On December 14 the Church honors St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), the Carmelite reformer and Doctor of the Church who, with St. Teresa of Ávila, reformed the Carmelite Order and produced the greatest mystical poetry in the Spanish language. Born Juan de Yepes on June 24, 1542, at Fontiveros in Castile, he joined the Carmelites and met Teresa in 1567, becoming the first friar of the Discalced reform. His strict reforms provoked such opposition from the unreformed friars that in 1577 he was imprisoned in a windowless cell at Toledo for nine months — beaten, starved, and made to wear the penitential garment of the order — until he escaped through a window in August 1578.
It was in the prison cell, or in the months after his escape, that he composed the Spiritual Canticle and began the Dark Night of the Soul — the great poem of the soul's ascent to God through the stripping of all desire. "To come to that which you know not," he wrote, "you must go by a way that you know not." He died on December 14, 1591, at Úbeda in Andalusia, and was canonized in 1726. In 1926 Pius XI declared him a Doctor of the Church — the "Mystical Doctor." His body was secretly exhumed and taken to Segovia in 1593; a papal Brief of October 1596 ordered it returned to Úbeda, and the Discalced Carmelite superiors settled the dispute with a compromise that left Segovia the head and torso and Úbeda the remaining relics. He is patron of Spanish poets and of contemplative life. The Spanish site of Fontiveros does not yet have a guide in this directory.
