This week Pope Francis is visiting the United States. Often referred to as “The People’s Pope”, one of the things that he is known for is making Christianity accessible to everyone by making it real to each one. Much of Pope Francis’ message is about serving each member of society, and most importantly, the least member – the poor. In some ways, this is a continuation of the goals of the Counter Reformation movement, to bring the individual closer to the Christian ideal. However, it is in stark contrast to some of its finer points including the focus on the individual’s own personal experience. According to our text, in the Counter Reformation movement the Catholic Church took the position where, “Christians were enjoined to use all of their senses to transport themselves emotionally as they imagined the events on which they were meditating. They were to feel the burning fires of hell or the bliss of heaven, the lashing of whips and the flesh-piercing crown of thorns.” (Stokstad p. 713) To exemplify this…show more content… Teresa is a work that was based on and designed to demonstrate the “use [of] all of [her] senses to transport [herself] emotionally as [she] imagined the events on which [she was] meditating.” (Stokstad p. 713) In her case, she was not experiencing the wearing of the crown of thorns, but she did describe her experience in her autobiography The Life of Teresa of Jesus to say “he appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and… to leave me all on fire with a great love of God.” (“Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”) Was this not the goal of the ideology of the Catholic Church during the Counter-Reformation movement – to make Christianity real to the individual through their personal meditations and to have the highest emotional responses to those meditations? If so, St. Teresa and Bernini’s sculpture of this moment taken from her life are truly representative of this goal – both the agony and the