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 The lively child grew oversensitive and withdrawn.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.
