Thérèse of Lisieux

Thérèse Françoise Marie Martin was born in Alençon on 2 January 1873 to Louis Martin, a jeweler and watchmaker, and Marie-Azélie (Zélie) Guérin, a lacemaker—both deeply believing merchants whom she later called "more worthy of heaven than of earth." She was the youngest of nine children; three died in infancy and a sister, Hélène, in childhood. Five daughters survived and all entered religious life. Soon after birth the frail infant was sent to a wet nurse, Rose Taillé, at Semallé, and returned to the family at fifteen months amid warm affection.

Zélie died of cancer on 28 August 1877, when Thérèse was only four and a half. The lively child grew oversensitive and withdrawn. Three months later Louis moved the family to Lisieux, to the house Les Buissonnets near Zélie's brother Isidore Guérin. Pauline became a second mother to Thérèse; Céline was her closest companion. Louis called his youngest "little Queen of France and of Navarre" and "the little orphan of the Beresina."

Taught at home, then at the Benedictine Abbey school of Notre-Dame du Pré, she excelled yet suffered bullying and homesickness. When Pauline entered the Carmel of Lisieux in October 1882, Thérèse felt abandoned and longed to follow, though she was told she was too young. A serious nervous illness with tremors followed; she later recalled a hard path marked by more thorns than roses. She desired above all "to save souls" and "to pray in aid of priests."

At fifteen she sought entrance to Carmel. Refused at first for her age, she went to Rome and begged Pope Leo XIII himself. "If God wills, you will enter," the Pope answered. With special permission she entered the Carmel of Lisieux in 1888 and joined two elder sisters. At profession she took the name Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face. Another sister, Céline, later entered as well. She served as sacristan and assistant to the novice mistress. At her superior's suggestion she began a diary of her interior life—the work later known as Story of a Soul, first subtitled "Springtime Story of a Little White Flower."

On 9 June 1895, feast of the Most Holy Trinity, she received a grace of understanding more deeply how much Jesus desires to be loved. In an age of positivism and anticlericalism she forged an original spirituality—the "theology of the little way" or spiritual childhood—founding love of God not on great deeds but on ordinary, seemingly insignificant acts. "There is only one thing to do," she wrote: "to throw to Jesus the flowers of little sacrifices." She wished "to teach the little ways that have succeeded with me." Misunderstood by some sisters, she accepted injustices, persecutions, and the pains of tuberculosis, offering everything "for the needs of the Church" and "to throw roses on everyone, just and sinners." In her last eighteen months she endured a night of faith, feeling the absence of Jesus and tormented by doubts, becoming sister to sinners, the distant, atheists, and the despairing.

After nine years of religious life she died of tuberculosis at Lisieux on 30 September 1897, aged twenty-four. Pius XI beatified her in 1923, calling her the star of his pontificate, and canonized her in 1925. John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church in 1997. Popes have pointed to her total openness to the invasion of God's love, even in spiritual night, and the Church has received her as patroness of missionaries. Her message of littleness divinized by grace has spread across languages and beyond Catholic borders.

May Saint Thérèse intercede for us, and let us practice today her little way of confident love in hidden sacrifices.

EUCHARISTIC CELEBRATION IN HONOR OF SAINT THÉRÈSE OF THE CHILD JESUS

BENEDICTUS DEUS

HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS PIUS XI

Sunday, 17 May 1925

Venerable Brethren, beloved Sons.

« Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation » [1], who, amid the many cares of the apostolic office, granted Us this consolation, namely to inscribe first in the register of the Saints that Virgin whom We also first, after the beginning of Our Pontificate, raised to the honor of the Blessed. She is the one who made herself an infant in spirit: of that infancy which cannot be separated from greatness of soul but whose glory, according to the very promises of Jesus Christ, is absolutely worthy of being consecrated in the heavenly Jerusalem and in the Church militant.

Likewise we are grateful to God inasmuch as today We are permitted, as Vicar of His Only-Begotten, to repeat and to inculcate to you all, from this Chair of truth and during these solemn rites, a most salutary admonition of the divine Master. When the disciples asked Him who He considered greater in the kingdom of heaven, He, « calling a child, placed him in their midst » and uttered those memorable words: « Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven » [2].

Thérèse, the new Saint, having vividly absorbed this evangelical doctrine, translated it into the practice of daily life; indeed with her word and example she taught the novices of her monastery this way of spiritual childhood, and all others through her writings: writings which, spread throughout the world, no one reads without wishing to reread them again and again, with the greatest joy of soul and with profit. For this most candid maiden, who blossomed in the enclosed garden of Carmel, having added to her own name that of the Child Jesus, vividly expressed in herself His image; therefore it must be said that whoever venerates Thérèse, venerates and praises the divine example, which she copied in herself.

Today therefore we hope that in the souls of the faithful a certain desire to practice this spiritual childhood may be established, which consists in this: that everything that the child thinks and does by nature, we too may think and do by the exercise of virtue. For as children, unstained by any fault and unhindered by any impulse of passion, rest secure in the possession of their own innocence (and utterly devoid of all deceit and duplicity, they sincerely express their thoughts and act rightly by showing themselves outwardly as they truly are), so Thérèse appeared angelic rather than human by nature, and acquired the simplicity of the child, according to the laws of truth and justice.

Since in the memory of the virgin of Lisieux were well impressed the invitations and promises of the divine Spouse: « Whoever is small, let him come to me » [3]. « You shall be carried upon the hip and dandled upon the knees. As one whom a mother caresses, so I will comfort you » [4], so Thérèse, conscious of her own frailty, entrusted herself confidently to divine Providence so that, relying solely on its help, she might attain the perfect holiness of life, even through the harshest difficulties, having resolved to strive for it with the total and joyful abdication of her own will.

It is therefore not surprising that in the holy nun was fulfilled what Christ said: "Whoever makes himself small like this child, will be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven" [5]. For it pleased the divine benevolence to enrich her with the gift of an almost singular wisdom. Having drawn abundantly the true doctrine of the faith from the instruction of the Catechism, asceticism from the golden book of The Imitation of Christ and mysticism from the volumes of her Father John of the Cross, while also nourishing her mind and her heart in the assiduous reading of the Sacred Scriptures, the Spirit of truth communicated to her and manifested what he is wont to hide "from the wise and the prudent" and to reveal "to the little ones"; for she — according to the testimony of Our Predecessor — was endowed with such knowledge of heavenly things as to point out to others the sure way of salvation. And from this so lavish participation in the divine light and divine grace there blazed forth in Teresa so great a fire of charity that, carrying her continually almost out of her body, it finally consumed her, so much so that, shortly before leaving this life, she could candidly declare that "she had given God nothing but love". It is likewise evident that because of this power of ardent charity, in the young woman of Lisieux there existed the resolve and commitment "to work for the love of Jesus, solely to please him, to console his Most Sacred Heart and to promote the eternal salvation of souls, who would then love Christ forever": that she began to do this and to obtain it as soon as she reached the heavenly homeland is easily understood from that mystical shower of roses, which by divine concession, as she had ingenuously promised while still alive, she has already scattered upon the earth and continues to scatter.

Therefore, Venerable Brothers and beloved Sons, we earnestly desire that all Christians render themselves worthy to participate in this most abundant outpouring of graces, patronized by the little Teresa; but far more earnestly do we desire that they look to her with diligence in order to imitate her, behaving like children, because, if they are not such, according to what Christ says, they will be excluded from the kingdom of heaven. If this way of spiritual childhood is followed by all, all will see how easily that correction of human society can be achieved which we have proposed from the very beginning of Our Pontificate and especially by proclaiming the Great Jubilee.

Therefore we make our own that prayer with which the new saint Teresa of the Child Jesus concluded her precious autobiography: "We beseech you, O good Jesus, to look upon the great number of little souls and to choose for yourself upon earth a legion of victims, who may be worthy of your charity". So be it.

[1] Ep. II ad Cor., I, 3.

[2] Matth., XVIII, 2-3.

[3] Prov., IX, 4.

[4] Is., LXVI, 12-13.

[5] Matth., XVIII, 4.

In the 1950s of the last century, Abbé André Combes, a theologian at the Institut Catholique, the Sorbonne in Paris and the Lateran University, discovered the manipulations that had been carried out in good faith on Thérèse’s Diary by her own sisters, who were inclined to regard her as the little one of the family; the spiritual and theological doctrine of “spiritual childhood” is not limited, however, to a psychologistic and sentimental background consisting only of attention to little things. The heart of her spirituality resides rather in the awareness that man, despite his littleness, ends up being divinized by Grace.

In this Thérèse responds to the “masters of suspicion” such as Feuerbach, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. The man-creature who allows himself to be divinized by the invasion of God’s love is anything but “alienated”. Christology and anthropology thus go hand in hand: Thérèse anticipates by almost a century certain texts of Vatican II, of Paul VI and in particular certain passages of Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate.

Her doctrine and her example of holiness have been received by every class of the faithful of this century with great enthusiasm, even outside the Catholic Church and Christianity.

Many Episcopal Conferences, on the occasion of the Centenary of her death, asked the Pope that she be proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, because of the solidity of her spiritual wisdom, inspired by the Gospel, for the originality of her theological intuitions, in which her eminent doctrine shines forth, for the universality of the reception of her spiritual message, welcomed throughout the world and spread through the translation of her works into some fifty different languages.

Accepting these wishes, the Holy Father John Paul II desired that the appropriateness of declaring Thérèse of Lisieux a Doctor of the Universal Church be studied by the competent Congregation for the Causes of Saints, with the vote of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as regards her eminent doctrine.

On 24 August 1997, at the time of the “Angelus” prayer, in the presence of hundreds of Bishops and before a vast crowd of young people from all over the world gathered in Paris for the XII World Youth Day, John Paul II announced his intention to proclaim Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face a Doctor of the Universal Church on 19 October 1997, on the Sunday on which World Mission Sunday is celebrated.