Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart, Saint

TERESA MARGARET OF THE SACRED HEART, Saint. - Born Anna Maria Redi, niece of the physician-poet Francesco, she was born in Arezzo on 15 July 1747. Educated by the Benedictines of St. Apollonia in Florence, she entered the Carmel of St. Teresa in the same city on 1 September 1764 and died there on 7 March 1770. Her body is preserved incorrupt.

Her spirituality is distinguished by a perfect balance of all the fundamental aspects of the spiritual life: she is a great mystic, but, always devoted to asceticism, she consumes herself in the assiduous service of numerous ailing sisters. Nourished on Sacred Scripture, dogma and liturgy, she knows the most pronounced contemplative aridity. The dominant note of her interior life: the cultivation of hiddenness: she is the "Saint of the hidden life." Her spiritual itinerary leads her from the Sacred Heart to the Trinity. Having totally assimilated the teachings of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, she then lives them in a personal way through the imitation of the hidden life of the Soul and Heart of Christ; from here she ascends to the search for intimacy with the Most Holy Trinity through a combination of ascetic and liturgical practices crowned by profound Trinitarian contemplations. She then devotes herself entirely to pouring out upon the Church the abundance of the impulses of the Holy Spirit with which she feels personally graced. She is the purest and most perfect realization of the Teresian ideal. She was canonized on 19 March 1934. She is the youngest saint of the Teresian Carmel.

Gabriele di Santa Maria Maddalena