A Child Of Mary Forever… Venerable Maria Teresa Quevedo (1930-1950)
By JAMES MONTI
It was on Monday of Holy Week, April 14, 1930 that the Quevedo family of Madrid saw the birth of their third child, a girl who just twenty years later would be called to eternal life at the conclusion of Holy Week, on Holy Saturday, April 8, 1950. Within that narrow span our Lord and our Lady were to accomplish great things in the soul of Maria Teresa Quevedo, who would come to say of herself, “I am in a hurry to grow holy” (quoted in Sr. Mary Pierre, RSM, Mary was Her Life: The Story of a Nun: Sister Maria Teresa Quevedo, 1930-1950, New York, Benziger Bros. 1963, p. 67).
As a toddler, Teresita, as her family called her, was the ultimate problem child at the dinner table, notoriously stubborn when it came to foods she did not like, and not above throwing a temper tantrum to make her point. Her willfulness extended to other things as well. Year later, in a letter to her older sister Carmen, she playfully refers to herself as “your little nuisance” (ibid., p. 22). Teresita’s father, a prosperous doctor, liked to call his youngest daughter “Princess,” and as a tot she showed every sign of thinking herself to be one.
Yet even at this time, there were signs that the hand of the Blessed Virgin was upon her, as on one occasion when after a squabble with other children she rushed off to a statue of the Blessed Mother to find solace for her tears.
Teresita’s First Holy Communion brought the first decisive change in her life. The child resolved to begin attending Mass daily, and her behavior improved drastically. In the course of a school essay Teresita related that her father used to tell her that the air is “the breath of Christ” and that, in recalling those words when walking by herself to church in the early morning, it made her feel as if “Christ’s breath” carried her to Mass (ibid., p. 20).
Teresita’s heart was increasingly falling under the sway of the extraordinary bond she felt with the Mother of God. It permeated all her thoughts and entered into all her decisions. She expressed it succinctly in a note she addressed to the Blessed Mother inside the front cover of a notebook she kept as captain of her school’s basketball team: “…you guide every move of my life, dearest Lady” (ibid., p. 27). At a school retreat in 1943, Teresita consecrated herself to the Blessed Virgin in the form taught by St. Louis Marie de Montfort.
Having cajoled her father into letting her attend a second retreat just four months later, Teresita made more resolutions, including, “Not to waste time (It belongs to Jesus)” (ibid., p. 49). It was shortly after this retreat that Teresita along with the other members of the Sodality of Our Lady at her school were each required to select a personal Marian motto for themselves that would be engraved on a medal for each of them.
For this occasion Teresita composed the motto that would define her for the rest of her life: “My Mother, grant that everyone who looks at me may see you!” (ibid., p. 49). There is implicit in these words a wider message — that all women have the sublime mission in this world of being an “alter Maria,” that how they think, act, speak, and dress ought to be a reflection and witness to the chaste feminine beauty of the Blessed Virgin herself.
The full meaning of the words on Teresita’s Sodality medallion would come when at the age of fifteen she sought and obtained from her confessor Fr. Joaquin Muzquiz, SJ, permission to make a private vow of chastity. Although the teenager kept this a secret, her parents and siblings could not help but notice that there was something different about her. Teresita’s mother was bewildered and a bit disconcerted that although her youngest daughter, a gifted and graceful dancer, continued to be “the life of the party” at social engagements, she was clearly eschewing any attention from the young men who admired her.
Several months earlier, Teresita and her family had attended the movie Song of Bernadette. Commenting on the latter to a friend, she told her, “Don’t miss it, Carmen; it is extraordinary” (ibid., p. 37).
In a letter written in the summer of 1946, Teresita describes as a “revolting experience” what she witnessed when she and several others were taken on a friend’s motorboat to visit a beach in France. What so disgusted her was the sight of bathers in bikinis, observing, “I cannot help but wonder how our Lady feels about such immodest dress” (ibid., p. 61).
Of all her teenage pastimes, Teresita’s favorite was tennis. On sunny days she would spend hours out on the tennis courts, ever perfecting her skills at the game. Her increasing success was putting a championship title within her grasp. Four years of effort were to come to a climax in September of 1946. The day of the final, decisive match for the championship had come, and Mrs. Quevedo was awaiting her sixteen-year-old daughter’s triumphant return from a tournament that the teenager had every expectation of winning.
When Teresita arrived home, she was smiling, but her eyes were glistening with tears. Her four-year quest had ended in a loss. Yet as she calmly explained to her mother, there had been a different sort of victory that day. In the days leading up to the decisive match, a casual tease from a classmate about Teresita getting a swollen ego from the hoped-for championship had cast a deep shadow over her thoughts, prompting her to beseech the Blessed Mother to obtain for her only the outcome that would be pleasing to her divine Son.
When despite Teresita’s best efforts things had turned out badly for her on the tennis court, she returned to the church where she had prayed before the match, intent upon kneeling before the altar of the Blessed Virgin to express her acceptance of what had happened. On the way in she paused to give a little money to a woman beggar on the church steps, and the beggar in turn handed her a holy card.
Teresita headed for the Virgin’s altar without even glancing at the card, but when she reached the altar, the card slipped from her hand and fluttered to the floor. Reaching down to retrieve the holy card, she saw that it bore no picture, but only the words, “Love makes all things easy” (ibid., p. 30). Teresita recognized in this a message from Heaven to her troubled soul. It was by embracing this painful defeat of her temporal dreams that she would find true joy, true peace, and true love.
Two months earlier, Teresita had revealed to her confessor her aspiration to become a nun. She kept this dream to herself for another year and a half, saying nothing about it to her family until she had made preliminary arrangements for admission to the Carmelites of Charity, the religious community that had educated her. With Christmas of 1947 drawing near, Teresita decided to postpone telling her family until the day after Epiphany, lest the news of her imminent departure for the convent cast a pall over their final Christmas together.
On the afternoon of January 7, 1948, Teresita went to her father’s room, where he was resting. After beginning to speak nervously as she gently knelt beside him, she finally told him plainly, “I want to become a Carmelite” (ibid., p. 72). Dr. Quevedo knew his daughter’s heart all too well not to have sensed that this was coming, yet even so, it took an effort for him to master his own feelings and join his Fiat to hers in accepting her calling as the will of God. His wife too wept at the news, yet she also found the courage to say yes.
The day Teresita had chosen to enter the postulancy was February 23, 1948. In her prayers leading up to this occasion, she had addressed to the Blessed Virgin her childlike request that there might be snow on the 23rd.
The weather on the 22nd made the fulfillment of her wish seem impossible, but when she awoke the next morning and went to her window, she saw that Madrid had been transformed overnight by a mantle of white. When in the afternoon Dr. Quevedo drove Teresita and the rest of the family to the convent for her entrance, as their car skidded from time to time on the snowy streets, Teresita’s aggravated aunt expressed her suspicion that this bad weather was to be blamed upon her niece’s prayers. To this Teresita simply answered, “I like snow very much” (ibid., p. 81).
In her notes for Holy Week of 1948, her first in the convent, Teresita speaks of her resolve to keep a perfect silence during the Sacred Triduum, her mind entirely fixed upon the Passion. Addressing our Lord in her journal entry for Holy Thursday, she observes, “I did not speak a word except to You all day,” motivated in this as in all else by the longing to love Him “as much as I have the power to love” (ibid., p. 98).
The End Of The
Earthly Pilgrimage
Teresita’s subsequent life as a religious could be summed up in what she wrote during a retreat at the convent in July of 1948: “No longer do I desire anything for myself…but God alone” (ibid., p. 104). At the conclusion of the retreat, with the permission of both her confessor and her mother superior, Teresita took a vow never to commit a deliberate venial sin again.
Like the childlike young virgin St. Gemma Galgani (1878-1903) with whom her sister Carmen had compared her, Teresita was destined to complete her earthly pilgrimage very quickly. In January of 1950, a severe headache proved to be the harbinger of a diagnosis of tuberculous meningitis. With Teresita not expected to live much longer, she was allowed to make her religious profession on her sickbed. For three months she patiently endured an agony of grievous head pains that climaxed during Holy Week.
Late on the evening of Holy Saturday, April 8, 1950, with her father and the religious community at her bedside, she gently breathed her last. In 1983 Maria Teresa Quevedo was declared venerable by Pope John Paul II.
