Juana Adelaida O’Sullivan and Rouley was born in New York, United States, on October 8, 1817 to a Catholic father and Anglican mother, being baptized in the Anglican Church. At a young age the girl decided to become a Catholic. At the death of her father, both her brother and her mother wanted her to return to the Anglican Church, but Juan Adelaida was already anchored in Catholicism and remained in it. In 1840 she entered the monastery of the Visitation of Georgetown. In her life as a Visitation nun she discovered the writings of St. Teresa of Jesus and in her interior she made the decision to be her daughter. With the help of her confessor she was able to fulfill her desire and after some difficult and unforeseen ways, she arrived in Guatemala City on September 8, 1843, where she entered the monastery of Discalced Carmelites receiving the name of Maria Adelaida de Santa Teresa. In 1868 she was elected Prioress of the Community and as such had to face the expulsion of her community by the liberal reforms in 1871. Realizing the impossibility of re-inhabiting her monastery, she undertook, with a group of sisters, an itinerary that took her to Cuba, the United States and finally to Spain, reorganizing the Carmelite-Teresian life in Grajal de Campos (León) in 1882 and passing away there on April 15, 1893.
