Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

Thérèse Martin was the youngest child of a devout French family. She lost her mother when she was four. She was a sensitive child who cried easily, but at fourteen, one Christmas night, she went through what she called "a complete conversion," and from then on she grew calm and strong. At fifteen, far younger than the usual age for entering, she asked Pope Leo XIII in person to let her join the Carmelites. The Pope told her, "If God wills it, you will enter," and soon afterwards she was given special permission.

The Little Way

Thérèse isn’t remembered for great miracles or dramatic events, but for what she called her "Little Way." Holiness, she believed, doesn’t require heroics. It is enough to do the most ordinary things, like putting up patiently with a difficult sister or getting through a boring job, with great love. She saw herself as a small child throwing herself into God’s arms, and wrote, "I am a very little bird, who only has strength enough to fly to the sun, to Love."

A Book Written in a Convent Cell

Her superiors asked her to write the story of her life. The Story of a Soul, published after her death, soon became known all over the world for its simple, honest and deeply moving voice. Thérèse caught tuberculosis at twenty-three. In her last year and a half she struggled with terrible pain and with deep darkness in her faith, yet she never lost hope. Before she died she said, "I will spend my heaven doing good on earth." She died in 1897, at twenty-four.

She was canonized in 1925, only twenty-eight years after her death, one of the fastest canonizations in the Church’s history. In 1997 Pope John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church, the youngest of them all. Her feast day is October 1.