ÁGREDA, MARIA de, venerable. — A mystic Poor Clare, in the world Maria Coronel, born at Ágreda (Burgos) on 2 April 1602, died there on 24 May 1665. At the age of 8 she made a vow of virginity, and at 17, together with her mother and a sister, she entered, taking the name Maria di Gesù, the monastery of the Discalced Poor Clares of the Immaculate Conception founded by her ancestors, while her father and her two brothers donned the Franciscan habit. At the age of 25, by papal dispensation, she was elected abbess, a dignity which she held, with great spiritual and material benefit to the monastery, apart from a three-year vacancy, until her death. On 21 June 1672 her cause of beatification was introduced.
She wrote various works of a religious nature, which remained unpublished: Leyes de la Esposa, conceptos y suspiros del corazón para alcanzar el último y verdadero fin del agrado del Esposo y Señor; Meditaciones de la pasión de nuestro Señor; Ejercicios cotidianos y doctrina para hacer las obras con mayor perfeccion; Escala espiritual para subir a la perfeccion.
The following were published posthumously: 1) Cartas de la ven. madre sor Maria de A. y del señor Rey Felipe IV, ed. F. Silvela, 2 vols., Madrid 1885–86. This correspondence (614 letters) with Filippo IV lasted 22 years; it concerns ascetic, moral and political subjects, and is regarded as a model of epistolary literature for the classical elegance of its style and as an excellent historical document. The removal of the count-duke of Olivares from the direction of the government is attributed to the Venerable’s advice. 2) Mistica ciudad de Dios, historia divina y vida de la virgen madre de Dios, etc., 3 vols., Madrid 1670; first Italian ed., Palermo 1703; new ed., with a biography, edited by Bishop Ozcoidi y Udave, Barcelona 1914. The Venerable owes her fame to this work. Conceived as early as 1637, begun in 1637 at the order of her spiritual director, it was definitively written between 1655 and 1660. After prefacing the account of the creation, the author describes in minute, often prolix, detail,
the life of the Most Blessed Virgin, asserting that she had written, by heavenly command, the revelations in which she had contemplated the perfections of the Mother of God.
Sbaralea, citing Giovanni di s. Antonio, lists other published and unpublished works of the Venerable, regarded by most as apocryphal.
The divergence of opinion does not concern the truly holy life of A., but her principal work. Mistica ciudad de Dios, published five years after the author’s death with the approval of a commission presided over by the Minister General of the Franciscans, who wished it to be accompanied by Fr. Samaniego with a life of A., an introductory dissertation (Prologo galeato), and explanatory notes, became the object of innumerable controversies. Prohibited by decree of the S. Congregation of the Inquisition of 26 June 1681—which, however, at the request of King Carlo II, Innocenzo XI did not extend to Spain—and removed in 1747, it had as its most acrimonious opponents the Sorbonne (censure of 1696), Bossuet, and above all E. Amort (v.). The Universities of Leuven, Alcalá, Salamanca, and Toulouse pronounced in favor of the work; in controversy with Amort were the Franciscans D. Gonzales Matheo, L. Maier, and D. Kich, along with many other theologians. Objectively, although Mistica ciudad de Dios contains no shortage of historical, geographical, and chronological errors, from which it follows that the work contains not only “revelations,” its high ascetic and mystical value must nevertheless be acknowledged.