TERESA MARGHERITA of the HEART of JESUS, saint. — In the world Anna Maria Redi, niece of the physician-poet Francesco, born in Arezzo on 15 July 1747. Educated by the Benedictines of S. Apollonia in Firenze, she entered the Carmel of S. Teresa in that same city on 1 September 1764 and died there on 7 March 1770. Her body remains incorrupt.
Her spirituality is distinguished by a perfect balance of all the fundamental aspects of the spiritual life: she is a great mystic, yet, ever devoted to asceticism, she wears herself out in the assiduous service of numerous sick fellow sisters. Nourished by Holy Scripture, dogma, and liturgy, she knew the most marked contemplative aridity. The dominant note of her interior life was the pursuit of hiddenness: she is the “Saint of the hidden life.” Her spiritual journey led her from the Sacred Heart to the Trinity. Having wholly assimilated the teachings of St. Margherita Maria Alacoque, she subsequently lived them in a personal manner through imitation of the hidden life of the Soul and Heart of Christ; thence she rose to seek intimacy with the Most Holy Trinity through a combination of ascetical and liturgical practices crowned by profound Trinitarian contemplations. She then devoted herself entirely to pouring out upon the Church the abundance of the impulses of the Holy Spirit with which she felt herself personally endowed. 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