Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (2 January 1873 – 30 September 1897), or Saint Thérèse of the Child
Jesus and the Holy Face, born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin, was a French Carmelite nun.
She is also known as "The Little Flower of Jesus".
She felt an early call to religious life, and overcoming various obstacles, in 1888 at the early
age of 15, became a nun and joined two of her older sisters in the cloistered Carmelite
community of Lisieux, Normandy. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 24 promising “When I die, I will send down a shower of roses from the heavens, I will spend my heaven by doing good on earth.”
The impact of The Story of a Soul, a collection of her autobiographical manuscripts,was great, and she rapidly became one of the most popular saints of the twentieth century.
She was beatified in 1923, and canonized in 1925. Thérèse was declared co-patron of the missions with Francis Xavier in 1927, and named co-patron of France with Joan of Arc in 1944. On 19 October 1997 Pope John Paul II declared her the thirty-third Doctor of the Church, the youngest person, and only the third woman, to be so honored.
In the face of her littleness and nothingness, she trusted in God to be her sanctity. She wanted to go to heaven by an entirely new little way. "I wanted to find an elevator that would raise me to Jesus." The elevator, she wrote, would be the arms of Jesus lifting her in all her littleness.
Copyright Abraham 2009
Listen to Louis Lachance's Méditations angéliques. We gratefuly thank him!
