Youth and Carmel

Blessed Anne (Ana de San Bartolomé) was born Ana Garcia Manzanas in 1550, in a tiny village called Almendral de la Cañada from the central region of Toledo–Castilla La Mancha in Catholic Spain. She was the seventh child in a deeply pious family, and by her own testimony given later under obedience, experienced very early on, almost from her toddling days, an awareness of the living God, and so from the very beginning of her life, she resisted sin consciously and turned to God, penance and prayer.¹ It seems that she had had heavenly visions and dreams of Jesus, Our Lady, the angels and the saints from infancy onwards, though her family knew nothing of it. The family owned and worked the land; her father could afford to have a priest come and teach his boys the faith and how to read and write (possibly Anne also? We do not know), while her mother could spend generously for the poor. They also prayed as a family, particularly reciting the daily rosary together.

But when she was nine her mother died, as did her father the following year. From then on, Anne was brought up by her older siblings. She was possibly functionally illiterate² and trained primarily for the concrete tasks of house and farm work; working in the fields like everyone else. Given her sense of God’s presence and her already committed life of prayer, it is not surprising that Anne desired early to become a nun, kept to herself and avoided all talk of marriage, which left her siblings angry and antagonistic.

However, a new parish priest told her about St Teresa’s new foundation of San José in Avila, and she resolved to enter there. It took years to achieve this. When her family learned about it, they were totally opposed. They overloaded her with work that was much too hard for her, and made her life miserable, so that Anne had a Mass said every day for a whole year for the benefit of the holy souls in purgatory, and petitioned them to clear the way for her to enter the monastery. Eventually, after constant and extreme family opposition, she was able to enter the convent of San José in Avila on All Souls’ day: 2 November 1570. St Teresa was the prioress then, but away for some months for the foundation of the Discalced Carmel in Salamanca at the time. But it is clear that from the time they eventually met, a deep sympathy was established between the older and the younger woman.

When she entered the monastery, Anne was twenty years old, a very sensible and grounded young woman, well-schooled in all practical daily and farming tasks, given to strong penitential practice, obviously a mystic and completely given over to her relationship with God. She was to take her vows as the first sister of the white veil in the Discalced Carmel: those sisters entrusted with the practical and often physically demanding work of the monastery, thus affording the black-veiled nuns with enough time and focus to recite the complete Divine Office in choir. Since Anne’s prayer life had always been filled with images and vivid experiences of the Lord and the saints, this was simply the normal way that God communicated with her throughout her life, though he often let her feel his absence. But she was not dependent on those experiences in order to believe and to pray generously and knew that these were graces from God: she received them with gratitude and humility, and kept to her way, untroubled either by his absence or his felt presence.

For the whole of the first year (the novitiate), in fact, God left Anne in spiritual darkness, but she persevered. However, after that time of probation, the Lord regularly let himself be seen again, once in particular showing her his concern for France, which gave him much sorrow: this, of course, was happening during the French wars of religion, which lasted until 1598 (the disturbed European situation in general continued for a long while and melded eventually into the Thirty Years war, which ended in 1648).

Helper and companion

One Christmas (1577), some five years before her death, the aging saint Teresa of Avila, the foundress and prioress, broke her arm. She was already by that time very impressed with Anne’s attentiveness and great efficiency in nursing. Teresa thought that, given her own age and increasing infirmity, it was better if Anne continued to attend to her and accompany her in her subsequent life and travels. As concerns her literacy, Anne probably had become by then a fluent reader during her years as a Carmelite, due to the importance of spiritual reading included in the convent daily life. She who had never been taught to write testified at Teresa’s beatification process that she had learned miraculously to write in a single afternoon, when Teresa wrote down a few lines for her to copy.³

And so she became Teresa’s inseparable nurse, amanuensis and travelling companion, helping her in the last four foundations right up to the moment of her death five years later (1582) in Anne’s arms. Teresa thought very highly of her, saying once: ‘Anne, Anne, you are the saint, and I have the reputation for it.’.

Inevitably, being in the know of all the complex situations that Teresa regularly faced and dealt with gave Anne a thorough education in the meaning and practices of the Discalced Carmel as conceived by Teresa, in the handling of personalities, in the difficulties of obedience to proper authority and in the wider political implications of their dealings with secular authority. All this would prepare her for the unexpected developments of her later life.

For a few years after her revered friend’s death, Anne’s importance as repository of Teresa’s wisdom meant that she was somehow included in discussions (inconclusive in her lifetime) about Teresa’s burial place, and about developments within the Discalced Carmel. When Nicolas Doria (1539-1594), elected provincial and then vicar general of the Discalced Carmelites, imposed authoritarian and despotic decrees on the Order, those nuns and friars who opposed him in the name of Teresa’s teachings and spirit were systematically destroyed by him. But Anne, seeing that he was the acknowledged superior of the Discalced Carmel, submitted in obedience, however much it cost her. This battle, however, was to be renewed in her life several years later, after she was chosen to be among those who travelled to France to establish the Discalced Carmel there.

Wars of Religion

At this point, it is worth looking briefly at the complex political situation that arose in Europe due to the wars of religion, and to the influence of reformers like Calvin and especially Martin Luther. The Protestant reformers inspired ardent followers in Germany, the Low Countries and France in particular, and in England at a slightly later date. This crisis started at about the time of the birth of St Teresa. It was a very long period of constant turmoil, which must have felt like the end of the world to people living in some areas. The Council of Trent, intent on repairing the damage done by the sins and ineptitudes of the Catholic Church’s own hierarchy and members and the heresies of the Protestants, took place between 1545 and 1563, at which point a true movement of renewal and self-reform finally made its way into Catholic countries and apostolates.

The Protestant revolt had led to widespread and very destructive attacks on churches, on religious communities and monasteries, on every level of civil life in Catholic countries, which in their turn also saw outbreaks of violence (the St Bartholomew’s massacre in France happened in 1572, two years after Anne had entered Carmel, on her patron saint’s day, too. She must have been horrified at the news), while all this profound social instability gave an opportunity for political realignment among local and continental rulers.⁴

In Spain, King Philip II (1556-1598) took up the defence of the Catholic faith in all his territories, which included the Low Countries (present-day Belgium and Netherlands). This included a strengthening of the Inquisition, since the Pope had allowed him to administer it in his territories. Eventually, in 1588 he disastrously decided also to invade England by means of his naval Armada to try and reinstate the Catholic Church there. And at the same time, the Spanish and French monarchs, although they were both Catholic rulers, were at war over their own territories and spheres of influence. King Henry IV of France (king of Navarre, a territory adjacent to Spain, from 1572 onwards and then of France, from 1589 to 1610) had been a strong Protestant but converted to the Catholic faith in order to bring peace to his kingdom. He published the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which did allow civil and religious freedom to Protestant Huguenots within his officially Catholic kingdom, something that the ultra-orthodox Philip II could not accept within his own territories. England for its part fought against the Spanish influence in the Low Countries. Philip II was succeeded by his son Philip III (1598 to 1621), who came on the scene as matters were gradually calming down everywhere, just as Spain’s influence and economy were also declining due to the considerable losses incurred in wars, and this, in spite of all the gains from South American bullion.

It is against such social and religious turmoil, and in such a difficult political environment that Anne’s life was to continue, when discussions about opening Carmel in France finally came to fruition.

France

On 29 August 1604, six nuns set off on the road to France, accompanied by a few French and Spanish gentlemen, all bound for new foundations of the Discalced Carmel in Paris and elsewhere. Among them was a single nun of the white veil, Anne of Saint Bartholomew.

How had this come about? A group of very influent and well-placed Catholics in Paris had heard about this new reformed Carmel and thought it could become an instrument of deep religious renewal in the country. These people usually met at the house of Pierre and Barbe Acarie. Madame Acarie, herself a future Carmelite in her eventual widowhood, was noted for her beauty, her strong Catholic commitment in all good works and for her management skills, as well as her deep spiritual life and mysticism. She, having discovered the writings of St Teresa of Avila and discussed the question with many holy intimate friends (including the future St Francis de Sales), joined with them in taking steps to organise the foundation in France of the Discalced Carmel, as a remedy for the ills of the time. They obtained letters from King Henry IV to the king of Spain, and in 1603, sent a small group of clerics and gentlemen to Spain to try and persuade the civil authorities and Carmelite superiors to release some nuns, particularly those who had known Teresa personally. Among these men was a young cousin of Madame Acarie, called Pierre de Bérulle, who had only been ordained a priest in 1599.

De Bérulle had drive, focus, conviction, natural authority, and he eventually won the day. He was interested in bringing with him nuns who had known the foundress well, had worked with her and were able to transmit all aspects of the renewed Carmel without fault. One of the nuns who was to join these new recruits for France died and Anne of St Bartholomew was included in the group in her place. She herself felt that her presence had not been wanted by these nuns: after all, she was not of the black veil like them, nor trained in the liturgy or in the formation of others, nor known for her linguistic abilities.

Nevertheless, once arrived in Paris, Anne was forced to accept the black veil. Years before, St Teresa had several times tried to convince her to accept this change, sure that she had the abilities for the task, but Anne had always refused. This time, it was taken out of her hands, and after several days of prayer, she finally surrendered her will on this. It did not make for an easy life: she had to guide the liturgical recitation of the (Latin) Divine Office, when she herself could hardly find her place in the books. She had to give talks to her new nuns, while not speaking their language. She had to take material decisions concerning the convent, while being ill-equipped to do so in every way, etc. Every decision, every normal action taken as a Carmelite superior was an effort and potentially could land her in unforeseen trouble.

We see here also the beginning of the sort of problem that Anne was to encounter in France: although St Teresa, the mother foundress, had worked so hard to annul within the Discalced Carmel every aspect of class consciousness within her convents, the necessity of having two ‘levels’ of nuns had allowed a certain amount of it to remain, so that Anne’s place among the foundresses of Carmel in France remained quite uncomfortable, even after she was given the black veil. And in class-ridden France, establishing an egalitarian religious order was also going to be a problem among the new religious and among their superiors, particularly as the initial and most important foundation was in Paris where members of the nobility were expected to enter the Order and where a critical eye was constantly kept on everything that was happening within the convent.

Furthermore, the political rivalry and suspicion between France and Spain was increasingly to come into play. As the situation deteriorated, a systematic isolation of the Spanish foundresses gradually took place. They were suspected of spying, and so all their letters were intercepted, including those to the Carmelite Friars in Spain. The French nuns from their new convents were instructed to shun confiding in them and turn to other French nuns instead, thus sabotaging the line of authority within the cloister; they were never left alone at the turn door, lest any information be passed, etc.

To top it all, de Bérulle was an authoritarian and, thinking he knew everything because he understood the Constitutions of the Order, demanded that the foundresses accommodate his ideas, while he gave supervision powers in the Paris convent to Madame Acarie and Pierre de Marillac, two lay people who had nothing to do with it. De Bérulle also demanded to be the sole confessor, and it was practically impossible for poor Anne to confess to him when there was so much animosity on his part against her, as she would not bend to please him when it concerned the accurate transmission of what she had received from St Teresa. He further demanded having the ultimate authority on the Order in France, and so would not allow the Carmelite Friars to do their legitimate work within the Order. His character, in fact, was not unlike that of Nicolas Doria’s had been in Spain, but he was not a legitimate Carmelite superior himself.⁵ And so, as mentioned above, the question of obedience was a constant trial for Anne. The years she spent in France were the darkest of her life.

She wrote in her autobiography that she knew very well what was happening, but decided simply to disregard it and carry on, since there was nothing she could do about it, and she knew well that the Lord had everything in hand. She simply offered up her inner suffering moment by moment, keeping her peace at all times. The important thing was that during her difficult years in France, Anne struck all who met her with her kindness, affability, clear ideas, and deep prayerfulness, as well as her readiness to help in the kitchen and the infirmary. She was indeed a treasure to all, even while putting up with insuperable obstacles.

Incidentally, due to these very difficult beginnings, the French Carmels (however successful they ultimately were) developed certain practices and structures that diverged from those of the Order elsewhere. These differences, touching on matters of governance and observance, were not fully ironed out until the twentieth century, when the future Blessed Marie-Eugene of the Child Jesus as Definitor General and Apostolic Visitor to his own country, was charged with regularising the situation and bringing the houses in France into full alignment with the wider Order.

Anne of Saint Bartholomew had a reputation for kindness and wisdom as she met people of every kind. There is for example the unusual case of one Antonio Peréz, who had been personal secretary to Philip II of Spain and later arrested and condemned to death for murder. He had escaped from jail, made his way to Paris and London and offered his services to each sovereign. Apparently, towards the end of his life, he went to talk to Anne of Saint Bartholomew, who was prioress in Paris at the time. She wrote in her autobiography that he seemed desperate about his salvation, that she came to love him in spite of everything and to hope for his salvation, that she was told that the Lord had touched him: he received the sacraments frequently and died a pious death. This gives us an idea of the beneficial effects of Anne’s quiet virtue, perceived even well outside the monastery walls.

In Tours, a region notable for its strong Protestant presence, with high tension between both parties, the new monastery’s immediate neighbour was himself a Protestant of note. In the early days of the foundation, that neighbour’s servant deliberately broke the fence separating the two properties so that he could entice the monastery’s flock of hens to his master’s coop, but Anne’s kind, muted and diplomatic approach to the problem defused the situation completely, and her neighbour was deeply impressed. Charity, mildness and respect were her great characteristics. When after three years it became known that Anne would be leaving Tours, the population’s opinion had changed so much that they opposed her departure, and Anne had to leave by night, disguised and secretly.

What was Blessed Anne’s trajectory in France? A few months after her arrival in Paris with the others, she was sent to found the Carmel at Pontoise, where she tried her wings as the prioress. But only seven or eight months later, she was recalled to the Paris Carmel, where she remained as prioress until 1608, in the difficult circumstances described above. She was then sent to make a foundation in Tours, and remained there until 1611, when she took the opportunity that presented itself to return to Paris after all, so that she could meet with legitimate Carmelite superiors whom the Lord had told her were expected to arrive. She was able to speak with them and ask them to allow her to return to their authority and to be sent wherever they pleased, so long as it was under their rule. This greatly offended de Bérulle and others (who after all prized her as the nun who had been closest to the soon-to-be-beatified Teresa), but she simply waited to be given her marching orders.

After a few days, her official orders arrived: she was sent to Flanders. De Bérulle was furious, and tried to delay her departure for several days, hoping that in the meantime her habitual visions would involve some direction from God that she should remain in France. All, of course, to no avail. She left on 5 October, stopping for a year in Mons (in present-day Belgium), at a Carmel previously founded by Anne of Jesus (Ana de Jesús), one of the little band who had initially travelled to France, but who had moved on a few years before to make foundations in Flanders. From Mons, Anne was sent to found the Discalced Carmel in Antwerp in October 1612, where she remained as its prioress for the rest of her life. She died in 1626, 14 years later.

Antwerp

If the years spent in France had been the darkest period of Anne’s life, Antwerp provided perhaps her most rewarding years. The context, of course, was entirely different. The Low Countries were part of the territory allocated to Spain after 1549, and Spain was grimly resolved to oppose the spread of Protestantism by any means. Inevitably, the inhabitants rose against this, and this led to a war lasting 80 years. By the time Anne of Saint Bartholomew arrived in Antwerp, that Southern part of the territory had been narrowly regained by Spain and put under the direction of Philip II’s daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia and her husband, Archduke Albert VII of Austria. Their calm and moderate governance brought peace and helped develop economic and social stability, and to a large extent reconciled the people to their Spanish rulers. So long as the remaining Protestants kept to themselves in peace and did not attempt to spread their ideas, they were not pursued. And to counter the religious damage due to the Protestant revolt, the Spanish rulers invited new religious orders to the territory, including Jesuits, Capuchins and Discalced Carmelites.

In Flanders, no more did Anne find herself shunned and suspected of spying. No more was there a battle as to the rule and the transmission of Teresa’s teachings on the Discalced Carmel’s direction, apostolate and practices. Furthermore, although she did not speak Flemish (initially at least, though she may have learned a certain amount as time went on), she could finally find sufficient numbers of people who understood Spanish, not least confessors.

And so, Anne flourished. Quietly and calmly, she established the monastery and trained its new members. She continued, as she always had, to be very involved in nursing the sick and working in the kitchen whenever her duties as prioress allowed. She spent herself endlessly. She took the interests of the city to heart and is credited with saving it twice from surprise assaults by Protestant forces. Antwerp was a valuable prize, seeing as it gave access to the sea, and a raid to seize it seemed to them a good objective to gamble on. But as it happens, on both occasions Anne awoke suddenly in the night, oppressed by such a sense of doom that she actually woke up the community and brought them to the chapel to pray right until morning. They did not alert anyone in town; they just prayed for the city’s safety. The city fathers knew nothing of it until later, when some nuns mentioned it to their relatives and the story spread that Anne was responsible for saving the city by her prayers. The bishop of Antwerp at the time proclaimed her as saviour of the city. To this day, she is still its official patron saint.

And what we know is that she was sought by all, from the greatest to the lowest, as a counsellor. She was kind and diplomatic, discreet, peaceful and practical. The Archduke and his wife both met and liked her from the start and the latter quickly came to rely on her advice. But anyone could approach her for counsel, prayers, consolation, practical remedies, etc. She seems to have also had an extensive personal apostolate through letter-writing.

After having had the joy of learning about her revered Teresa’s beatification in 1614, and canonisation in 1622, Anne, at the ripe old age of 76, died in the most unobtrusive of manners but was given two funerals: one in Antwerp, for her burial, and another one in Brussels, the seat of power, to allow the Court to give their homage to her. This gives an idea of how much she was loved and appreciated everywhere: enclosed nuns don’t normally get a funeral requested by the Establishment.

In keeping with her humility and quiet, she was then almost forgotten except where she had lived and where people had known her personally, and she was not beatified until 1917.

In conclusion

Anne of St Batholomew’s life introduces us to a person who allowed herself to be moulded by the gospel and to pursue the deepest friendship with her merciful Lord, to meet bravely the unexpected developments of her life, while being plunged in a world of societal challenge and turmoil everywhere she lived. She teaches us how to set priorities, how to trust God, how to persevere, how to practice kindness and goodness always and everywhere. We ourselves, also, live in a world challenged worldwide and at every level in its values and institutions, and Christianity itself is under serious attack. We would do well to take her as a friend and as an example of fidelity to Christ, to charity and to prayer in all circumstances. It is good that she is gradually becoming more well-known, to our great encouragement. The four hundredth anniversary of her death (7 June 1626–2026) has come at a providential time.

1. In her autobiography she mentions an early memory, ‘as a little girl who didn’t yet know how to speak’, hearing a family discussion about the innocence of young children and the fact that people start sinning at around the age of seven, the age of reason. ‘I understood all this, and as she spoke of sinning, I raised my eyes to heaven without really knowing, it seems to me, what I was doing. It seemed to me that I saw heaven open, the Lord showed himself to me with great majesty, and since this was something completely new, it caused great fear and reverence in my heart at the time. Because I knew it was God and that it was he who would judge me, there remained with me the fear that I would sin, as my sisters said, and offend him.’ (Ana de San Bartolome: Autobiography and other Writings, Edited and translated by Darcy Donahue, University of Chicago Press, 2008.) ↩︎
2. As Blessed Anne was to say later (quoted in full in the next footnote),  ‘she could only read a bit of Spanish and had difficulty understanding the letters’; and she was mentioning having this imperfect reading ability only after some years in the convent, where she had been exposed to daily spiritual reading, quite the opposite from what had been her life as a young girl and young woman, where daily farm labour was not calculated to leave her time for literary pursuits, and this, after what had been, at best, a sketchy home-based more formal education. ↩︎
3. ‘Also this deponent remembers that once when the mother was in Salamanca, where they had gone to from Valladolid in the journey already mentioned, when the holy mother found herself too tired to write to all the letters that needed answering, told this deponent: If you knew how to write you could help me answer those letters’. And she told her: ‘Let your reverence give me something to learn with.’ She gave her a letter in a good hand from a Discalced Carmelite nun and told her to learn from that. And this witness replied that it seemed better to her that she should learn from her hand instead, and that she would imitate it. And the holy mother straight away wrote two lines in her own hand and gave them to her. And that afternoon this witness wrote to the sisters in Saint Joseph in Avila. And from that day she wrote them and helped answer the letters that the mother received, without ever having had a teacher, as she said, nor learned from any person or learned in other ways, and she could only read a bit of Spanish and had difficulty understanding the letters; from which she knows that this was a work of Our Lord so that she could help the mother in the travails and cares that she underwent for love of him with so much joy and happiness.’ (Testimony for the Beatification Process, section IX, second paragraph). ↩︎
4. The St Bartholomew’s day massacre (24 August 1572) was a wave of anti-Protestant violence beginning in Paris and Spreading across France, resulting in thousands of deaths. Contemporary estimates speak of around 3000 Protestants killed in Paris alone, with further massacres occurring in other regions. In reaction, this inevitably intensified the wars of religion. An excellent book to consult here is ‘The Cleaving of Christendom’, being volume 4 of his History of Christendom, by Warren Carroll, Christendom Press, Front Royal, Virginia, 2000. This describes the immensely complex story of the spread of Protestantism in the whole of Europe from the time of Martin Luther onwards, as well as that of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and he does so chronologically, so one can have a sense of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation vying with each other in real time. Pages 360 to 371 deal with the St Bartholomew’s day massacre in France.  ↩︎
5. Cf. Bérulle and the French School: Selected Writings, Paulis Press, New York, 1989. The Introduction, written by Susan Muto, goes into more details on pp 13-15, about the spiritual aspects of the controversy he generated, which were a deviation from true Teresian Carmelite spirituality. His authoritarian character is given an illustration in the little book Madame Acarie, by Dr A.R. Salmon-Malebranche, published by the Carmel of Maria Regina in Eugene, Oregon, in 1981. At the end of her life, he visited his cousin Marie de l’Incarnation (the widowed former Madame Acarie) hoping to receive her approval and support for the new devotions he was seeking to introduce: ‘He did not obtain them and after a long discussion, he flew into a rage, ending the conversation abruptly and leaving Marie of the Incarnation very moved, repeating what he had said to her, that she was only a deluded mind…’.  In her autobiography, the very charitable Anne of St Bartholomew also does give various instances of the clashes she had with him, but while she was no pushover and stuck to what St Teresa and the Constitutions had taught her, she chose to obey him in every way that she personally could. He undoubtedly had great zeal for the good of the Church, and all his actions were aimed at fostering in France a true Catholic Reform according to the decrees of the Council of Trent. He was named a Cardinal two years before his sudden death at the altar, aged 54. ↩︎