Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897)

Key dates

A family marked by mourning

Thérèse was born on 2 January 1873 at Alençon, the last of the nine children of Louis Martin, a watchmaker, and Zélie Guérin, a lacemaker who ran a renowned Alençon lace workshop^[2]. Four of the children (two boys and two girls) had already died in early childhood; five daughters would survive, and all would enter religion. The Martin home was intensely devout: daily Mass, fasting, almsgiving, spiritual reading. This couple would be canonized together by Pope Francis on 18 October 2015^[3].

On 28 August 1877, Zélie dies of breast cancer, aged forty-five. Thérèse is not yet five. The shock marks the child deeply — until then cheerful and outgoing: she becomes shy, oversensitive, quick to tears. In her autobiography, she clearly distinguishes two periods of her early childhood:

"Every family celebration was concentrated in that one [...]. On the first day of January 1877, I was four years old. During the years that followed Mama's death, those were the saddest of the four years I had to spend."^[4]

After their mother's death, Louis Martin leaves Alençon and settles the family at Lisieux, at Les Buissonnets, near his pharmacist brother-in-law. His eldest daughter Marie and the second, Pauline, take charge of the younger children's upbringing; Thérèse, her father's "little queen", chooses Pauline as her "second mother"^[5].

The "Virgin of the Smile" (1883)

In the spring of 1883, just as Pauline has entered Carmel (a fresh separation experienced as a second bereavement), Thérèse falls seriously ill: trembling, hallucinations, fits the doctors cannot explain. On 13 May 1883, Whit Sunday, her sisters pray before a statue of the Virgin placed in her room. Thérèse then sees the statue smile at her and is instantly cured^[6]. She would keep all her life the conviction that this cure was a Marian grace, and the Carmel still keeps today this statue known as the "Virgin of the Smile"^[7].

The 1886 "Christmas grace": conversion

The decisive turning point comes on Christmas night 1886. Thérèse, then almost fourteen, is still captive to a childish touchiness that makes her cry over nothing. Returning from Midnight Mass, her father lets slip an irritated remark about the shoes she expected to find by the fireplace. Instead of bursting into tears, Thérèse pulls herself together in an instant. She calls this moment her conversion:

"On that night of light began the third period of my life, the most beautiful of all, the most filled with the graces of Heaven... [...] Jesus drew me out of the swaddling clothes of childhood."^[8]

This "Christmas grace" is, in her own eyes, the founding event: the end of oversensitivity and the start of a life turned toward souls. A few months later, gazing at a picture of the Crucified, she is seized with the desire to stand at the foot of the Cross to gather the Blood of Christ and carry it to sinners^[9].

The journey to Rome and the plea to Leo XIII (1887)

Thérèse wants to enter the Carmel of Lisieux, where her sisters Pauline and Marie already are, but her youth (fifteen years old) stands in the way. In November 1887, during a diocesan pilgrimage to Rome organized for the sacerdotal jubilee of Leo XIII, she seizes her chance. On 20 November 1887, received in pontifical audience, she defies the ban on speaking and addresses the Pope directly:

"Most Holy Father, in honour of your jubilee, allow me to enter Carmel at fifteen!"^[10]

Leo XIII answers cautiously: "You shall enter if God wills it." It takes the intervention of the Bishop of Bayeux for her at last to obtain permission. Thérèse enters the Carmel of Lisieux on 9 April 1888, at fifteen years and three months^[11].

An ordinary, hidden religious life

At Carmel, nothing extraordinary on the surface. Thérèse receives the habit on 10 January 1889 and pronounces her vows on 8 September 1890, taking the name of Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. She lives the common life: prayer, choir, work in the linen room and painting, observance of the rule. She knows neither spectacular visions, nor ecstasies, nor stigmata. Her holiness is played out in daily life: bearing without a word an unpleasant sister, doing good unnoticed, performing the humblest acts with love^[12].

The trial of her father's illness

The great cross of these years is the illness of Louis Martin. Struck by cerebral arteriosclerosis, he sinks into mental disorder and is committed in 1889 to the Bon-Sauveur asylum at Caen. For Thérèse, who venerated her father, this public humiliation is a deep wound, which she rereads as sharing in the mystery of the Holy Face, the disfigured countenance of Christ in the Passion. Louis Martin dies on 29 July 1894^[13]. Soon after, his last daughter, Céline, in turn enters the Carmel of Lisieux, joining her three sisters.

Sister Thérèse, mistress of novices

Despite her young age, Thérèse is effectively placed in charge of the formation of the novices from 1893. It is in this office that she refines her spiritual pedagogy: no grand abstract principles, but concrete attention to each soul, a gentle firmness, and the conviction that love is worth more than fear^[14]. Her prioress, Mother Marie de Gonzague, and her sister Pauline, now Mother Agnes of Jesus, will play a decisive role: it is in obedience to them that she will write the manuscripts from which her book will be born.

The heart of Thérèse's contribution is not a story but a spiritual doctrine: the little way, the way of spiritual childhood. It springs from a lucid observation and an insight.

The insight: one cannot be a great saint, but one can be a little one

Thérèse ardently desires holiness, yet knows herself incapable of the great austerities of the saints she admires. Rather than be discouraged, she seeks a path suited to her littleness. The image she finds is a strikingly modern one for her time, the elevator:

"We are living in an age of inventions, and nowadays there is no longer any need to climb the steps of a staircase; in the homes of the rich, an elevator replaces them very well. I too would like to find an elevator to lift me up to Jesus, for I am too little to climb the rough stairway of perfection."^[15]

The elevator is the arms of Jesus. To be carried in them, one must not grow tall, but on the contrary stay little:

"The elevator that must lift me to Heaven is Your arms, O Jesus! For that I have no need to grow tall; on the contrary, I must stay little, and become littler still."^[16]

The little way is therefore not a cut-price way. It is the radical working-out of the Gospel word: "Unless you become like little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven" (Mt 18:3). It overturns a logic of merit and heroic effort in favour of a logic of filial trust.

Trust and abandonment

The mainspring of the little way is trust: a trust that goes as far as boldness. Thérèse does not deny her faults and imperfections: she hands them over to God as a child hands everything over to its father. Far from troubling her, her weakness becomes the very ground of her hope, for it draws down mercy^[17]. This doctrine of abandonment and trust belongs to the great spiritual tradition of the French School and of Saint John of the Cross, whom she read deeply, but it gives it a new accent: holiness is offered to little souls, not reserved to heroes.

"My vocation is love"

In September 1896, during a retreat, Thérèse seeks her place in the Church. Reading Saint Paul (1 Cor 12-13), she understands that every charism (apostles, prophets, doctors, martyrs) is vain without charity, and that love is the heart that gives life to the whole Body. She then discovers her own vocation, which she puts into words in a page that has become famous (Manuscript B):

"I understood that Love embraces every vocation, that Love is everything, that it enfolds all times and all places... in a word, that it is Eternal! Then, in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love... my vocation, at last I have found it, my vocation is love!"^[18]

"In the Heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be Love... thus I shall be all things... thus my dream shall come true!"^[19]

This insight (that love is the vocation containing all others) is the summit of her doctrine and the deep reason for her title of Doctor of the Church.

From justice to mercy

On 9 June 1895, the feast of the Holy Trinity, Thérèse performs a decisive spiritual act: she offers herself as a victim of holocaust to the Merciful Love of God. At a time when some souls offered themselves as victims to divine Justice to appease its anger, Thérèse reverses the movement: it is God's Love which, despised and rejected by so many souls, needs to pour itself out:

"O my God! Will Your Love, despised, remain then within Your Heart? It seems to me that if You were to find souls offering themselves as victims of holocaust to Your Love, You would consume them swiftly; it seems to me You would be glad not to hold back the waves of infinite tenderness within You."^[20]

"It is my very weakness that gives me the boldness to offer myself as victim to Your Love, O Jesus... the law of fear has been succeeded by the law of Love, and Love has chosen me for holocaust, me, a weak and imperfect creature."^[21]

The meaning of the offering

Contrary to a superficial reading, this offering is not a request for suffering: it is a request to be flooded with the love of God and to let it act unhindered. It expresses the most total trust in mercy, to the point that Thérèse makes it the centre of gravity of her whole spirituality. This "little doctrine" of Merciful Love heralds, in its own way, the great devotion to Divine Mercy which Saint Faustina would spread a generation later.

The "land of darkness"

In the night from Holy Thursday to Good Friday, 2 to 3 April 1896, Thérèse has her first haemoptysis: a spitting of blood announcing tuberculosis. She first sees in it a joyful sign of approaching death and of Heaven. But it is at the same moment that a terrible inner trial begins: she loses all felt consolation, and the very thought of Heaven, once so sweet to her, grows dim. She enters what she calls a "thick fog", the "land of darkness", a true night of faith that will last until her death^[22].

This trial has a prophetic dimension: Thérèse passes through, in advance and in solidarity, the night of the unbelievers of the modern age. She does not lose faith; she sets against the darkness acts of pure faith, without any felt sweetness:

"One must have travelled through this dark tunnel to understand its darkness."^[23]

In the final weeks, the trial took a turn toward oppression which her sisters noted with dread: in the night of 15 to 16 August 1897, then on the 25th, Thérèse confided that she felt the devil around her ("I do not see him, but I feel him [...] He holds me with a hand of iron") while continuing to make, without any felt sweetness, acts of faith^[24].

The table of sinners

Most striking is the attitude she adopts: instead of fleeing this night, she accepts it out of love for unbelievers, whom she calls her brothers. She places herself spiritually at their table (the table of those who do not see God) and accepts to eat there "the bread of sorrow" for as long as God wills:

"Lord, Your child has understood Your divine light; she asks pardon for her brothers, she accepts to eat, for as long as You will it, the bread of sorrow, and does not wish to rise from this table filled with bitterness where poor sinners eat, before the day You have marked."^[25]

This solidarity with atheists in the night of faith is one of the most modern and profound traits of her holiness: she turns her trial into a missionary prayer for those who no longer believe.

Illness and death

The tuberculosis progresses. In the spring of 1897, Thérèse grows ever weaker; moved to the infirmary on 8 July, she endures considerable physical suffering, with no effective painkillers, while keeping an admirable peace. Her sisters gather her words, which will form the Last Conversations. She dies on 30 September 1897, at about twenty past seven in the evening, her gaze fixed on her crucifix. Her last words were: "My God... I love You!"^[26]

The universal influence of Thérèse rests almost entirely on her writings, composed in obedience and published after her death.

The three autobiographical manuscripts

Thérèse's autobiography is not a book conceived in one piece, but the assembling of three distinct manuscripts, written for different addressees:

• Manuscript A (January 1895 – January 1896): the story of her life, written in obedience to her sister Pauline, Mother Agnes of Jesus^[27].
• Manuscript B (September 1896): the page on the discovery of her vocation ("my vocation is love"), written for her sister Marie of the Sacred Heart.
• Manuscript C (June 1897): the "little way", fraternal charity and the night of faith, written for the prioress Mother Marie de Gonzague, a few months before her death.

These three texts, written in different settings, together form the spiritual document that would make her famous.

Story of a Soul (1898)

After Thérèse's death, Mother Agnes reworked and combined the three manuscripts into a single book, published on 30 September 1898 under the title Story of a Soul, printed in two thousand copies and at first intended for the Carmels^[28]. The success was shattering and unforeseen: reprint upon reprint, translations, worldwide diffusion. Readers recognized in this simple voice an accessible holiness. The book prompted a flood of testimonies of graces and healings attributed to the young Carmelite's intercession: the beginning of the "shower of roses".

Modern editions restore the complete, unreworked text of the three manuscripts, from the critical edition of the Complete Works (Cerf–Desclée de Brouwer, 1992), which clearly distinguishes manuscripts A, B and C.

Poems, letters and last conversations

Thérèse's work is not reducible to her autobiography. She left fifty-four poems, Pious Recreations (little plays composed for the community), prayers, and an abundant correspondence. To these are added the Last Conversations: the words gathered by her sisters during the final months, notably in Mother Agnes's Yellow Notebook. There are found some of her most famous sayings about her posthumous mission.

Her correspondence also preserves her last letter to Maurice Bellière, seminarian and Thérèse's first spiritual brother: in it she contemplates the Child Jesus in the host that the priest holds in his hands, and sums up her trust in a sentence often quoted as her eucharistic testament: "I cannot fear a God who has made himself so little for me… I love him! for he is nothing but Love and Mercy" (LT 266)^[29].

The promise of the "shower of roses"

In the final months, Thérèse expresses an astonishing certainty: her death will not be an end, but the start of a mission. She announces that she will go on acting from Heaven:

"I feel above all that my mission is about to begin, my mission of making God loved as I love Him, of giving my little way to souls. [...] I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth."^[30]

And when one of her sisters tells her of the sorrow of losing her, she answers with the image that will become her emblem:

"You will see, it will be like a shower of roses."^[31]

History would prove her right: from the very first years, countless favours and healings are attributed to her intercession, to the point that this "shower of roses" becomes a decisive argument in her cause.

A missionary who never left her cloister

Thérèse had an ardent desire for the missions: she corresponded with two missionary priests as "spiritual brothers", and had even considered leaving for the Carmel of Hanoi. Illness prevented it. But her prayer and her offering for missionaries made her, paradoxically, one of the great missionary figures of the Church, to the point of becoming their patroness. Her logic is that of the vocation to love: it is the loving heart, not outward activity, that makes fruitful the apostolate of the whole Church.

Beatification (1923) and canonization (1925)

Her reputation for holiness is so swift and so vast that the process opens very early. Thérèse is beatified on 29 April 1923 by Pius XI, who hails her as one of the greatest saints of modern times. Two years later, on 17 May 1925, before an immense crowd in Saint Peter's Basilica, the same Pope canonizes her. According to the testimony taken up by Saint John Paul II in Divini Amoris Scientia, Pius XI regarded Thérèse as the Star of his pontificate^[32]. Only twenty-eight years separate her death from her canonization: an exceptional swiftness.

Patroness of the Missions (1927) and of France (1944)

On 14 December 1927, Pius XI proclaims Thérèse universal Patroness of the Missions, on a par with Saint Francis Xavier, all the more striking a distinction as she had never left her convent. Then, on 3 May 1944, Pius XII declares her secondary patroness of France, alongside Saint Joan of Arc, whom she admired to the point of devoting one of her Pious Recreations to her^[33].

Doctor of the Church (1997)

On 19 October 1997, for the centenary of her death, Saint John Paul II proclaims Thérèse a Doctor of the Church by the apostolic letter Divini Amoris Scientia ("the science of divine love"). She is the third woman to receive this title, after Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Catherine of Siena, and the youngest of the Doctors. The Pope stresses that her doctrine, despite its apparent simplicity, reaches the heart of the Gospel: according to the letter, Thérèse not only perceived the central place of love at the heart of the Church, but lived it in her brief existence^[34].

This title seals a paradoxical truth: a young woman with no theological training, dead at twenty-four, is recognized as a teacher of doctrine for the universal Church. She now stands among the Doctors of the Church.

A family of saints

Thérèse's radiance ended by enlightening her whole family. Her parents, Louis and Zélie Martin, were beatified in 2008 then canonized together on 18 October 2015 by Pope Francis, the first couple canonized jointly for their conjugal and educational virtues^[35]. Her sister Léonie, long fragile and three times turned away from convents before becoming a Visitandine, is today a Servant of God, her cause for beatification being open. The Les Buissonnets house, the Carmel of Lisieux and the great basilica raised in her honour make the town the second pilgrimage site of France after Lourdes, a heritage detailed in the article devoted to the Shrine of Lisieux.

A worldwide spiritual influence

Since 1994, her relics have travelled the world: dozens of countries have welcomed them, drawing everywhere immense crowds. Her little way has marked twentieth-century spirituality and inspired figures as diverse as Saint Teresa of Calcutta (who took her name in homage to her) or major theologians such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, who devoted a study to her. Far from being a sentimental devotion, Thérèsean "spiritual childhood" is recognized as one of the surest and most demanding ways of Christian holiness: handing everything over to God, expecting everything from His love, and making the smallest things, done out of love, the road to Heaven.

• Shrine of Lisieux: the basilica, the Carmel, Les Buissonnets and the worldwide journey of the relics.
• Saints Louis and Zélie Martin: Thérèse's parents, the first couple canonized together.
• Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Catherine of Siena: the two other women Doctors of the Church.
• Saint Francis Xavier: co-patron of the missions with Thérèse.
• Growing in abandonment to God and Growing in trust: two keys to the Thérèsean little way.
• The Doctors of the Church through history: the list and the meaning of this title.