Who was St. John of the Cross?
Juan de Yepes was born on June 24, 1542, in Fontiveros, a village near Ávila in Old Castile; the Catholic Encyclopedia spells it Hontoveros. His father, Gonzalo, came from a family of some standing in Toledo and was disinherited for marrying Catalina, a poor silk weaver. He died when Juan was small. Benedict XVI, in a 2011 audience, summed up the childhood in one word: poor. His mother moved the family to Medina del Campo, where Juan worked in the hospital and studied with the Jesuits. In 1563 he entered the Carmelites at Medina and took the name John of St. Matthias. He was ordained in 1567 after studies at Salamanca.
That year he met Teresa of Jesus, who was in Medina founding a convent. He was about to leave for the stricter Carthusians. She talked him out of it and asked him to help her bring the same reform to the friars. On November 28, 1568, in a small house at Duruelo, the first community of Discalced Carmelite friars began; the Encyclopedia and the order give that date, Benedict XVI gives December 28. It was then that he became John of the Cross.
The reform made enemies inside his own order. On the night of December 3, 1577, friars of the older observance seized him and took him to Toledo, where he was held for more than nine months. Franciscan Media describes the cell as dark, damp and narrow; Benedict calls the imprisonment "the most traumatic episode" of his life, with "physical and moral deprivations and constrictions." In that cell he composed the Spiritual Canticle. On the night of August 16 to 17, 1578, he escaped and found shelter with the Discalced nuns of the city.
The years after were full of offices in the order, ending in a seat in its government at Segovia. Then, near the end, he opposed the centralizing policies of the new superior and was stripped of every office and sent to a remote house. He fell ill and was moved to Úbeda, where the prior at first treated him harshly. The Encyclopedia says this fulfilled his own prayer, "to suffer and to be despised." He died in the night of December 13 to 14, 1591, while the friars were reciting Matins; Benedict XVI records his words, "Today I am going to sing the Office in Heaven." Benedict places his death in "a secluded convent near Jaén," the province in which Úbeda lies; the Encyclopedia and the Discalced Carmelites name Úbeda. His body was moved to Segovia in 1593. Clement X beatified him on January 25, 1675, Benedict XIII canonized him on December 27, 1726, and Pius XI declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1926.
Why Catholics pray to St. John of the Cross in darkness and fear
He is the saint of the dark night because he named it. The phrase comes from his poem and the commentary on it, The Dark Night, which Benedict XVI describes as the "passive" side of purification, "God's intervention in this process of the soul's purification," in which "the soul is subjected to every kind of trial, as if it were in a dark night." The Ascent of Mount Carmel covers the active side, and The Living Flame of Love the union at the end.
Two things about this matter for a person who cannot feel God, or who is afraid all the time. First, John wrote it from inside. The Canticle is not a treatise by a comfortable scholar. It was composed in a cell by a man his own brothers had locked up, and Franciscan Media puts the result in one line: "In the darkness of the dungeon, John's spirit came into the Light." Second, he insists the dark is not abandonment. In his account the night is the time God is working hardest, rooting out what the person could never reach alone. Benedict says the same of the cross itself: the journey with Christ "is not an additional burden in our life" but "a light, a power that helps us to bear it."
A caution John himself would want stated: the dark night is a stage of prayer, not a diagnosis. Depression and anxiety are illnesses, and the Church does not ask anyone to decide alone whether what they feel is God's purification or a condition that needs treatment. Often it is both, and a doctor and a confessor each have a part. What a Catholic asks John for is his steadiness: to keep praying with nothing to show for it, to stop measuring God by feelings, and to trust that the night has a morning he could not see either.
How to pray to St. John of the Cross
Pray to him any day. His memorial is December 14, so the nine days before it, December 5 to 13, fall inside Advent, the Church's own season of waiting in the dark. His tomb is at Segovia. If you can, read him: the poem The Dark Night is short.
Say the prayer below once, then say nothing for a while. Go to Mass and receive Communion even when it feels like nothing; that is exactly when it matters. Go to Confession and let the priest hear the dryness and the fear. If you can, find a spiritual director, because John's whole work was written for people who had one. If the darkness comes with sleeplessness, panic, loss of appetite, or thoughts of death, see a doctor; his night and a clinical depression can look alike from inside, and only one of them is treated by waiting. If you are thinking of ending your life, call emergency services or, in the United States, 988.
He asked to suffer and to be despised, and got both, and died while his brothers sang. But the Office he went to sing is still being sung, and the dark he wrote about still ends the same way.