PARROQUIA

After the loss of her children and her husband, Teresa found strength of spirit in the cross of Jesus. Years earlier, the couple had acquired a large building in the town of Torrijos which they used as a palace, to which they sometimes retired. It was here that Teresa came to take refuge after the Queen's death in 1504, and with her son Diego and daughter Maria married, a new life began for her, freed from the frenzy of the Court, centred on the realisation of the great ideals that had inspired her life. In brief, I could summarise these ideals, a transcript of those she had lived with her now distant paternal grandmother: living faith and ardent love for the Lord, especially in the Eucharistic mystery; love also for the Holy Mother of God; operative charity towards the poorest and sickest, including captives in Muslim lands and children; a spirit of austerity and very high prayer.

 

The fruit of his ardent devotion to the Eucharist would be realised:

- In the building of the Collegiate Church of Torrijos, Gothic in its interior, Plateresque in its façades. The work lasted about 10 years and was completed in 1518.

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- In the creation of the confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament. To understand this, we must situate ourselves in the religious crisis of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Already at the end of the 14th century, the Englishman Wycliffe had denied the truth of the real presence of the Eucharist. And in the years when the Collegiate Church was being built, the Lutheran and Zwinglian split, which also obscured or denied the Real Presence, was taking shape. Luther broke with Rome in 1517 and Zwingli in 1518. Despite some positive reactions, such as the Corpus Christi feast, which was spreading. These doubts were reflected in the fact that the Lord was practically abandoned in many churches where it was celebrated from evening to evening: tabernacles reduced to vulgar, undecorated boxes, wooden ciboria, chalices of ordinary glass, absence of lights to indicate the presence of the Lord....

In the Roman church of San Lorenzo in Damasus, a humble group of men accompanied the Viaticum through the streets with lights and recollection. They lacked resources and the people looked on with a certain respect, but indifferent to this Eucharistic gesture of this first "confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament". Someone informed Teresa in Torrijos of this act of these good Christians in Rome. She, so in love with the Blessed Sacrament, was moved and, through a religious, sent them a splendid embroidered canopy, a little golden pyx for the forms and 125 ducats for the nascent confraternity.

Later some of them came to Torrijos to see Doña Teresa. She had a beautiful marble chapel carved for the Lord in that Roman church, endowing and enriching it. There is a marble slab in the church that commemorates Teresa Enríquez as the founder of this first chapel of the confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament.

 

Teresa also obtained from Pope Julius II a bull with privileges for this Eucharistic Association and a licence to found it in Torrijos. This was achieved in 1508, and from Torrijos they spread to the whole of Spain, and later to a large part of Europe. The kind title of "Madwoman of the Sacrament" was given to her by Pope Julius II himself, and shortly afterwards Leo X would say of her: "The fact that a lady of Castile started in the world, from a small place, this new way of honouring the Eucharist and of promoting the virtue of Christians is, above all consideration, glorious for Spain".

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- In the Love of the Blessed Virgin. Not only in his personal piety but also in his works. In Toledo Cathedral there is the Chapel of Nuestra Señora de la Antigua, founded by Doña Teresa. Another work in Torrijos honours the mystery of the Immaculate Conception of Mary: the foundation of one of the first Conceptionist convents in Spain in a large house she owned. It is not surprising that in her will she says: "I have the Blessed Glorious Virgin Mary as my Lady and Advocate in all my deeds, and now with a devout heart I offer myself as her servant and give her my soul".

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- In the field of social justice and charity. Teresa was also a pioneer in the field that centuries later would become known as "agrarian parcelling". She divided some of her large estates near Torrijos into plots and gave them to poor families to cultivate with a small income which she used for her charitable works. In other words, she knew how to give not only the fish but also the fishing rod. With the help of a Sevillian priest, Fernando Contreras, famous for his social works, she took on the task of assisting the very numerous sick (during her husband's lifetime she had already founded the Hospital de la Trinidad), the orphans and even the poor captives from the Maghreb, especially from Algiers, renewing or helping the great work of the redemption of the captives of previous centuries.

 

These are just a few small samples of the great spirit of this great woman. Her incorrupted body rests in the Monastery of the Conceptionist Nuns of Torrijos.