Feast day: October 1
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
French Carmelite who died at 24 having never left her convent — yet her 'little way' of small things done with great love made her a Doctor of the Church and patroness of missions.
Thérèse Martin was born in 1873 at Alençon in France, the youngest of the five surviving daughters of Louis and Zélie Martin, themselves now saints. Her mother died when she was four, and the sensitive, much-loved child was raised by her father and older sisters. She felt early and intensely a call to give herself entirely to God, and longed to enter the Carmelite convent at Lisieux where two of her sisters had gone before her.
So determined was she that, on a pilgrimage to Rome at fifteen, she dared to break protocol and beg the pope himself for permission to enter early. She was admitted at fifteen and lived just nine hidden years behind the convent walls, never doing anything the world would call great — no missions, no founding of orders, only the ordinary round of prayer, chores, and community life, often amid dryness and small daily irritations.
In that ordinariness she discovered what she called her 'little way': the path of spiritual childhood, of doing the smallest things with the greatest love and trusting God as a little child trusts a father, rather than striving after heroic feats. Ordered by her superior to write down her memories, she produced the 'Story of a Soul,' which after her death spread around the world and made her one of the most loved saints of modern times.
She died of tuberculosis in 1897 at only twenty-four, promising to spend her heaven doing good on earth and to 'let fall a shower of roses.' Canonized in 1925, named a patron of the missions though she never left her cloister, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997, the 'Little Flower' taught the whole Church that holiness is within the reach of the smallest and most hidden life.
She never went on a single mission trip, yet is co-patron of all missionaries — because her hidden prayers and letters carried them.
“My vocation is love.”
— St. Thérèse of Lisieux
Image: Céline Martin (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/17721a.htm
Get a story like this every Sunday.