La Beata de Piedrahita - Life

Life

María was born in the village of Aldeanueva de Santa Cruz. According to her contemporaries, this peasant visionary, who was the daughter of devout farmers, spent her childhood doing charitable works and spending long hours in prayer.

Piedrahíta, near Ávila, where the Inquisitor General Torquemada had gone to live in the Dominican monastery, was María's spiritual home. As a young woman, she became a tertiary sister in the same Dominican order in Piedrahita that had fostered the young Torquemada, taking the name María de Santo Domingo. She was what in Spain at that time was termed a beata, that is to say, an unmarried woman who was not a nun, but who quested after holiness by taking vows of chastity and often of poverty. Soon she transferred to Ávila.

María's charismatic personality expressed itself in numerous revelations, in which she held celestial converse with the Virgin Mary and the Savior. She informed her contemporaries that Christ was with her, that she was Christ, and that she was Christ's bride, a concept that offers parallels with her neighbor in Ávila, Saint Teresa of Ávila. For hours she would remain in an ecstatic trance, unmoving, her arms and legs rigidly extended, dissolving herself in the arms of the Deity. Though unlearned she was reputed to be the equal of the most sophisticated theologians, her supernatural lights easily compensating for her lack of schooling. At Ávila, Diego Magdaleno, Provincial of the Dominicans sent her to Toledo to inspect the Orders houses there and initiate ascetic reforms, a move that was still shocking in its inherent impropriety to the Dominican historian Beltrán in 1939.

News of her deeds reached Ferdinand II of Aragon, who summoned her to his court at Burgos, where she stayed during the season of 1507-08, impressing king and courtiers and meeting Cardinal Cisneros. However, she confounded and scandalised many of her contemporaries, who denounced her as a self-seeking fraud and labeled her ecstatic behavior "lascivious". Some theologians, including the new Master General of the Dominicans, Thomas Cajetan, suspected that she was inspired by the devil rather than God, and restricted her access to the friars of Santo Domingo, who were agitating for ascetic reform in the Dominican Order and for whom she was spokesperson; the Duke of Alba, one of whose palaces faced the monastery at Ávila, took a patron's interest in the affair. Serious charges were made regarding her orthodoxy, culminating in four trials between 1508 and 1510.

Three influential patrons, the Duke of Alba, his cousin King Ferdinand and Cardinal Cisneros, recently regent of Castile, convinced the episcopal hierarchy that La Beata enjoyed a special inspiration available to very few; their support was largely responsible for the failure of her critics to bring about her downfall as a heretic. She was absolved of the charges and her life and doctrine pronounced exemplary. La Beata went on to rule as prioress in a convent founded especially for her by the Duke of Alba in her native village in central Castile. Jodi Bilinkoff has demonstrated that her pronouncements and actions helped the establishment consolidate power, endorsed their policies and reinforced their sense of identity.

Her Book of Prayer, stream-of-consciousness utterances that were transcribed by Antonio de la Peña and her apologist Diego Victoria, was printed around 1518. It was thought that all copies had been lost, but a copy was discovered in Zaragoza and a facsimile edition published in Madrid (1948). An English translation appeared in 1992.

The name of alumbrados ("illuminati"), says the orthodox Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1914), was assumed by some 16th-century Spanish "false mystics" who claimed — like La Beata de Piedrahíta — to have a direct connection with God. "They held that the human soul can reach such a degree of perfection that it contemplates even in the present life the essence of God and comprehends the mystery of the Trinity. All external worship, they declared, is superfluous, the reception of the sacraments useless, and sin impossible in this state of complete union with Him Who is Perfection Itself. Carnal desires may be indulged and other sinful actions committed freely without staining the soul." There is no evidence, however, that La Beata shared such views, and the Catholic Encyclopedia cautions that although La Beata de Piedrahíta "is cited among the early adherents of these errors...it is not certain that she was guilty of heresy". Furthermore, many recent scholars, like Álvaro Huerga, question, on chronological and other grounds, the tendency to consider La Beata de Piedrahíta one of the alumbrados, placing her rather among the "pre-alumbrados"

La Beata was not alone. At Toledo, Isabel de la Cruz actively proselytized, and Magdalena de la Cruz, a Poor Clare of Aguilar, near Córdoba, was even more famous. The Inquisition, however, convinced the latter to abjure her heretical errors in 1546. Their ideas found wide responses among Spanish Catholics, though the Inquisition proceeded with relentless energy against all suspects, citing before its tribunal even St. John of Avila and St. Ignatius of Loyola.