HIGGINSON, TERESA HELENA. - Mystic, born in 1844 to Catholic parents. In 1854 she entered a convent in Nottingham, where she remained for 10 years and made her First Communion at Easter in 1857. From earliest childhood she gave evidence of exceptional piety, yearning for suffering and penance. For many years she taught poor children in Catholic schools at Bootle, Wigan, and Sabden in Lancashire, the seat of her ancestors, and finally at Chudleigh in Devonshire, where she died on 15 Feb. 1906.
Around 1926, the publication of several Lives of H. aroused intense interest among English-speaking Catholics. They include letters written by H. in obedience to her spiritual director, in which she recounts having received extraordinary favors and miracles such as bilocation and living for many years without food, miraculous Communions, and the stigmata. She believed herself called to spread the new devotion to the Sacred Head of Our Lord, seat of Divine Wisdom, in reparation for the sins of intellectual pride.