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"She carried a picture of the crucified Christ in her pocket. That was her book. Every time she looked at it, she read some new and wonderful lesson." — Traditional account of Blessed Joan
The Woman Who Received the Habit From the Reformer Himself
In 1265, Saint Simon Stock — the English-born Carmelite who is credited with the reform of the Order and with the tradition of the Brown Scapular — passed through Toulouse on his travels. Toulouse in the mid-thirteenth century was still living in the shadow of the Albigensian Crusade, the twenty-year military campaign that had suppressed the Cathar heresy but left the region scarred, the faith of many disrupted, the social fabric of the Languedoc altered forever. Into this city, still healing, the Carmelite monastery founded in 1240 had established a center of prayer and contemplation.
Joan was a noble woman of the kingdom of Navarre, living in Toulouse, whose devotion to Our Lady had drawn her to the Carmelite community. She had heard the Carmelites pray. She had watched the way they lived. She wanted to be near it. When Simon Stock arrived, she asked him to affiliate her with the Order. He agreed. He gave her the habit and received her vow of perpetual chastity, making her — according to Carmelite tradition — the first lay person ever to be received into formal association with the Order of Carmel. She became, in a single meeting, the foundress of what would eventually become the Carmelite Third Order.
She lived as an anchorite: a woman enclosed in a small cell attached to the Carmelite church, enclosed but not entirely cut off, sustained by the liturgical life of the friars and by the conversations about heavenly things she had with the younger members of the community. Her biographers record that she loved especially to speak with the young Carmelite students about God — drawing them upward by the quality of her prayer, the directness of her faith, and a warmth that the sources consistently note. She cared for the sick and the poor as much as her enclosed life permitted. She organized the young men of the town to help her in this work, encouraging some of them to consider the Carmelite vocation.
She carried a picture of the crucified Christ in her pocket wherever she went within the enclosure. When she looked at it, her face lit up. Witnesses said she read something new from the image every time she looked at it — as if the crucified Christ were a text that never finished yielding meaning to someone attentive enough to keep reading.
She died around 1286. Her body was buried at the Carmelite church, and when the church was demolished during the French Revolution in 1805, her remains were found in a wall together with the document of an ecclesiastical examination conducted in 1688 and certain prayers she had customarily recited. The preservation — body and documents together — was treated as a providential sign. Her remains were moved to the metropolitan church of Saint Stephen.
She was beatified for the first time in 1452, the first beatification in Carmelite history, by an authority that scholars debate but whose effect was recognized. Pope Leo XIII reconfirmed her veneration in 1895. In 1472, a fresco in a Carmelite church in Brescia, Italy, depicted her wearing the white veil of a Carmelite tertiary — evidence of how widely her image had spread within the Order in the two centuries after her death.
She is the patron of all those who belong to religious third orders — the millions of lay people who have affiliated themselves with Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, Augustinians, and other orders throughout history. She was the first of them all. What she received from Simon Stock in Toulouse in 1265 she has been passing on, through the tradition of tertiary life, to every lay person who has ever put on a scapular, joined a confraternity, and tried to live the spirit of a religious order from inside the ordinary world.
Prayer to Blessed Joan of Toulouse
O God, who in Blessed Joan gave the world its first daughter of Carmel in the world, and who formed in her a love of Your crucified Son so luminous that she read new wonder from His image every day, grant through her intercession that those who live in the world may be formed by its silence and prayer, and that we may never cease to find new meaning in the mystery of Your love. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Blessed Joan of Toulouse, pray for us.
| Born | c. 1220 — Toulouse or Navarre |
| Died | c. 1286 — Toulouse, France — natural death as anchorite |
| Feast Day | March 31 |
| Order / Vocation | Carmelite Third Order — first Carmelite tertiary; anchorite at the Carmelite church, Toulouse |
| Beatified | 1452 (first Carmelite beatification); confirmed by Pope Leo XIII, 1895 |
| Body | Chapel of Saint Vincent de Paul, Metropolitan Church of Saint Stephen, Toulouse |
| Patron of | Carmelite tertiaries · Lay affiliates of religious orders · Anchorites |
| Known as | Jeanne de Toulouse · Jane of Toulouse · Johanna a Tolosa · First Carmelite Tertiary |
| Their words | (traditional) — "Every time I look at His face in the cross, I read some new and wonderful lesson that I had not read before." |
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