“The sovereign Lady
and Doctor of the divine Schools,
from whom all the Angels
draw their wisdom,
for she is the one who shares
most perfectly in God’s intelligence,
ascends to read upon the supreme
Chair of Theology”.[1]
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Introduction
During the two-thousand-year history of the Roman Catholic Church, thirty-eight saints have been recognized as Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis, four of whom are women. All of these women Doctors are from Europe: St. Hildegard of Bingen (Germany), St. Catherine of Siena (Italy), St. Teresa of Ávila (Spain), and St. Thérèse of Lisieux (France). Still, the Catholic Church in the New World has borne equally great fruits. Among its precious jewels are Our Lady of Guadalupe, Santa Rosa de Lima, San Martín de Porres, St. Óscar Romero, and the Cristero martyrs. Additionally, two princes of the Church from the Americas have been elevated to the throne of St. Peter: the late Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Leo XIV.[2] The only precious stone missing from the American Catholic Church’s crown is a Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis.
Doctor of the Universal Church, Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis
The title Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis is given to individuals who exhibit the characteristics of a holy and saintly life and who have significantly contributed to Catholic doctrine, theology, and philosophy through their religious writings. The life and writings of the seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz fulfill both of these prerequisites.
Sor Juana’s Recognition in the Viceregal Period of New Spain
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s literary genius was recognized throughout Spain, as well as in the Spanish Empire, Portugal, and Poland.[3] She was also esteemed by members of New Spain’s viceregal court, including the Viceroy Don Antonio Sebastián de Toledo and Doña Leonor Carreto, who invited her to live in the viceregal palace.[4] Consequently, the newly appointed viceroy and vicereine, Tomás Antonio de la Cerda y Aragón, Marquis of La Laguna, and María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, Countess of Paredes, governed New Spain from 1680 to 1686. María Luisa so admired Sor Juana’s writings that she arranged for two publications of her work in Spain: Inundación castálida (1689) and Segundo volumen de las obras de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1692).[5] In Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: The Classics of Western Spirituality, Pamela Kirk Rappaport comments:
The first two volumes of her collected works published in Spain contain laudatory prefaces from members of nearly all the major religious orders including Jesuits, as well as other clerics in high offices, all in addition to the praise of the censors.[6]
In addition, Doña Catalina de Alfaro Fernández de Córdoba, in Spain, wrote a sonnet in honor of Sor Juana’s saintly wisdom that preceded the final published volume of Sor Juana’s works, Fama y obras póstumas (Fame and Posthumous Works) (1700).[7]
Members of the Church hierarchy also regarded Sor Juana as a theologian and philosopher. Among these admirers were prominent Jesuits in New Spain, including her confessor, the Reverend Antonio Núñez de Miranda, SJ; her biographer, Diego Calleja, SJ; and her good friend Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, the Bishop of Puebla. It was Fernández de Santa Cruz who publicly recognized Sor Juana’s intellectual contribution to the Roman Catholic Church.[8] He encouraged Sor Juana to use her talents and abilities to teach and counsel others, in theological matters.[9] Additionally, upon her death, the Archbishop of Mexico, Francisco de Aguiar y Seixas, granted forty days of indulgences to the religious sisters who engaged in the devotional practice of reciting Sor Juana’s Protesta de la fe.[10] For centuries, this devotional practice continued among female religious orders throughout the Spanish world.[11]
Sor Juana’s Recognition in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
In the twenty-first century, Alejandro Soriano Vallès’s groundbreaking work, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Doncella del Verbo narrates her intellectual genius, her religiosity, and her saintly life by drawing on primary sources. In the twentieth century, Sor Juana’s literary genius was recognized, in Mexico, when the Fondo de Cultura Económica commissioned the esteemed Mexican Catholic priest Alfonso Méndez Plancarte to compile the entirety of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s writings. The result was a four-volume collection published in 1951 entitled Obras Completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.[12] The four volumes are organized thematically: Lírica personal (Volume I), Villancicos y letras sacras (Volume II), Autos y loas (Volume III), and Comedias, sainetes y prosa (Volume IV). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s corpus of writings testifies to her significant contributions to the Catholic intellectual tradition and qualifies her for the title of Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Biography and Text
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was born in the central valley of Mexico on November 12, 1651.[13] She was an autodidact who was passionate about learning, reading, writing, and studying. As a young girl, Juana had a strong “desire to learn to read”.[14] In Sor Juana’s text, La Respuesta, she articulates that her passion for learning was instilled in her by God. She states:
For ever since the light of reason, first dawned in me, my inclination to letters was marked by such passion and vehemence that neither the reprimands of others (for I have received many) nor reflections of my own (there have been more than a few) have sufficed to make me abandon my pursuit of this native impulse that God Himself bestowed on me.[15]
At age six or seven, the young Juana made her debut as a poet when she wrote her first Eucharistic poem to the Blessed Sacrament.[16] A witness to this debut was the vicar, the Reverend Padre Maestro Fr. Francisco, “of the town of Mecameca”.[17] The fact that Juana Inés wrote a poem dedicated to the Blessed Sacrament at such a young and tender age demonstrates her lifelong interest in religious themes, including the mysteries of the Eucharist.
As a lady-in-waiting in the imperial court of Mexico City, Sor Juana met Fr. Antonio Núñez de Miranda, who would become her lifelong spiritual father and mentor. Under his academic and spiritual guidance, Juana Inés mastered Latin in “fewer than twenty lessons”.[18] Additionally, Núñez de Miranda guided her in the discernment process for entering religious life. Sor Juana eventually took vows as a Hieronymite nun at the Convent of San Jerónimo.
In Sor Juana’s more than twenty-five years as a professed religious, she matured and flourished as both a theologian and a philosopher. Sor Juana’s vocation was to apply her intellect in the service of God.[19] She did this service through reading, studying, and writing for the Church she loved. In La Respuesta, Sor Juana states, “. . . I did my best to elevate these studies and direct them to His service, for the goal to which I aspired was the study of Theology”.[20] She continues, “I went on in this way, always directing each step of my studies … toward the summit of Holy Theology ….”[21] For this reason, the Bishop of Puebla chastised her, urging her to cease being a student and to assume the role of a Master of Theology.[22]
Recognition of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as a Philosopher
Sor Juana’s philosophical and theological training was immense in breadth and scope. She was versed in the wisdom of the Church Fathers; the Hebrew and Christian Testaments; Church teachings; Greco-Roman myths; and Nahua beliefs and customs.[23] She was proficient in Latin, the Indigenous language Nahuatl, and “the Spanish dialect of the African slaves”.[24] Sor Juana also drew on her Baroque world to write about poetry, music, mathematics, science, chemistry, astronomy, rhetoric, architecture, and art. Today, Sor Juana is recognized as the last great author of the Spanish Golden Age (El Siglo de Oro).
Just as the Bishop of Puebla recognized Sor Juana as a theologian, the contemporary Mexican philosopher and writer Mauricio Beuchot in his book Significados del pensamiento novohispano, recognizes Sor Juana as a philosopher. Beuchot states:
Throughout her work, Sor Juana had knowledge of various subjects in philosophy and its history. She mentions Plato and Aristotle, as well as other figures from Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As we have mentioned, she [was] familiar with several philosophers of her time, especially [Athanasius] Kircher, whose philosophical hermeticism she had absorbed ….[25]
Clearly, Beuchot acknowledges Sor Juana as a prominent philosopher within the Mexican tradition.
El Primero Sueño (First Dream)
El Primero Sueño is Sor Juana’s most acclaimed philosophical work. In this nine-hundred-seventy-five-line poem, she seeks to understand God and the totality of the universe.[26] Alejandro Soriano Vallès describes “El sueño” as “the greatest poem ever written in the Spanish language”.[27] He states, “Theologically and philosophically, First Dream is a scholastic work of Thomistic character. It belongs, as is logical… to its time and space. The cultural environment of New Spain in the second half of the seventeenth century was that of the Catholic Reform, arising from the Council of Trent”. [28] Sor Juana’s authorship of El Primero Sueño further strengthens her candidacy for the title of Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Theological Treatise, La Respuesta (The Answer)
Sor Juana’s most renowned theological treatise, La Respuesta, was published by her close friend, the respected theologian Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, the Bishop of Puebla, in 1691. His admiration for Sor Juana’s theological treatise, La Respuesta, prompted him to publish it. According to Alejandro Soriano Vallès, Fernández de Santa Cruz’s purpose in publishing the text was to demonstrate to Europe that in the Americas there was a great Novohispana theologian.[29] La Respuesta is one of many contributions Sor Juana made to the Catholic intellectual tradition. In addition, La Respuesta is a semi-biographical work, in which Sor Juana confirms that she is a faithful daughter of the Church: “Thus he would find revenge and I contentment, for I more greatly value, as I ought, the name of Catholic and obedient daughter of my Holy Mother Church than any praise that might befall me as a scholar”.[30] In this statement, Sor Juana affirms her pursuit of a saintly life in accordance with the teachings of the Church: “Que Dios me haga santa”, or, “May God make me a saint”.[31] Both then and now, La Respuesta and El Primero Sueño are both compelling examples of why Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz should be declared a Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis.
Conclusion
During her lifetime, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz contributed to the Catholic intellectual tradition as a theologian and a philosopher through her poetry, Eucharistic dramas, villancicos, and Marian devotional works. As a prolific writer, she was esteemed in Spain, throughout the Spanish Empire, and beyond. As the Bishop of Puebla, contemporary sorjuanistas, such as Alejandro Soriano Vallès, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, Mauricio Beuchot, Francisco de la Maza, Michelle A. González, Pamela Kirk Rappaport, Guillermo Schmidhuber and Olga Martha Peña Doria, concur that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was equally a Doctor of Theology. As the Catholic Church advances further into its third millennium, it would be both fitting and timely for the Archdiocese of Mexico City to open the cause for the canonization of the Servant of God, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In due course, the Supreme Pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, could then solemnly declare the Mexican Hieronymite nun a saint and proclaim her the first American woman to be named Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis.