June 4, 2023 - Saint Therese of Lisieux

Today we are discussing St. Thérèse of Lisieux, chronologically the last of the thirty-seven men and women who have been named Doctors of the Church.  She was born on January 2, 1873, the last daughter of Louis and Zélie Martin, exemplary parents who were canonized together by Pope Francis on October 18, 2015.   Louis and Zélie had nine children, four of whom died as babies or small children.  The five daughters who remained all became religious.  Four of them became Discalced Carmelites and one became a Visitandine.
 
Zélie was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after Thérèse was born, and, unfortunately, succumbed to cancer when Thérèse was four.  After Zélie died, Louis moved with his daughters to Lisieux, where Thérèse would live for the rest of her life.  Later, Thérèse was afflicted by a serious nervous disorder which was cured by what he called “a smile from Our Lady.” Thérèse then received her First Communion, which was an intense religious experience for her.  Subsequently, she made Jesus in the Eucharist the center of her life.
 
At Christmas in 1886 Thérèse experienced a great grace through which she recovered completely from her childhood hypersensitivity.  The next year Thérèse became even closer to the crucified Christ.  She learned about an impenitent criminal who had been sentenced to death. “I wanted at all costs to prevent him from going to hell,” Thérèse later wrote.  She was convinced that her prayers would put him in contact with the redeeming Blood of Christ.  This was her first and fundamental experience of spiritual motherhood. “I had such great trust in the Infinite Mercy of Jesus,” she wrote.
 
In November 1887, Thérèse, her sister Céline, and her father went on a pilgrimage to Rome. The climactic moment of the pilgrimage occurred when the pilgrims had an audience with Pope Leo XIII.  At the audience Thérèse disregarded instructions that the pilgrims were not to speak to the Holy Father.  After kissing his foot, she took him by complete surprise when she requested his permission to allow her to enter the Carmelites at the age of fifteen.  When he said that things would turn out for the best if she only waited, Thérèse remained insistent.  Finally, she had to be carried away by papal guards.  Finally on April 9, 1888, Thérèse was accepted into the Lisieux Carmel as a postulant. In January of 1889 she became a novice and finally on September 8, 1890, she became a fully professed member of the community, taking the name Sister Thérèse of the Infant Jesus and the Holy Face. 
 
In 1894, her beloved father died after a trying illness and her biological sister Pauline, now Mother Agnes, ordered her to write down the memories of her childhood.  This was the beginning of the manuscript that would grow into the Story of a Soul. The work consists of three different manuscripts. The eight chapters of Manuscript A were written between December 1894 and January 1896, at the command of Mother Agnes.  Manuscript B (chapter 9) on the vocation of love was written in September of 1896 and addressed to Jesus.  Finally, Manuscript C (chapters 10-11), addressed to Mother Marie de Gonzague, was written in June of 1897 and describes her final days and the “Dark Night” experience that had begun on April 5 of the previous year and was to continue until her death. 
 
In this trial, Thérèse’s sense of God’s presence vanished, and she lived in the midst of a darkness in which all the joy of belief had vanished.  These final chapters of the Story of a Soul constitute the core of Thérèse’s message.
 
After Thérése died in October 1897, the nuns at the Lisieux Carmel were faced with a dilemma.  It was customary for them to send an obituary notice to the other monasteries when one of the nuns died.  What would they say about Thérèse?  As far as they were concerned, she was the typical Carmelite nun.  Sadly, she had died at a young age, but there was nothing all that notable about her, as far as they were concerned.  They decided to send a copy of the Story of a Soul which Mother Agnes heavily edited to conform to the standards of nineteenth-century piety.  As Thérèse became better known, interest in studying her work increased.  The unexpurgated texts revealed in her a far deeper and stronger figure, one whose dark night of the soul was similar to that of John of the Cross and other great mystics. 
 
In 1925 Thérèse was canonized—only twenty-eight years after her death.  Pope Pius XI named her the Patroness of the Missions in 1939.  In 1997 Pope St. John Paul II named her a Doctor of the Church.  Let me close this column with this maxim of St. Thérèse, “Holiness consists simply in doing God’s will, and being just what God wants us to be.”
 
Until next week,
Fr. John