Saint Teresa of Portugal and Trust in the Lord

 

Saint Teresa of Portugal

b. 1126 - d. 18 June 1250

My 1st cousin, 28 times removed!

Saint Teresa of Portugal was the daughter of King Sancho I of Portugal, my 27th great granduncle.

Catholic Online (and other online sources) list today as her Feast Day, which it USED to be, but in the 1960's it was changed to June 20th so she can share it with her sisters Sancha and Mafalda who are ALSO saints. The three of them are my first cousins, 28 times removed. Their grandfather is my 28th great grandfather, Alfonso I, King of Portugal.

Alfonso I of Portugal

My 28th Great Grandfather

b. 1109 - d. 6 Dec. 1185

I'm not sure why her feast day was the 17th of June ANYWAY because she died on the 18th, but I am sure there is a story behind that somewhere. 

I WON'T be trying to get accurate information about her from Catholic Online because they've used Teresa of Avilla's portrait on Saint Teresa of Portugal's page. They do not appear to realize there was more than one female saint who lived in Portugal. Obviously, their researcher isn't all that good.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                             

They also gave my personal information and email address to an organization called "America Needs Fatima" that has been sending me hysteria-laden emails exhorting recipients to go to battle against several different things. Evangelization is passé, apparently. Now we are expected to force non-Catholics to live, think, behave and read nothing but what meets the approval of a certain group of Catholics. I've told them to take me off their list I never agreed to be on to begin with.

The Catholic Church has a LOT to apologize for these days, and we should be a bit more humble. Sometimes I wonder if these war-like Catholics get all militant and demanding as a type of smoke and mirrors, to distract from all our scandals.

Anyway, I will give you the straight scoop on Teresa of Portugal, to the degree I am able.

Teresa of Portugal married her first cousin, without permission. He was Alfonso IX, King of Leon and Galicia. They had a few children, then their marriage was nullified, ostensibly because of consanguinity, but I suspect the main reason was that they did not get permission. You know how those authoritarians are.

Alfonso went on to marry Berengaria of Castile. who was his first cousin once removed! One of their five children was my 25th great grandfather, Saint Ferdinand III of Castile. See how it is with these nobles? They intermarried so often, I am a cousin to myself 100 times over!

So - back to cousin Teresa of Portugal. She retired to the Monastery of Lorvao when the church dissolved her marriage. It had been a Benedictine establishment, but she changed it to Cistercian, which is more of a contemplative order. Right up my alley!

Abbey of Lorvao

She remained involved in political matters, however, coming out of the convent to help solve some complex disputes about inheritance. (Small wonder.)

I searched around quite a bit to try and get some idea of why this lady was sainted. I know that several confirmed miracles are required as part of the process these days. If I can find some information about her details, I will come back later and include it. I have searched several times over the last few years, and there is still nothing new on this score, which is a perfect example of how it is with the saints. If the exploits of the saint are not recorded during her/his time, then her/his story is lost in the mists of time.

In this way, research of the saints becomes somewhat a case of "what have you done for us lately?" This is due partly to the fact that people seem to gravitate toward the sensational. We love excitement and when given a choice between a serious topic and a bit of fluff that has some excitement attached to it, we often run to the thing we find entertaining.

This is what I have observed about Facebook, for instance. If you have some maniac writing a screed against the Pope and about how he is supposedly an "usurper" or a "heretic" or some such nonsense, you will see the Facebook version of a crowd collecting around the town lunatic. FORGET learning about the saints and how you can emulate them.  No. Most people would rather get themselves all enthused about the latest scandal.

It's when we take the lunatics seriously and we lose track of the human tendency to gravitate toward entertainment that we forget ourselves and get into real trouble. Understanding human beings, digging for the truth, and trying to bring it to the light, is a tedious process. We can't assume we even know what a person means when they speak the same language, as a matter of fact. Hardly anyone is exact in their speech, especially if their words are translated, such as the Pope's. He was born in Argentina, where a number of languages are spoken, the main language being Spanish, but Argentinian Spanish is different than the Spanish spoke in New Mexico or that which is spoken in Cuba. The slang is different. A few words are different, because of the other languages in a country such as Argentina, where many other languages are used there - not in the minority, but a enough to have an effect on the primary language.

Most people are too lazy to do the work necessary to make sure they have "it" right before they ride off into the sunset to bring the news to everyone that the Pope is a heretic because he said such and such a thing, which they extrapolate to mean something B-A-A-D. They're off and running with it. It is more exciting to spread the gossip than to knuckle down and thoroughly research and investigate, if something like that is even necessary - what to speak about the ability of some folks to do the kind of research necessary to establish truth under the circumstances. 

Some people love to spread bad news especially, because it captivates the attention of others, which is a big boost to the ego.

The next thing you know, there is some nun who is being advertised as a "seer" to whom God and the Virgin Mary and various saints are speaking and who have told her that the Pope is an "usurper," as if the guy strode into the Vatican with a conquering army, beheaded Pope Benedict and ascended to the chair of Peter. Please.

Jesus promised us that His Church would last the test of time. He said that the gates of Hell would not overcome it. He would not mislead us. God doesn't change his mind like some undisciplined human. This Pope was chosen the same way Popes have been chosen, with confidence, for more than a thousand years.

Don't you think it odd that the same type of conspiracy theories about American law and justice are being bandied about by Americans in regard to the legitimacy of our POPE? 

I cannot tell you why this infectious fad has hit Americans so strongly. But I CAN tell you that Jesus can be trusted, and our Holy blessed Catholic Church can ALSO be trusted.

This is not to say that mistakes are never made. I am quite sure there are many small errors being made at the Vatican, as there is everywhere else in the world - because anywhere human beings are involved, there will be errors. But the organization is protected from deadly error. 

Instead of catering to our desire for entertainment and ease and mouthing off about the defects of the current Pope, I recommend that we each take a good hard look at our own behaviors, and especially our spiritual disciplines. How is your prayer life? Are you praying the Angelus three times a day? Are you meditating at least 15 minutes a day? Are you doing a daily rosary? Are you meeting all the prayer commitments you have made since becoming Catholic?

May we all be blessed!

Silver Rose
Silver Cottage Hermitage

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P.S. All of the blog posts I write are independently researched and written by me and all of them are protected by legal copyright and may not be copied for any purpose by any person for any reason, so please just enjoy them here and leave them here where you found them.

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ST. TERESA OF PORTUGAL - Feast Day: June 17

Today is the feast day for Saint Teresa of Portugal.  She was married to my 26th Great Grandfather, King Alfonso IX of Leon, and they were FIRST COUSINS! She is also a distant cousin of mine.

After having several children together, the church dissolved the marriage because it was too close in blood relation (consanguinity.)  It was common at one time for relatives to marry one another among nobility because, God forbid, one couldn't marry a commoner.  Their world would fall in. Consequently, since I am descended from a bunch of royal lines, I am a cousin to myself a hundred times over, maybe more!

After the marriage was dissolved, Teresa returned to her estate at Lorvao in Portugal and funded a monastery on her property.  Later, she replaced the monks with 300 nuns following the Cistercian Rule, and she lived with them, though she did not take vows until later.

In 1231, her former husband's second wife, Berengaria of Castile, asked Teresa to return to Leon to arbitrate a dispute between their children about the throne and inheritance of Alfonso IX, who had died in September of the previous year. Imagine the confidence that Berengaria would have had to have in our Saint Teresa in order to call on her for assistance with something as weighty as this. As is the case with so many of the female saints, we have to infer her virtuous qualities from the limited amount of information passed down to us over the years.

After settling this dispute, she returned to Lorvao and lived as a nun for the rest of her life, ruling over hundreds of Cistercians in her convent (pictured below) which HAD been a monastery of Benedictine MEN. She replaced them with her Cistercians, which I find incredible, because it is usually the men that are throwing out the women! She must have been remarkable.

This too tells me something about her attributes, since I cannot imagine the men obeying her edict to get lost and then hundreds of women following her in religious life without that woman having had an unusual character. She would have to inspire devotion and obedience in all those women, overcoming the pettiness and infighting that could easily occur among a community of people who have been told since childhood that they are worthless in comparison to the male sex. I pray to be imbued with some of that inspiration myself!

Many of my Sainted ancestors and cousins have started convents and monasteries. I have also long wanted to start a convent geared toward disabled and retired ladies, but that sort of thing requires a huge amount of funding.  My sainted ancient ancestors were wealthy, most of them, or at least had quite a bit of land, and they had the freedom to dedicate it to the church so as to establish convents and monasteries "for the glory of God." If you had no money, you had little or no chance of a religious vocation - unless, of course you were young, exceedingly healthy, and able to wait on and serve everyone else. 

Abbey of Lorvao

Photograph by Vitor Oliveira

from Torres Vedras, Portugal

This is a view of the old Abbey cloister and of the

lantern tower of the Abbey Church.

It was originally occupied by Benedictine monks, from

about 1070 to 1206, and then housed Saint Teresa's Cistercian

nuns from 1206 to 1887

The great importance of prayer, whether intercessory prayer, glorification, or contemplative prayer in which one simply inclines the mind to God, cannot be underestimated, but I find that, even some very devout people don't see the sense of it and are not likely to support contemplative vocations.  They expect visible production in the form of social programs on the part of the religious, but fail to calculate that Martha AND Mary are necessary.  Some are jealous of the peaceful, protected life of contemplative monastics, despite the lack of mobility and choice about almost anything in a nun's life. When I was a nun in the Vedanta convent, I overheard a few "close devotees" speak with bitterness about the supposed ease of the lives of the nuns, when they knew nothing at all about the tremendous amount of physical labor that was required of them. My body was destroyed by the physical work and I ended up in a wheelchair for a couple of weeks, at least.

Why do I care if I am related to this saint or that saint?  The thing is this:  The saints are not really dead. They have exited the physical world and moved on to another, spiritual realm and if I am related to any of them, I like to direct requests for intercessory prayer to them.  Hey...I need all the help I can get, and I am counting on them to be interested in their descendants and relations.

In addition, the lives of the saints give tremendous inspiration to process along the holy path they trod before me. Their examples prove it can be done. It is possible to conquer the lower urges and approach the Lord, if we observe, imitate and correspond with the glorified ones.

Granted, it is more difficult to be inspired by the saints like Teresa of Portugal who have been ignored by the church and for whom there is so little information, but when we meditate on the events of their life and spend some time considering the implications of their history, we can mine jewels from it.

Teresa had two sisters who were ALSO sainted - Sancha and Malfalda. I have seen this tendency of saints appearing in the same family like this, and it gives me something to think about. Is there some DNA aspect to sisters given to saintliness, or is it entirely a "nurture, rather than nature" situation? Therese of Lisieux immediately comes to mind. Her sisters, you will remember, were also nuns.

Today I commune with Teresa of Portugal and I recommend her to you, as well. 

God bless us all.

Silver "Rose" S. Parnell

Sannyasini Kaliprana

Silver Cottage Hermitage

Albuquerque, New Mexico
(c) 2015