Marie-Françoise
Thérèse Martin was born on January 2, 1873 in the town of Alençon in
French Normandy. Her parents were Louis Martin, a watch maker, and Zélie
Guerin, both beatified by the Church. Called Thérèse, she was the last
of nine children, five of which survived to adulthood.
Growing up
in a deeply Catholic family, Thérèse’s life was filled with love,
consideration and kindness. A pretty, blond and blue-eyed girl, hers was
a precocious mind, and passionate, willful, sensitive nature, a nature
made yet more sensitive by her mother’s death of breast cancer when
Thérèse was four.
After his wife’s death, M. Martin moved his
family to the town of Lisieux, and rented a charming home, “Les
Buissonnets”, where he raised his five girls in bourgeois comfort.
Thérèse was his “Benjamin” for whom he had a special affection and whom
he called “my little queen”.
For her mothering needs, the little
girl turned to her favorite sister, Pauline, who took the rearing of her
“child” seriously looking after her needs of body, mind and soul.
When
Pauline decided to enter Carmel in 1882, the shock made Thérèse
seriously ill. As the illness progressed, and as her family prepared for
the worst, on May 13, the sick girl appealed to a statue of Our Lady by
her bed. “Suddenly,” Thérèse writes, “Mary’s face radiated kindness and
love…” and she was healed. To the family the statue became “The Virgin
of the Smile”.
On
Christmas Eve in 1886 at the age of fourteen Thérèse received a great
grace. In one moment, she was cured of her hyper-sensitivity, and went
through what she calls “her conversion”. From then on she decided to
live no longer to please herself but for love. She felt her heart burn
with the wish to help Jesus save souls.
Hearing of a murderer,
Henri Pranzini, who had been condemned to death, but remained
unrepentant, she set out to pray and offer small sacrifices for his
conversion, and trusted that God would hear her against all appearances.
She was elated when she read that though refusing a priest to the last,
at the scaffold Pranzini suddenly turned and, snatching a crucifix from
the attending priest’s hands, kissed it repeatedly. Thereafter, Thérèse
always called Pranzini her “first son”– her course was set.
She
entered Carmel at age sixteen, and though only living as a Carmelite
for nine years, she rose to the heights of sanctity through her “little
way” of serving God and others in everyday life, and doing everything,
even the smallest things, with great love and child-like trust in her
God’s paternal love, and mercy. At the request of her sister Pauline
who glimpsed her sanctity, she penned her autobiography, The Story of a Soul.
Struck
with tuberculosis, Thérèse suffered greatly. Knowing she was dying she
promised, “I shall spend my heaven doing good on earth … I shall let
fall a shower of roses”. Thérèse died on September 30, 1897, after a
brief ecstasy. Her last gasping words were, “My God! ... I love Thee!”
She
was canonized by Pius XI in 1925 and devotion to her quickly spread
throughout the world. For her doctrine of “The Little Way” Thérèse was
declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997.
Thursday, October 1, 2020
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
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