los Sagrados Corazones Fernández Solar on 13 July 1900 in Santiago, Chile, the daughter of Miguel Fernández Jaraquemada and Lucía Solar Armstrong. She grew up in a prosperous Catholic family of the Chilean upper class and was educated by the Religious of the Sacred Heart. Contemporary accounts and her own later writings describe a spirited, affectionate, and strong-willed girl who enjoyed riding, tennis, music, and the social life of her milieu, yet who from an early age also practiced prayer, frequent confession and communion, and a marked devotion to the Eucharist and to the Virgin Mary. She worked deliberately against faults of temper and vanity, a struggle that recurs in her correspondence.

Influenced by the autobiography of Thérèse of Lisieux and by the writings of Teresa of Ávila, she discerned a vocation to the Discalced Carmelites. After corresponding with the nuns of the Carmel of the Holy Spirit at Los Andes, in the Aconcagua valley north of Santiago, she obtained her father’s permission and entered that monastery on 7 May 1919, taking the religious name Teresa of Jesus. She received the Carmelite habit on 14 October 1919 and began her novitiate. In letters to her family and in spiritual notes she expressed a desire to live a hidden life of love, to offer herself for the Church and for priests, and to seek the conversion of sinners. She remained a novice for the whole of her short religious life, spending only eleven months in the cloister.

Early in 1920 she contracted typhus. As her condition worsened, her superiors allowed her to make religious profession in articulo mortis on 7 April 1920. She died in the monastery at Los Andes on 12 April 1920, at the age of nineteen. News of her holiness spread quickly among Chilean Catholics. Her tomb became a place of pilgrimage, and a popular cult grew around the young Carmelite whose brief life and writings were often compared with those of Thérèse of Lisieux.

Pope John Paul II beatified her in Santiago on 3 April 1987, during his apostolic visit to Chile, the first beatification celebrated on Chilean soil. He canonized her in Saint Peter’s Square on 21 March 1993, making her the first person born in Chile to be declared a saint of the Catholic Church. Her remains are venerated at the national sanctuary dedicated to her at Auco, in the commune of Rinconada near Los Andes. In the liturgy her memory is kept on 13 July. She is widely invoked by young people and by the sick, and she remains one of the most popular saints of Latin America.