Thérèse of Lisieux

• 1. Introduction

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  Thérèse of Lisieux spent her adult life inside a Carmelite convent in Normandy, and almost no one outside its walls knew her name. Now the Basilica of Lisieux ranks second among the pilgrimage sites of France, behind only Lourdes. Pope Pius X called her "the greatest saint of modern times". English speakers know her as the "Little Flower of Jesus". In French she is la petite Thérèse, "Little Therese".

  She was born Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin on the 2nd of January 1873. She entered the cloister as a teenager and never held a position of authority. Her fame came from a handful of notebooks, some letters and a few poems. So why did a woman who asked to be unknown become one of the most popular saints in the history of the church? What did she mean by a "little way" to holiness that required no great deeds? And what happened in her last eighteen months, when she is said to have felt that Jesus had gone silent and to have been tormented by doubts that God existed?

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• 2. A Family of Nuns

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  Louis Martin once tried to join the Great St Bernard Hospice and was turned away because he did not know Latin. His future wife, Zélie Guérin, had hoped to nurse the sick. The prioress of the canonesses at the Hôtel-Dieu in Alençon discouraged her outright. Disappointed, Zélie learned lacemaking instead, and at the age of 22 she opened her own lace business on Rue Saint-Blaise.

  Louis and Zélie met in early 1858 and married on the 13th of July that year at the Basilica of Notre-Dame d'Alençon. At first they planned to live together as brother and sister. A confessor talked them out of it, and they went on to have nine children. Between 1867 and 1870 they lost three infants and a five-year-old daughter, Hélène. Louis worked as a jeweler and watchmaker.

  Five daughters survived, and every one became a nun. Marie, Pauline and Céline all entered the Carmel of Lisieux, as Thérèse later did. Léonie joined the Visitation order in Caen. Decades afterward, in 2015, Pope Francis canonized Louis and Zélie together. They are the first married couple the Roman Catholic Church has canonized together.

  Louis gave each daughter a pet name. Marie was his "diamond", Pauline his "noble pearl" and Céline "the bold one". Thérèse, the youngest, was his "little queen", to whom all treasures belonged.

  The little queen nearly did not survive her first winter. Her frail condition sent her to a wet nurse named Rose Taillé, who lived in the wooded bocage country of Semallé. Thérèse came home to Alençon on the 2nd of April 1874, at 15 months old. Her mother wrote to Pauline about the baby calling "Mama!" on every step of the staircase.

  The household ran on prayer. Mass began at 5:30 in the morning, fasts were strictly kept, and the family visited the sick and old. Strangers and wanderers were sometimes welcomed to the table. Thérèse played at being a nun, but she was no angel. Zélie described tantrums so fierce that the child rolled on the floor and almost choked.

  Zélie had felt breast pain since 1865. In December 1876 a doctor told her how serious the tumour was. She travelled to Lourdes in June 1877 hoping for a cure, and none came. She died on the 28th of August 1877, aged 45, when Thérèse was barely four and a half. Thérèse later wrote that her lively, open nature gave way to shyness, and that she cried whenever anyone looked at her.

  Three months later Louis left Alençon for Lisieux, where Zélie's brother Isidore Guérin kept a pharmacy. Isidore lived there with his wife and their two daughters, Jeanne and Marie. Louis leased Les Buissonnets, a house with a large garden on a hillside above the town. Looking back, Thérèse called the years from four and a half to fourteen the most painful of her life. Pauline stepped in as her "Mama", and Céline became her closest companion.

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• 3. Fragile Childhood

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  At eight and a half, Thérèse stopped studying at home and entered the school run by the Benedictine nuns of the Abbey of Notre Dame du Pré. Marie and Pauline had taught her well. She ranked first in her class in everything except writing and arithmetic. Her youth and her marks made her a target for bullies. She wrote that her five school years were the saddest of her life, and that without Céline she could not have lasted a month.

  Céline recalled that Thérèse developed a fondness for hiding and sincerely thought herself inferior. On free days she played with her younger cousin Marie Guérin. The two girls pretended to be anchorites, hermits living apart in prayer.

  Then, in October 1882, Pauline entered the Carmelite convent at Lisieux. Thérèse was nine, and she understood that a cloistered sister would never come back. She remembered thinking, "Pauline is lost to me!" She wanted to follow at once but was told she was too young. The prioress, Mother Marie de Gonzague, wrote to console her around the turn of that year, calling her "my little daughter Therese of the Child Jesus".

  Soon afterward Thérèse began to shake. The tremors started one night after her uncle took her on a walk and spoke about her dead mother. Blankets did not stop them. She clenched her teeth and could not speak. Dr. Notta could make no diagnosis. Dr. Gayral concluded that she reacted to an emotional frustration with a neurotic attack. Pauline, unable to leave the cloister, wrote letters to her.

  The crisis ended on the 13th of May 1883. Thérèse had been moved into Marie's room, and she reported that the statue of the Virgin Mary there had smiled at her. When she described the vision to the Carmelite nuns, their questions shook her confidence. She began to wonder whether she had lied and whether her illness had been deliberate. She wrote of a feeling of profound horror toward herself. Those doubts lingered until November 1887.

  More grief followed in October 1886, when Marie also entered Carmel without waiting for her. Thérèse suffered from scruples as well, a torment of conscience that Alphonsus Liguori and Ignatius Loyola had also known. She said one would have to live through it to understand it, and that she had endured it for a year and a half.

  Christmas Eve of 1886 changed that. The family had gone to Midnight Mass at the cathedral in Lisieux, but spirits were low. Léonie had come home on the 1st of December after only seven weeks with the Poor Clares in Alençon, and her sisters were helping her recover from the humiliation. Back at Les Buissonnets, Thérèse had left her shoes by the hearth, as French children did, for gifts from the Child Jesus. Passing by, she heard her father say, "Well, fortunately, this will be the last year!"

  She began to cry, and Céline advised her to wait before going downstairs. Then Thérèse wiped her eyes, ran down, knelt at the fireplace and opened her gifts with her usual delight. Writing nine years later, she said Jesus had finished in one instant the work she could not do in ten years. She felt charity enter her soul, along with a need to forget herself. She called it her "complete conversion".

  Biographers have read the moment in different ways. The Catholic author Ida Görres, who studied church history, saw it as a victory over her own sensitivity that arrived as pure grace. Kathryn Harrison saw in it both power and danger. Harrison concluded that Thérèse's temperament was not made for moderation, and that her life was "perhaps shortened by the force of her desire and ambition".

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• 4. Road to Carmel

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  On a Sunday afternoon in May 1887, Thérèse found her 63-year-old father in the garden, still recovering from a small stroke. She told him she wanted to enter Carmel before Christmas. Both of them wept. Louis then stood, picked a white flower and explained how carefully God had made it and kept it alive. Thérèse wrote that she seemed to hear her own story, the story of "the little flower and little Thérèse".

  The Father Superior of Carmel still refused, on account of her youth. That summer, French newspapers were full of Henri Pranzini, convicted of murdering two women and a child. To an outraged public he stood for everything threatening decent life in France. In July and August 1887 Thérèse prayed that his soul would be saved, but he showed no remorse. At the end of August the papers reported that, as his neck was placed on the guillotine, he seized a crucifix and kissed it three times. Thérèse was ecstatic and believed her prayers had worked.

  In November 1887 Louis took Céline and Thérèse on a diocesan pilgrimage to Rome for the priestly jubilee of Pope Leo XIII. At a general audience on the 20th of November, Thérèse knelt before the Pope and asked permission to enter Carmel. He answered, "Well, my child, do what the superiors decide… You will enter if it is God's Will". She would not leave his feet, and a member of the Noble Guard carried her out.

  The trip went on to Pompeii, Naples and Assisi, returning by way of Pisa and Genoa. It lasted nearly a month and was the only time she ever left Normandy. It also unsettled her picture of priests. She had known them only in their ministry, and now she overheard their conversations and saw their faults. They were, she concluded, weak and feeble men who needed prayer like anyone else. "I understood my vocation in Italy," she wrote.

  The journey also brought her among young men for the first time. Céline later testified that one of them developed a tender affection for Thérèse. Thérèse admitted to her sister that it was time for Jesus to take her away from the poisonous breath of the world.

  Soon the Bishop of Bayeux authorized the prioress to receive her. On Monday, the 9th of April 1888, Thérèse became a postulant at the Carmel of Lisieux. She was 15 years and 3 months old, and she wrote of a deep, sweet peace.

  The convent had been founded in 1838 by two nuns sent from the Carmel at Poitiers. In 1888 it held 26 nuns from very different backgrounds. Only one room was heated. The rule allowed a single meal a day for seven months of the year. The prioress was Marie de Gonzague, then 54, a woman of changeable humour who guarded her authority jealously.

  Thérèse worked to keep her distance from her blood sisters, who now lived in the same building. She sat beside whichever nun she happened to be near, or beside one who looked downcast. "We must apologize to the others for our being four under one roof", she liked to say. Her spiritual director, the Jesuit Almire Pichon, heard her general confession on the 28th of May 1888 and relieved her scruples. A few months later he left for Canada, and from then on they could only write.

  Some sisters were less kind. Sister St Vincent de Paul, the community's finest embroiderer, mocked the postulant's clumsiness with handiwork and called her "the big nanny goat". The worst blow, though, fell outside the walls. On the 23rd of June 1888, Louis Martin vanished from home. He was found days later in the post office at Le Havre, and his slow decline ended with his death on the 29th of July 1894.

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• 5. Two Names

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  On the 10th of January 1889, Thérèse took the habit. It consisted of rough homespun cloth, a brown scapular, a white wimple and veil, a leather belt with a rosary, woollen stockings and rope sandals. Her father was well enough to attend. Twelve days later he suffered another stroke. He was taken to the Bon Sauveur sanatorium at Caen and remained there for three years, returning to Lisieux in 1892.

  In those years she wrote of practicing little virtues because she lacked the ability to perform great ones. In letters she called herself a grain of sand, an image borrowed from Pauline, and hoped to grow "littler, lighter" so that the breeze of love could lift her. She also read John of the Cross, uncommon reading for so young a nun, and little else fed her at seventeen and eighteen. Fear paralyzed her. "With LOVE not only do I go forward, I fly", she wrote.

  She hoped to make her final vows on or after the 11th of January 1890. Her superiors judged her too young, and the profession was postponed. She spent eight extra months as a novice before professing on the 8th of September 1890, at seventeen and a half. The retreat beforehand was dry and empty. On the eve of the ceremony she panicked, fearing that her vocation was a sham. The novice mistress and Mother Marie de Gonzague reassured her, and the next day brought a flood of peace.

  The public ceremony of taking the veil followed on the 24th of September and was tinged with sadness. Bishop Hugonin and Father Pichon were absent, and her father was confined in an asylum. Mother Marie de Gonzague still wrote to the prioress of Tours that the "angelic child" had the judgment of someone of thirty.

  A Carmelite receives a new name on entering the order, usually with an epithet that points to a mystery she is to contemplate. Thérèse carried two. Mother Marie de Gonzague had promised her the first, "of the Child Jesus", when she was nine, and it was given on her entry. Devotion to the infant Jesus was a Carmelite tradition from the seventeenth century, focused on divine majesty taking the shape of helplessness.

  At the veiling she added "of the Holy Face", a devotion to the disfigured face of Jesus during the Passion. She meditated on Isaiah 53, which speaks of one despised and left out of all human reckoning. Six weeks before her death she told Pauline that those words were the basis of her whole worship of the Holy Face. She, too, wanted to be unknown, without comeliness or beauty.

  The devotion had a short history in France. Sister Marie of St Peter, a Carmelite in Tours, promoted it in 1844, and Leo Dupont founded the Archconfraternity of the Holy Face there in 1851. Thérèse joined it on the 26th of April 1885, and her parents had prayed at Dupont's oratory. The devotion rested on images of the Veil of Veronica. It did not rest on the Shroud of Turin, whose face first appeared on a photographic negative in 1898.

  She wrote a Canticle to the Holy Face in August 1895. On the 6th of August 1896 she composed a Consecration to the Holy Face for herself, Céline and Sister Marie of the Trinity. All three added "and the Holy Face" to their names. Céline received permission to do so on the 14th of November 1916, becoming Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face and of Saint Teresa.

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• 6. The Little Way

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  On the 20th of February 1893, Pauline was elected prioress and became Mother Agnes. She made the former prioress, Marie de Gonzague, novice mistress and named Thérèse as assistant. Most of the actual work of guiding the novices fell to Thérèse. She had a talent for explaining doctrine to nuns with less schooling. To describe the Holy Trinity she used a kaleidoscope, in which three mirrors turn scraps of paper into beautiful patterns. For God's grace she chose a newly invented machine, the elevator, which lifts people to heights they cannot reach alone.

  One novice, Martha of Jesus, had grown up in a series of orphanages and was widely seen as unbalanced, with a violent temper. She testified at the beatification process about Thérèse's unusual attention. Thérèse deliberately sought out the nuns she found hardest to bear. Loving people who came naturally to love, she reasoned, earned no merit. In September 1893, after the standard three years of temporary vows, she asked to remain a novice indefinitely. That meant she would always need permission from the nuns with perpetual vows, and she would never hold an important office.

  In 1894 Joan of Arc was in the news. On the 27th of January, Pope Leo XIII authorized the introduction of her cause for beatification and declared her venerable. Using a history of Joan by Henri-Alexandre Wallon, a gift from her uncle Isidore, Thérèse wrote two plays for the community. The Mission of Joan of Arc was performed on the 21st of January 1894, and Joan of Arc Accomplishes her Mission exactly a year later. Görres called them scarcely veiled self-portraits. At the second performance, the alcohol stoves that represented the stake at Rouen set fire to the screen behind her. Thérèse did not flinch, and fire became a recurring image in her writing.

  By the end of 1894 she was six years into Carmel and felt small and insignificant. Her cousin-in-faith could not help, but Céline could. Céline had brought notebooks of Old Testament passages, which Thérèse lacked because the authorized Louvain Bible for French Catholics left out the Old Testament. In them she found Proverbs 9:4, "Whosoever is a little one, let him come to me", and Isaiah's promise that God would carry his people at the breast. Her weakness became a reason for joy.

  She did not give this discovery a name until Manuscript C of her autobiography. There she wrote of finding a lift to raise her to God, since she was too tiny to climb the stairway of perfection. Jesus's arms would be that lift. "To get there I need not grow," she wrote. "On the contrary, I must remain little." Great deeds were forbidden her, so she would scatter flowers, meaning every small sacrifice, glance and word.

  The phrase had a stranger history. Thérèse wrote "little way" only three times and never wrote "spiritual childhood". Her sister Pauline adopted the longer phrase after Thérèse died. In May 1897 Thérèse told Father Adolphe Roulland that her way was entirely one of trust and love. When learned treatises wore her out, she wrote, she closed the book and opened Scripture instead.

  On the 9th of June 1895, during Mass for the feast of the Holy Trinity, she felt a sudden urge to offer herself as a victim to merciful love. Some nuns then offered themselves to God's justice. Two days later she and Céline knelt before the miraculous Virgin, and Thérèse read aloud her Act of Oblation. In it she said she would come before God with empty hands, asking him not to count her works.

  Her prayers reached far beyond Lisieux. In October 1895 a seminarian of the White Fathers, Maurice Bellière, asked Carmel for a nun who would support his future mission by prayer and sacrifice. Mother Agnes chose Thérèse. They never met, but ten letters passed between them. A year later Roulland, a priest of the Paris Foreign Missions Society bound for Sichuan in West China, made the same request. Görres noted that Thérèse felt herself the teacher in both cases, instructing the priests in her little way.

  She also prayed for Hyacinthe Loyson, a former Carmelite who had left the Catholic Church in 1870. He married a Protestant widow two years later and was excommunicated, and clerical papers called him a renegade. Thérèse called him "our brother, a son of the Blessed Virgin". She offered her last communion, on the 19th of August 1897, for him.

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• 7. The Last Months

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  On the eve of Good Friday in 1896, after a strict Lenten fast, Thérèse put her head on the pillow and felt something like a bubbling stream rise to her lips. By morning her handkerchief was soaked in blood. She knew that coughing blood meant tuberculosis, and tuberculosis meant death. She wrote that she was filled with consolation, convinced that Jesus was calling her on the anniversary of his own death.

  The disease advanced slowly. A Carmelite mission in what was then French Indochina invited her to join them, but her sickness made travel impossible. As the illness worsened, even her doctor exclaimed that no one could know what the young nun was suffering. She said she would never have believed it possible to suffer so much. In July 1897 she made her last move, to the monastery infirmary.

  Her sisters recorded her final conversations. She told them, "I only love simplicity. I have a horror of pretence." She also warned against claims in the saints' biographies of her day, insisting they should not say improbable things or things they did not know. Real lives, not imagined ones, were what mattered.

  Thérèse died on the 30th of September 1897, aged 24. Reports give two last sayings. One is that she had reached the point of no longer being able to suffer, because all suffering had become sweet to her. The other, her last words, was "My God, I love you!"

  She was buried on the 4th of October 1897 in the Carmelite plot of the municipal cemetery at Lisieux, where her parents already lay. In September 1910 her body was exhumed, placed in a lead coffin and moved to another tomb. In March 1923, before her beatification, it was returned to the Carmel of Lisieux, where it remains. The figure visitors see in the glass coffin is a reclining statue, modelled on drawings and photographs by Céline. Inside it are Thérèse's ribcage and other remains.

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• 8. A Book Goes Out

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  The book that made Thérèse famous began as three separate manuscripts, later published as Story of a Soul, or Histoire d'une âme. The first, from 1895, recalled her childhood. Mother Agnes ordered it written after prompting from their eldest sister, Marie. The second was a three-page letter from September 1896, written at Marie's request when she saw how ill Thérèse was and wanted her "little doctrine" on paper. The third came in June 1897, when Mother Agnes asked Marie de Gonzague, then prioress, to let Thérèse write more about her religious life. The ostensible purpose was to help with an expected obituary.

  On her deathbed Thérèse spoke of the book's future benefit to souls. She authorized Pauline to make whatever changes were needed. Pauline made more than seven thousand revisions and presented the result as a biography of her sister. Marie de Gonzague had also ordered her to alter the first two sections so they seemed addressed to Marie as well. Since 1973, centenary editions have restored the original manuscripts, along with her letters, poems, prayers and plays. The American publisher ICS Publications has issued the writings in English, translated mainly by John Clarke.

  The book went out as the customary circular that informs other Carmels of a nun's death. Copies were lent and passed around, and it reached a far wider public than anyone intended. A year after her death it was printed and distributed to an initially small audience. Her poem To Live by Love, written from memory on the 26th of February 1895 without a rough draft, circulated too. Céline's paintings and photographs gave readers a face to match the words. Pope Pius XI later called Thérèse the "star of his pontificate".

  On the 10th of June 1914, Pius X signed the decree opening her cause for canonization. Pope Benedict XV, to hasten the process, waived the usual fifty-year wait between death and beatification. He declared her venerable on the 14th of August 1921. She was beatified on the 29th of April 1923 and canonized by Pius XI on the 17th of May 1925. That was five years and a day after Joan of Arc.

  The celebration in Rome "far outshone" Joan's. For the occasion Pius XI revived the old custom of covering St. Peter's with torches and tallow lamps. Ropes and lamps came out of storerooms after 55 years, and a few old workmen who remembered the work of 1870 directed 300 men for two weeks. The New York Times put the story on its front page under the headline "All Rome Admires St. Peter's Aglow for a New Saint". It estimated that over 60,000 people filled the basilica, and in the evening 500,000 pilgrims crowded into the lit square.

  Her feast day entered the General Roman Calendar in 1927, set for the 3rd of October. In 1969 Pope Paul VI moved it to the 1st of October, the day after the anniversary of her death. She is patron saint of aviators, florists, the sick and missions. Pius XI also named her a patron of Russian Catholics, and in 1927 made her co-patroness of the missions alongside Francis Xavier. In 1944 Pius XII made her co-patroness of France with Joan of Arc.

  A writer for The New York Times, Barbara Stewart, once called her "the Emily Dickinson of Roman Catholic sainthood". The honors did not stop. In 1997, Pope John Paul II named the cloistered novice a Doctor of the Church, a title given to saints whose teaching has shaped the church.

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