Despite his name, St. John Avila (Spanish San Juan de Ávila) was not from Ávila and doesn’t seem even to have visited the place. His last name is a family name: his father was Alfonso de Ávila. And both of John’s parents, like many Spanish Catholics, were of Jewish descent.
After being ordained a priest in 1525 at Alcalá, he gave the fortune inherited from his parents to charity. Although he had prepared for missionary work to North America, he was persuaded instead to dedicate himself to a mission closer to home – the southern lands of Spain, which had recently been liberated from hundreds of years of Muslim domination.
He was an immensely popular preacher and is known as the Apostle of Andalusia. He did, however, spend a year of that time in jail due to some trouble with the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition investigated his fervent denunciation of wealth and of vice and his encouragement of rigorism; even a spurious connection between his Jewish heritage and charges of heresy was considered. John was found innocent of all charges, and not only was he allowed to continue preaching, but he found in that time of sorrow and hardship the basis for the deep spirituality which can be found in his works and which so inspired his followers. He also began writing his most famous work, Audi, filia (Listen, daughter), a treatise on Christian perfection addressed to the nun Doña Sancha Carillo, during his imprisonment.
He was called a “Master,” and was a spiritual guide for such saints as Teresa of Ávila, Ignatius of Loyola, Peter of Alcantara and John of Ribera. The saints John of God and Francis Borgia owed their conversion to him and turned to him constantly for spiritual direction. John co-organized the University of Granada; outstanding among the other colleges he founded was that of Baeza. He helped foster in Spain the Society of Jesus, to which he was devoted. He died before he could carry out his plan to become a Jesuit.
John was invited by his bishop to attend the Council of Trent as his theological adviser. John’s poor health prevented him from going, but he wrote memoranda which were influential in some of the council’s decisions regarding reform of the clergy.
Saint Pope Paul VI, who called him a model for modern priests suffering from an identity crisis, canonized Saint John of Ávila in 1970, and he was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 appropriately at the opening of the synod on “The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith,”— the first diocesan priest to hold such a distinction. Pope Pius XII had declared him the patron of Spanish secular priests.
https://slmedia.org/blog/telling-them-apart-so-many-johns-part-1-two-from-avila
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-John-of-Avila
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