Sancta Teresia a Iesu Infante, Virgo — A Life, for her feast on the third day of October — III classis
Circumduxit eam, et docuit, et custodivit quasi pupillam oculi sui. Sicut aquila expandit alas suas, assumpsit eam, atque portavit in humeris suis. Dominus solus dux eius fuit. “He led her about, and taught her: and He kept her as the apple of His eye. As the eagle spreadeth her wings, He hath taken her and carried her on His shoulders. The Lord alone was her leader.” — Communion antiphon of the Mass, from Deuteronomy 32:10-12
I. The house at Alençon
She was born on the second day of January, 1873, in the rue Saint-Blaise at Alençon in Normandy, and baptized two days later in the church of Notre-Dame as Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin. She was the ninth and last child of Louis Martin, a watchmaker and jeweller, and Zélie Guérin, a maker of the celebrated point d’Alençon lace. Four of the nine had died in infancy or early childhood; five daughters lived, and all five became nuns.
The parents are worth a moment, because the daughter is unintelligible without them. Each had, in youth, sought the religious life and been turned away — he from the Great St. Bernard, she from the Daughters of Charity — and each had accepted the refusal as the will of God. Their household was ordered by the liturgical year, by daily Mass at half past five, by the observance of fasts and Sundays at a cost to the business, and by a tenderness that their surviving letters still make vivid. Thérèse would later say that God had given her a father and mother more worthy of heaven than of earth.
She was, by her own account and her mother’s letters, a strong-willed, quick, and passionate child, given to tantrums and to an absolute candour. When offered a basket of trinkets by an elder sister, she took the whole basket, saying “I choose all” — and she later read the episode as the motto of her whole spiritual life: she would not be a saint by halves.
II. Lisieux, and the smile of the Virgin
On the twenty-eighth of August, 1877, when Thérèse was four and a half, her mother died of cancer. The child, she wrote afterward, lost her gaiety in that hour, and it did not return for nine years. Louis Martin sold the business and moved his daughters to Lisieux, to a house called Les Buissonnets, to be near Zélie’s brother, the pharmacist Isidore Guérin. Thérèse chose her sister Pauline as her “second mother.”
In October of 1882 Pauline entered the Carmel of Lisieux, and the loss broke something in the child. Within months she fell into a strange and violent illness — fevers, tremors, hallucinations, states of terror — which the physicians could not name. On Pentecost Sunday, the thirteenth of May, 1883, as her sisters prayed at her bedside before a statue of Our Lady of Victories, she saw the statue become living and beautiful, and the Virgin smile upon her. She was cured at once.
She made her First Communion on the eighth of May, 1884, and described it, characteristically, not as a meeting but as a fusion: Jesus and the little Thérèse were no longer two. And then, for a year and a half, she was tormented by scruples so severe that she could scarcely go to confession without tears.
III. The grace of Christmas night
The release came, as she was always careful to say, not by effort but by a grace. On Christmas night, 1886, returning from Midnight Mass, she heard her father — tired, and not knowing she could hear — remark of the shoes set out by the fire for her presents, “Well, fortunately this will be the last year.” A month before, such a word would have left her in tears for an hour. Instead she went down, opened her presents with every appearance of joy, and found that the over-sensitive child had died. She called it her “complete conversion”: in an instant, she said, Jesus did what she had been unable to do in ten years, and charity entered her heart.
The fruit appeared at once. In the summer of 1887 the papers were full of Henri Pranzini, condemned for a triple murder and refusing every approach of the chaplain. Thérèse, fourteen, set herself to obtain his conversion, had a Mass said for him, and asked God for a single sign. On the morning after his execution on the thirty-first of August she read in La Croix that at the foot of the scaffold he had turned, seized the priest’s crucifix, and kissed the wounds three times. She called him her first child.
IV. Rome, and the hands of the Pope
She had resolved to enter Carmel at fifteen. Her father consented; the superior of the Carmel, Canon Delatroëtte, refused; the Bishop of Bayeux, Mgr Hugonin, deferred. And so, in November of 1887, she went with her father and her sister Céline on the diocesan pilgrimage to Rome, determined to ask the Holy Father himself.
On the twentieth of November, at the papal audience, the pilgrims were forbidden to speak to Leo XIII. Thérèse knelt, took his hands, and asked to enter Carmel at fifteen. The Pope answered that she should do as her superiors decided; she pressed him; and he said, “Go — go — you will enter if God wills it.” The Noble Guard lifted her away. She wept, and wrote that she had become the little ball of the Child Jesus, which He might pierce, throw, or leave in a corner as He pleased.
The permission came at the end of December. She entered the Carmel of Lisieux on the ninth of April, 1888. She was fifteen years and three months old.
V. The enclosure
The Carmel she entered was poor, cold, and under the government of Mother Marie de Gonzague, a prioress of real gifts and real instability, who resolved to treat the youngest postulant without indulgence. Thérèse later thanked God for it. She was corrected constantly, sent out to weed the garden as a reproach for idleness, and given no consolations in prayer: she slept, she confessed, through much of her thanksgiving after Communion, and consoled herself that little children please their parents as much asleep as awake.
She received the habit on the tenth of January, 1889. A month later her father, his mind failing after a series of strokes, was taken to the asylum of the Bon Sauveur at Caen, where he remained for three years. It was the great humiliation of the family, and Thérèse met it by deepening the second half of her religious name, which she had already taken: Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face. The veiled and disfigured Face of the Passion, the Face that Isaias says was despised, and the most abject of men (Is. 53:3), became her chosen contemplation; she saw her father’s face in it.
She made her profession on the eighth of September, 1890, the Nativity of Our Lady. Louis Martin died on the twenty-ninth of July, 1894; in September Céline, who had nursed him, entered the same Carmel. Four Martin sisters were now under one roof, and Pauline, as Mother Agnes of Jesus, had been elected prioress in 1893. Thérèse, without the title, was given charge of the novices.
VI. The little way
It was in these years, under the pressure of guiding others, that she found the thing for which the Church remembers her.
She had always wanted to be a saint, and had always felt, when she compared herself with the great saints, the distance between a mountain lost in the clouds and an obscure grain of sand. She would not lower the desire. She asked instead whether there was a short way up — a lift, like the new elevators in rich men’s houses, that would spare the little ones the stair of perfection. And she sought it in Scripture. She found first the word of Wisdom: Si quis est parvulus, veniat ad me — “Whosoever is a little one, let him come to me” (Prov. 9:4). And then, wanting to know what God would do with the little one who came, she found the very passage the Church reads as the Epistle of her Mass:
“You shall be carried at the breasts, and upon the knees they shall caress you. As one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you.” (Is. 66:12-13)
The elevator, she concluded, was the arms of Jesus. She had no need to grow up; she had rather to remain little, and become ever more so.
This is the little way — the way of spiritual childhood — and it is easily sentimentalized by those who have not read her. It is not the cultivation of a childish manner, and it is not the abandonment of effort. It is the Gospel of her Mass taken with absolute seriousness: Nisi conversi fueritis, et efficiamini sicut parvuli, non intrabitis in regnum cælorum (Matt. 18:3). St. Jerome, commenting on that verse, already insisted that the Lord commands not the age of children but their innocence, so that we may have by virtue what they have by nature; Thérèse supplied the interior content. The little one, in her account, knows her own poverty and is not discouraged by it; expects everything from her Father and nothing from her own merits; does not hoard her good works as a capital to be presented at the end; and offers the smallest acts — a smile to a sister she found disagreeable, the bearing of a splashing of dirty water in the laundry, the refusal to excuse herself when wrongly blamed — not as small things but as love, which is never small.
On Trinity Sunday, the ninth of June, 1895, she made her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love, offering herself not, as some souls of her time did, as a victim to the Divine Justice, but as a victim of holocaust to the Merciful Love of God, asking that the floods of infinite tenderness held back in His Heart might be poured into her soul. The distinction was deliberate and is the key to her theology: she believed that God’s mercy, more than His justice, was the attribute least received by men.
In the same year, by obedience to Mother Agnes, she began to write the memories of her childhood. In 1895 and 1896 she was given, by the two prioresses in turn, two missionary priests as spiritual brothers — the seminarian Maurice Bellière, and Father Adolphe Roulland of the Paris Foreign Missions, bound for China — and her letters to them are among the most robust things she wrote. She who never left her enclosure would be named the patroness of the missions.
VII. Sedere ad mensam peccatorum
In the night between Holy Thursday and Good Friday of 1896 she coughed blood for the first time, and received it as the first summons of the Bridegroom. A few days later, in the joy of Easter, the light went out.
From Paschaltide of 1896 to her death eighteen months later, Thérèse lived in what she called a night — a trial against faith itself, in which the thought of heaven, which had been her whole joy, became an object of torment, and a voice within her mocked: advance, advance; rejoice at the death that will give you, not what you hope for, but a night deeper still, the night of nothingness. She told almost no one. She went on writing poems about heaven and wrote that she sang what she wished to believe. She said that she had made more acts of faith in that year than in all her life before.
And she understood the trial as a vocation. In the third of her manuscripts, written in the last summer of her life, she accepted it as a share in the darkness of unbelievers: she consented, she wrote, to sit at the table of sinners and to eat the bread of sorrow with them, asking only that all those not enlightened by the torch of faith might at last see it shine. The child who had begged for Pranzini’s conversion now took her seat among those for whom she prayed.
It was in this same season, in September of 1896, that she wrote for her sister Marie the pages in which she found her vocation. She had wanted to be every vocation at once — warrior, priest, apostle, doctor, martyr — and found in St. Paul (1 Cor. 12-13) that the Church is a body with members, and that the body must have a heart, and that the heart burns with love. In the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be Love; thus I shall be everything. She imagined herself as a little bird, unable to fly to the Sun, content to fix her gaze upon it, waiting for the Divine Eagle to come and carry her up — the image, unknown to her, that the Church would place in the Communion of her Mass.
There was one further humiliation, and honesty requires that it be named. In 1896 the Carmel, like much of Catholic France, had been taken in by the “Memoirs” of one Diana Vaughan, a supposed convert from Masonic devil-worship — a fabrication of the journalist Léo Taxil. Thérèse wrote a recreational play in her honour and the community sent “Diana” a photograph of Thérèse in costume as Joan of Arc. On the nineteenth of April, 1897, Taxil announced to a hall in Paris that Diana Vaughan had never existed and that the whole affair had been a hoax upon the credulity of the clergy; the photograph was shown to the room. Thérèse tore up the letter she had received from “Diana” and threw it on the dung-heap. She did not defend herself.
VIII. Mon Dieu, je vous aime
She was moved to the infirmary on the eighth of July, 1897. Her sisters, chiefly Mother Agnes, took down her words in the last months, and they are among the strongest testimonies to her that we have, because they show her not composing but suffering. To one who asked what she would do in heaven she answered, on the seventeenth of July, that she would spend her heaven doing good upon earth. She said that she would let fall a shower of roses. She also said, when the pain was at its height, that she would never have believed it possible to suffer so much, and that she did not regret having given herself up to Love.
She died at about twenty past seven on the evening of Thursday, the thirtieth of September, 1897, after a long agony. Her last words, looking at her crucifix, were “Oh! I love Him… My God, I love You!” She was twenty-four years old, and had been nine years in Carmel. She was buried in the town cemetery of Lisieux on the fourth of October.
IX. The shower of roses
On the first anniversary of her death, in 1898, the Carmel printed two thousand copies of her writings under the title Histoire d’une âme, to be sent to other Carmels in place of the customary obituary circular. Within a few years it had passed into dozens of languages and millions of copies, and letters reporting graces and cures arrived at Lisieux by the hundred, then the thousand, a day.
The text the world first read was Mother Agnes’s: she had arranged the three manuscripts, written to three different recipients, into a single narrative addressed to herself as prioress, and had corrected and polished the style with a freedom that would not be permitted today. The original manuscripts were published in facsimile in 1956, and the critical editions since have given us Thérèse’s own words. The restoration did not diminish her; it showed her rougher, braver, and more theologically exact than the edited saint.
The processes moved with a speed without precedent in the modern Church. Pius XI, who called her the star of his pontificate, beatified her on the twenty-ninth of April, 1923, and canonized her on the seventeenth of May, 1925. On the fourteenth of December, 1927, he named her, together with St. Francis Xavier, principal patroness of all the missions of the world; and in 1944 Pius XII named her secondary patroness of France with St. Joan of Arc. Her body rests in the chapel of the Carmel of Lisieux, and the basilica built in her honour on the hill above the town was consecrated in 1954.
Her feast was extended to the universal Church and fixed on the third of October, where the 1962 Missal keeps it with the Mass Veni de Libano; the reformed calendar moves it to the first of October, the day after her dies natalis. In 1997, the centenary of her death, she was declared a Doctor of the Church.
X. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That spiritual childhood is a doctrine, not a mood. The Gospel of her Mass is the Gospel of St. Joseph Calasanctius’s: Who thinkest thou is the greater? He answered it by receiving the little ones; she answered it by becoming one. Her littleness is not the absence of strength but the refusal to rely on it — the precise opposite of the pride that St. Augustine calls the obstacle to every grace. A soul that knows itself poor and expects everything of God is not diminished by its weakness; it is opened by it.
That love gives value to the smallest act, and nothing else does. She did no great works. She founded nothing, preached nothing, governed nothing, and was known outside her enclosure to almost no one. She is a patroness of the missions because she understood that the heart of the Church is love, and that every act made in love, however hidden, is made in the heart.
That faith is proved in the dark. The saint who wrote most sweetly of heaven spent her last eighteen months unable to feel that it existed, and chose to believe it anyway, and to sit at the table of those who did not. Whoever has supposed that her way is easy, or for the comfortable, has not read to the end.
Practice
Examine. Where am I still trying to present God with a capital of good works — to be thought, by Him or by others, a soul of some consequence? Where am I discouraged by my own weakness, as though it were a surprise to Him?
Do. Each day this week, one hidden act of charity toward the person you find most difficult: a kindness unmentioned, an unjust correction borne without explanation, a smile where you would rather withdraw. Tell no one.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Domine, qui dixisti: Nisi efficiamini sicut parvuli, non intrabitis in regnum cælorum: da nobis, quaesumus; ita sanctæ Teresiæ Virginis in humilitate et simplicitate cordis vestigia sectari, ut præmia consequamur æterna.
“O Lord, who hast said: Unless ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven: grant us, we beseech Thee, so to follow in humility and simplicity of heart the footsteps of the holy Virgin Teresa, that we may attain to the everlasting reward.”
Devote. The Joyful Mysteries, dwelling on the Nativity, where the Eternal Word made Himself the little one; or, for those in darkness of faith, the Agony in the Garden, and her own short act: My God, I love You.
If you wish to go deeper: the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up the little way as a method of prayer and of daily examen, alongside the Act of Oblation to Merciful Love. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the Carmelite line from which she came — St. Teresa of Avila, whose name she bore (15 October), and St. John of the Cross, whose night she entered. The Theology and Doctrine path treats humility and the theological virtues, and why she placed mercy before justice in the order of what souls most need to receive.
Sancta Teresia a Iesu Infante, patrona missionum, ora pro nobis.
Principal sources: the critical edition of her writings, Œuvres complètes (Cerf / Desclée de Brouwer), comprising Manuscripts A, B and C, the Letters, Poems, Recreations, Prayers, and the Last Conversations (Derniers Entretiens); the Archives of the Carmel of Lisieux; Butler’s Lives of the Saints; and the apostolic letters of Pius XI on her beatification, canonization, and missionary patronage.