The Life of St. Therese of Lisieux

Patroness of Catholic Missions

Surrounded by Love

arie Francoise Therese Martin, known affectionately as the Little Flower, was born on the night of January 2, 1873, in Alencon, a small town in the north of France.   She was the ninth child, born after the death of two infant sons, the parents wished to have a missionary son.  Instead she was one of five girls, four of whom entered religious life.  Three entered the Carmelites and one entered the Poor Clares.  Her father Louis Martin was a watchmaker by trade.  In his youth he believed he had a vocation to the monastic life, but when he was 35, he married a young woman of Alencon, Zelie Marie Guerin.  She was a lacemaker and she, too, had sought to enter religious life.  They had nine children.  Two boys and two girls died in infancy, and they were left with five daughters.  Her mother passed away from breast cancer when Therese was only five years old.  Soon after her mother’s death, the family moved to Lisieux, France.

At eight years old, Therese became a day student at the Benedictine Abbey school in Lisieux.  Until then she had lived in the sheltered life of her family with her sister Pauline assuming the role of Therese’s second mother.  The boarding school was a traumatic experience for her. She suffered self-doubts about her ability to fit in, to do things well, and to be accepted; but Therese outshone her classmates in intelligence and academic performance.

With the entrance of Pauline in the convent at Carmel, Therese suffered a second maternal loss, which threw her into a distressful state of insomnia, nervous trembling and hallucinations.  Therese made her First Communion at the same time of Pauline’s profession at Carmel.  A few months later, Marie and Leonie, her older sisters, entered religious life: Marie at Carmel with Pauline, and Leonie with the Poor Clares.

The Mystery of God’s Call

he tells in her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, this key experience at 14 years of age.  “One Sunday when I was looking at a picture of Our Lord on the Cross, I saw the Blood coming from one of His hands, and I felt terribly sad to think that It was falling to the earth and that no one was rushing forward to catch It.  I determined to stay continually at the foot of the Cross and receive It.  I knew that I should then have to spread It among other souls.  The cry of Jesus on the Cross ‘I am thirsty’ rang continually in my heart and set me burning with a new, intense longing.  I wanted to quench the thirst of my Well-Beloved and I myself was consumed with a thirst for souls.  I was concerned not with the souls of priests, but with those of great sinners which I wanted to snatch from the flames of hell.”

And on Christmas morning of 1886, Therese received the power to overcome all her fears.  Therese had just returned home from midnight Mass with her father and Celine.  Not knowing that Therese could overhear his words, her father impatiently commented to Celine about Therese’s childish behavior as she opened her Christmas presents: “Well, thank goodness it’s the last year this is going to happen!”  It was at that moment that Therese rediscovered the strength of soul and the joy of living.  In May of 1887 she asked her father’s permission to enter the Carmelite convent at Lisieux.

Therese may have been known as the “Little Flower” but she was said to have a will of steel.  When she was refused entrance into the Carmelites due to her young age, she went to the bishop.  When the bishop said no, she decided to go over his head as well.

In order to get her mind off the rejection, her father took her to Rome on a pilgrimage.  There they went for an audience with the Pope.  They were forbidden to speak to him, but that did not stop Therese.  As the papal audience proceeded, Therese, ignoring all protocol, directly voiced her request to the pope, she begged that he let her enter the Carmelite convent.  He told her to follow the directives of her superiors, but reassured her, “All’s well; if God wants you to enter, you will.”  Then guards lead Therese out of the audience chamber.

Life at Carmel

er request was granted in December of that year.  She entered the convent in April 1888, at the age of 15, and took the name Therese of the Child Jesus.  Soon after, she began a time of extreme suffering.  Her father suffered a series of strokes, leaving him so mentally and physically impaired that he was admitted into an insane asylum.  Tragically, as a cloistered nun, she was not allowed to visit him.  Her father died five years later.

Suffering was experienced in the dryness of her prayer life.  She once wrote: “Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love?  Great deeds are forbidden me.  The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and every word and the doing of the least actions for love.”  She took every chance to sacrifice, no matter how small it seemed.  The difficult routine of Carmel proved a challenge for Therese: she did manual labor, swept corridors, gardened, and did common tasks in the linen room, the dining room, the sacristy, or the laundry.  When Pauline was elected prioress, Therese was named assistant to the novice directress, Mother Gonzague, who was the former prioress.  Then Therese became novice mistress de facto after three years in that role.

Therese also worried about her vocation.  “I feel in me the vocation of a priest.  I have the vocation of the apostle.  Martyrdom was the dream of my youth and this dream has grown within me.”  Reflecting on the Mystical Body she writes, “I understood that the Church had a heart and that this heart was burning with love.  I understood that love comprised all vocations. That love was everything, that it embraced all times and places…  In a word, that it was eternal.  Then in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out, ‘O Jesus, my love… my vocation, at last I have found it… My vocation is Love’!”

Then in 1896, Therese coughed up blood.  Her pain was so great that she said, “If I had not had faith I would have taken my own life without hesitation.”  In the last two months of her life, Therese suffered high fevers, fits of coughing, difficulty in breathing, bed sores, and searing pain in her lungs.  Until the end, self-doubt, frightful nightmares, spiritual darkness, and temptations to despair plagued her.  But Therese’s patience and calm smile disguised her desperate state from many of her sisters.  She died on September 30^th, 1897 at the young age of 24 from tuberculosis. 

Patroness of all Missions

he miracles and conversions that happened after the publication of her autobiography “The Story of a Soul” caught the attention of the Bishop of Bayeux who started the diocesan process in 1908 in view of a future beatification.  Therese had not tangible achievements to her credit during the 24 years of her life.  She did no apostolic work, founded no religious community, and engaged in no missionary activity.  She lived virtually unknown.  But in 1923, she was beatified, and then canonized on May 17, 1925 by Pope Pius XI (28 years after her death).  He also declared on Dec. 14, 1927, “Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, Patron of Missionaries, men and women, of all existing missions on earth, with the same merits of St. Francis Xavier, with all the rights and the liturgical privileges which this title entails.”

St. Therese of Lisieux is the patroness of the missions not because she went to the missions but because of her special love for the missions and the prayers and letters she gave in support of missionaries.