Santa Teresa del Niño Jesús, Virgen y Doctora de la Iglesia

Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin was born at Alençon in Normandy on 2 January 1873, the youngest child of Louis Martin, a watchmaker and jeweler, and Zélie Guérin Martin. Both parents had once desired religious life; the vocation denied them was given to their children. Of the nine born to them, five daughters entered religion—four as Carmelites at Lisieux and one as a Visitandine. Zélie died of cancer in 1877, when Thérèse was only four. The family then moved to Lisieux, where the little girl grew in an atmosphere of deep faith yet also of great emotional sensitivity.

A decisive grace came at Christmas 1886. Freed from childish scruples, Thérèse felt an urgent call to Carmel. Though only fourteen, she sought entry into the Discalced Carmelite monastery of Lisieux, where two of her sisters already lived. When the superior hesitated because of her youth, she went with her father on pilgrimage to Rome in late 1887 and, at a papal audience, begged Leo XIII for permission. The Pope left the decision to the local superiors. At last consent was given, and on 9 April 1888, at the age of fifteen, Thérèse entered the Carmel of Lisieux. She took the name Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face and made her profession in due course.

For the next nine years she lived an ordinary cloistered life of prayer, work, and hidden fidelity. She embroidered, served as assistant novice mistress despite her youth, and above all practiced her "little way": the path of spiritual childhood that consists in doing the smallest duties with great love, trusting completely in God's merciful love, and offering every little sacrifice as a flower to Jesus. On the feast of the Most Holy Trinity, 9 June 1895, she received a special grace to understand more deeply how much Jesus desires to be loved, and she offered herself as a victim of Holocaust to Merciful Love.

In obedience to her superiors she wrote the three manuscripts that form her autobiography, Story of a Soul. In 1896, after a severe Lenten fast, the first signs of tuberculosis appeared; on Good Friday she suffered a hemorrhage. The disease advanced rapidly. In the infirmary she endured not only physical agony but a dark night of faith, temptations against hope, yet she never ceased to affirm love. On the evening of 30 September 1897, gazing at her crucifix, she uttered her last words—"My God, I love you!"—and died at the age of twenty-four. She was buried on 4 October in the municipal cemetery of Lisieux; her remains were later transferred to the Carmel and finally to the great Basilica that bears her name.

Her cause was introduced on 10 June 1914. Declared Venerable in 1921, she was beatified by Pius XI on 29 April 1923 and canonized by the same Pope on 17 May 1925, only twenty-eight years after her death. In 1927 she was named Patroness of the Missions together with Saint Francis Xavier. On 19 October 1997 Pope John Paul II proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church. Her parents, Louis and Zélie, were themselves canonized in 2015.

May Saint Thérèse obtain for us the grace to walk her little way of confident love and to offer God the flowers of our daily sacrifices.