Saints Louis and Zélie Martin (1823-1894 / 1831-1877)

Key dates

Louis Martin, the watchmaker who dreamed of the Grand-Saint-Bernard

Louis Joseph Aloys Stanislas Martin is born on 22 August 1823 in Bordeaux, son of an infantry captain who will end his career in Alençon^[2]. A reserved, contemplative boy, drawn to silence and nature, he feels called to religious life. At about twenty-two, he presents himself at the monastery of the Grand-Saint-Bernard, in the Alps, famous for its hospitaller canons and their rescue dogs. The prior sends him away: Louis knows no Latin, indispensable for choir. He tries to learn it, fails, and gives up his dream of the cloister^[3].

He then trains in watchmaking in Rennes, Strasbourg and Paris, and opens in Alençon a watchmaker-jeweller's shop, rue du Pont-Neuf. A dutiful man, a keen fisherman, a member of the Catholic Circle, he leads an orderly, almost monastic life until the age of thirty-five — so much so that his mother, worried to see him a bachelor, takes matters into her own hands.

Zélie Guérin, the lace-maker refused by the Hôtel-Dieu

Marie-Azélie Guérin, known as Zélie, is born on 23 December 1831 in Gandelain, a hamlet of Saint-Denis-sur-Sarthon, near Alençon. Her father is a former gendarme; the home is austere, and Zélie will keep from her childhood the feeling of having lacked tenderness^[4]. Like Louis, she dreams of giving herself to God and knocks at the door of the Sisters of Charity who run the Hôtel-Dieu of Alençon. The superior makes her understand, bluntly, that such is not her vocation^[5].

Zélie then turns to lace. She learns the famous Point d'Alençon, a needle lace of extreme fineness, and founds around 1853 her own workshop: she designs, assembles, directs up to twenty home workers and builds a prosperous business. She is a woman of remarkable energy, at once a business leader, an ardent believer and an indefatigable worker. Yet she confides to God a simple and insistent desire, which she will repeat all her life:

"I love children to distraction; I was born to have them."^[6]

Meeting on the Saint-Léonard bridge

The story is well known in Alençon. One day in 1858, crossing the Saint-Léonard bridge, Zélie passes a man of noble bearing and recollected gaze: Louis Martin. According to the account she later gave to her daughters, she recognised in it an interior inspiration — this man had been prepared for her^[7]. Their meeting is in fact encouraged by Louis's mother, who follows a lace course with Zélie. They get along at once: two souls who each dreamed of the cloister, and who recognize in each other the same desire for God.

The midnight wedding, 13 July 1858

Three months after meeting, in the night of 12-13 July 1858, at midnight, Louis (34) and Zélie (26) are united in the church of Notre-Dame of Alençon. The Church will later fix their liturgical feast on 12 July, in memory of this wedding^[8].

Ten months of virginal marriage

The beginning of their life together is unusual. Marked by their broken religious vocations, the two spouses first decide to live in perfect continence, as "brother and sister" — a Josephite marriage. It lasts about ten months, until a confessor turns them away from this plan and invites them to embrace fully the mission of Christian spouses: to give life^[9]. In this Zélie will find the great joy of her life. "We lived only for them; they were our whole happiness," she will say of her children^[10]. Their conjugal love thus becomes, not an obstacle to holiness, but its very path.

Nine children in thirteen years

From 1860 to 1873, Zélie gives birth to nine children. Four die in infancy; five daughters will survive, and all five will enter religious life. The Martin family is thus at once a very ordinary family of the provincial bourgeoisie and a home of exceptional spiritual fruitfulness.

Four children's graves

Losing four children — two little boys on whom Zélie had set her hope of a priest son, and two little girls — leaves a mark her letters do not hide. But what strikes the reader is less the pain than the faith with which she passes through it. To her sister-in-law she writes one of the strongest pages of all her correspondence:

"When I closed the eyes of my dear little children and buried them, I felt great pain, but it was always with resignation. I did not regret the trouble and care I had taken for them. Several people said to me: 'It would have been far better never to have had them.' I could not bear such talk. I did not think the troubles and worries could be set against the eternal happiness of my children."^[11]

For Zélie, these dead children are not lost: they are in Heaven, and she firmly counts on their intercession. This hope, passed on in the home, will later form the backdrop of Thérèse's confidence in the mercy of God.

A house of work and prayer

The Martin home lives to the rhythm of a solid and joyful piety: daily Mass, often at dawn; strict observance of Sunday, which Louis refuses to profane by work or trade; fasts and Lent; the family rosary; visits to the poor and the sick. Louis ends up selling his watchmaking business to devote himself to managing Zélie's lace workshop, which has become very prosperous — a sign that, in this couple, work is placed at the service of the family and not the reverse.

Charity there is concrete. Zélie has women workers labouring at home and wants her staff to be loved "like the members of her own family"; the couple aids needy families, tends the sick and defends the oppressed even before the courts^[12]. This everyday charity, lived in the duty of one's state, is the very matter of their holiness.

"Becoming saints": a conjugal project

What sets the Martins apart is not an extraordinary devotion, but the explicit resolve to become saints together, in their state of life. Zélie sets herself this goal bluntly, with her usual realism: to become a saint, with no illusion as to the scale of the effort^[13].

This resolve sums up their whole spirituality: no illusion about the effort holiness costs, but a tenacious will to reach it where God placed them — in marriage, trade, education, sickness. They no longer dream of the lost cloister: they have understood that Heaven is won at home.

The sanctification of work and the duty of one's state

Louis and Zélie sanctify their trade. Zélie, overwhelmed by lace orders, sees in her work a service of God and her family, not a mere source of income; she entrusts her financial worries to Providence, to whom she attributes each unexpected order. Louis refuses profits that would require compromising with morals or working on Sunday. The duty of one's state, accomplished out of love, becomes prayer. This is exactly the lesson Thérèse, decades later, will raise into a doctrine under the name of the little way: doing the smallest things out of love.

Charity and care for the poor

The Martins' faith is inseparable from an active charity. Beyond almsgiving, they commit themselves personally: Louis and Zélie visit the dying, accompany the agonizing, take in tramps. This teaching will mark their daughters: Thérèse will write that fraternal charity, exercised in secret and without splendour, is the summit of the Christian life — a conviction first drawn from Les Buissonnets and the rue du Pont-Neuf.

The education of the five daughters

Education, in the Martins, combines tenderness and high standards. Zélie, a vibrant and slightly anxious mother, does not hide her preference for the youngest — "This little one is the pride of my heart" — but she takes care to form each daughter in truth, work and prayer^[14]. Louis, nicknamed by Thérèse her "king" and calling his youngest his "little queen", is a father of rare gentleness for his time, who takes his daughters fishing, to adoration, on pilgrimage. From this home will come five religious sisters, including a saint and Doctor of the Church: proof, the Church will say, that the first school of holiness is the family.

Breast cancer

In April 1865, Zélie confides to her brother that she has noticed in her breast a lump that worries her, which she herself traces back to a blow received in her youth; yet she long delays having it examined^[15]. In December 1876, the diagnosis falls, without appeal at the time: breast cancer at too advanced a stage for surgery. Zélie is forty-five and has five daughters, one of them barely four. She receives the news with shattering lucidity, organizing the future of her own and continuing to work as long as her strength allows.

The pilgrimage to Lourdes (June 1877)

In June 1877, with three of her daughters, Zélie undertakes a pilgrimage to Lourdes, hoping for a cure^[16]. The journey is gruelling — fatigue, mishaps, icy baths — and the hoped-for cure does not come. Zélie returns exhausted but not revolted: she understands that the Virgin is not granting her bodily health, but the grace to carry her cross to the end. Her faith does not waver; she prepares to die as she lived, in abandonment.

Death, 28 August 1877

The last weeks are atrocious. Zélie receives the last sacraments on 26 August and dies in Alençon on 28 August 1877, at forty-five, surrounded by Louis and her family. Thérèse is not yet five. This bereavement shatters the child, till then cheerful, and makes her timid and hypersensitive — a wound that Story of a Soul will reread as the beginning of her own night. At her mother's coffin, little Thérèse chooses her sister Pauline as her second mama^[17].

The widower of Les Buissonnets, in Lisieux

Widowed at fifty-four with five daughters, Louis makes a decisive choice: to leave Alençon for Lisieux, to bring his children closer to their uncle's family, the pharmacist Isidore Guérin. He settles in November 1877 at Les Buissonnets, a house famous today. Louis leads there a life of prayer and retirement, venerated by his daughters, who call him their "king". He devotes his time to his children's education, to fishing, to long hours of adoration and to pilgrimages — including the diocesan pilgrimage to Rome of November–December 1887 with Thérèse and Céline, for the sacerdotal jubilee of Leo XIII^[18].

The daughters' departures

One by one, his daughters leave him for God, and each departure is for Louis a sacrifice consented to in joy. Pauline enters the Carmel of Lisieux in 1882, Marie in 1886. When Thérèse, at fifteen, tells him in the garden of Les Buissonnets of her desire to enter the Carmel too, Louis, moved, picks a little white flower and gives it to her with its roots, an image of his own life offered to God^[19]. He will accompany her himself to Rome to plead her cause before Leo XIII, then to the threshold of the Carmel in April 1888.

The trial of the Bon-Sauveur

There remain for Louis his own "crucifying graces". Struck by cerebral arteriosclerosis and uraemic attacks, he sinks into confusion, wanderings, memory loss. On 12 February 1889, he is committed to the Bon-Sauveur asylum in Caen, where he will stay three years, among the insane^[20]. For this man of honour, the humiliation is total, and for his Carmelite daughters, the suffering immense. But Louis welcomes it as a purification willed by God: in a moment of lucidity, he is said to have confided to the asylum doctor that he had never known humiliation in his life, and that he needed one^[21].

Thérèse — who received at her clothing on 10 January 1889 the name of Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face — will later read her father's tried face as an image of the Holy Face of the suffering Christ.

Death at La Musse (29 July 1894)

Released from the asylum in May 1892, paralysed and diminished, Louis spends his last months surrounded by Céline's care, at the Château of La Musse, a Guérin property. He dies there on 29 July 1894, at seventy. Shortly after, Céline, the last of his daughters still free, enters the Carmel of Lisieux in her turn: the five Martin daughters are now all consecrated to God, fulfilling their parents' secret vow.

The destiny of the Martin couple continues in that of their daughters. All five consecrate themselves to God, four in the Carmel of Lisieux, one in the Visitation of Caen. This table sums up this wholly given offspring:

The cause of beatification of Léonie Martin, long the "unloved" one of the siblings before finding her path in the Visitation, is now open: the Martin family could thus one day count three figures raised to the altars, after the parents and their youngest daughter.

The opening of the causes

For a long time, devotion concentrated on Thérèse, canonized as early as 1925. But the saint's radiance ended up drawing attention to her parents. The causes of Louis and Zélie, at first separate, are joined into one by Roman decision, so as to show that it is their common conjugal holiness — lived as a pair — that is recognized. On 26 March 1994, Saint John Paul II declares them Venerable^[22].

Beatification (2008): the Milan miracle

Beatification requires a miracle. It occurs in 2002 in Monza, near Milan: Pietro Schiliro, a newborn suffering at birth from grave pulmonary complications judged fatal, is cured at the end of June 2002 after novenas for the intercession of the Martin spouses. Recognized by Benedict XVI on 3 July 2008, this miracle allows the beatification, celebrated in Lisieux on 19 October 2008 — Mission Sunday, in the middle of the Synod on the Word of God — by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, legate of the Pope^[23].

Canonization (2015): the first couple on the altars

A second miracle is recognized: the cure of Carmen, born in Valencia (Spain) on 15 October 2008 after twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy, suffering from multiple complications including a cerebral haemorrhage at the most advanced stage. Entrusted by her parents to the intercession of the Martin spouses from the end of November 2008, she leaves hospital on 2 January 2009 with no neurological or motor after-effects. The diocesan tribunal of Valencia examines the case (January–May 2013) and, on 18 March 2015, Pope Francis authorises the recognition of the miracle. On 18 October 2015, in the middle of the assembly of the Synod on the Family, Pope Francis canonizes Louis and Zélie Martin in Saint Peter's Square^[24]. For the first time in the history of the Church, a married couple is proclaimed saints together, on account not of individual exploits but of their very married and family life. The Pope stresses the meaning of the gesture:

"The holy spouses Louis Martin and Marie-Azélie Guérin practised Christian service in the family, creating day by day an environment of faith and love which nurtured the vocations of their daughters, including Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus."^[25]

A model for families

The canonization of the Martins during the Synod on the Family has been widely read as a gesture addressed to today's families. At a time that doubts the indissolubility of marriage, fruitfulness and the transmission of the faith, the Church points to an ordinary couple as a model of accessible holiness: one can become a saint by marrying, working, raising children, mourning one's dead and bearing illness. Holiness is not reserved for cloisters or martyrs: it is offered to the home.

The legacy of the Martin spouses lies in an intuition their daughter formulated and the Church consecrated: holiness is an ordinary life lived extraordinarily, out of love. Their home was not spared — repeated bereavements, cancer, the ruin of reason — but was crossed by a faith that turned each trial into an offering. From this soil was born Thérèse's little way: trust, abandonment, littleness, love of the smallest things. The saint's doctrine can be read, in a sense, as the setting into words of her parents' experience.

Today, the sanctuary of Alençon (birthplace and Basilica of Notre-Dame) and the sanctuary of Lisieux (Les Buissonnets, the Carmel, the basilica) keep their memory alive. Patrons of couples and families, invoked for struggling homes, the engaged, tried spouses and parents who have lost a child, Louis and Zélie Martin remain the proof that, in the words of the Council, "the call to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity is addressed to all who believe in Christ, whatever their state or form of life"^[26].

• Saint Thérèse of Lisieux — their youngest daughter, Doctor of the Church, the brightest fruit of their home.
• Servant of God Léonie Martin — the fourth daughter, long fragile, whose cause of beatification is open.
• Sanctuary of Lisieux — Les Buissonnets, the Carmel and the basilica.
• Our Lady of Lourdes — the pilgrimage of June 1877, Zélie's last recourse in sickness.
• Saint Teresa of Avila — the great Carmelite whose spirituality nourishes the Carmel of Lisieux.