Therese was born on 2 January 1873 into a comfortable middle class family in Alencon, the youngest of a family of nine children of whom only four daughters had survived, Pauline, Marie, Leonie, Celine and herself. Their father Louis Martin and their mother Marie-Zelie Guerin practised their religion with great fervour, both going to an early 5.30 am Mass each day and concerned above all for the spiritual welfare of their children. Therese, an extremely sensitive and highly strung child was surrounded by love and a religious atmosphere of deep faith, which influenced her spiritual growth from her earliest years. Her mother describes three year old Therese as having more intelligence than Celine but being less gentle. She ‘has a stubborn streak in her that is almost invincible.’ But channelled by her devoted and vigilant parents and sisters her nature soon developed in the ways of grace. When her mother died in 1877 they moved to Lisieux. Therese first realised her vocation to Carmel at the age of nine just before her beloved sister Pauline entered there, followed five years later by Marie. Therese had already understood at 13 the overriding claims of God’s love. “I experienced a great desire to work for the conversion of sinners. I felt charity enter my soul, the need to forget myself and please others… I wanted to give my Beloved to drink and felt myself consumed with the thirst for souls.”

Therese confided her vocation to her father and won his support. But her uncle and the religious superiors were strongly opposed. Her perseverance finally gained her the permission to enter Carmel at 15, where she was professed on 8 September 1890. She showed such fidelity and humility from the beginning that from 1893 until her death she was entrusted with the office of assistant to the novice mistress. She also fulfilled many other offices of the community in an exemplary manner and entered into the great austerities of the life as welcome opportunities for suffering, just as she lived through the ‘glorious trials’ of her father’s tragic illness and death. However she was far from being a plaster saint. Her prioress describes Therese’s liveliness and humour - ‘A mystic, a comedienne, she is everything!’ Meanwhile her sensitive love and compassion for others, especially the sick and suffering shone out continually.

She found her nourishment in the writings of St John of the Cross, the ‘Imitation of Christ’ and most of all in the Scriptures. ‘It is especially the Gospels which sustain me during my hours of prayer… I am constantly discovering in them new lights, hidden and mysterious meanings.’ On the feast of the Holy Trinity 1895, she was deeply inspired to offer herself as a victim to God’s merciful love and having received permission to make this offering felt herself from then on penetrated and surrounded by ‘Love’ renewing and purifying her at each moment. Her intense apostolic and missionary desires made her long for every kind of ecclesial vocation and searching for guidance she learned in the great hymn to charity in St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians that Love comprised all vocations. At last she had found her place in the Church: ‘In the heart of the Church, my mother, I shall be Love.’  During her last illness she felt that her mission in heaven was about to begin ‘my mission to make God loved as I love him, to teach souls my little way’…’the way of spiritual childhood, the way of trust and absolute surrender.’… ‘I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.’

Therese died of pulmonary tuberculosis, a long drawn out illness which had shown its first signs three years earlier but she had gone on living her Carmelite life in its full rigour and was only taken to the infirmary two months before her death. In the midst of acute physical sufferings she had also been living the darkest night of faith for a year and a half, when heaven seemed not to exist at all; and yet she persevered in giving herself completely to God with supreme confidence in his love and its transforming power. She was content, she said, to sit at table with sinners and unbelievers. Her final agony lasted for two days. She had always hoped to die of live and her desire was fulfilled when she died making a fervent act of love.

It was out of obedience to her superiors that she wrote the three manuscripts which together were to be published as ‘Story of a Soul’, her chief written work, in which her entire teaching would be found. Published a year after Therese’s death it soon went into several editions, the later ones made closer to the original manuscripts. It was reprinted again and again in response to the growing demands. Meanwhile countless miracles were occurring through her intercession, the ‘shower of roses’ she had promised to let fall on the earth. Her teaching was enthusiastically received not only by Catholics and other Christians but also by non-believers and spread throughout the world eventually being translated into over fifty languages.

St Therese of the Child Jesus was canonized by Pope Pius XI on 17 May 1925. The same Pope proclaimed her Universal Patron of the Missions, along with St Francis Xavier. With the rapidly increasing number of requests that she be declared a Doctor, Pope John Paul II eventually proclaimed her Doctor of the Universal Church on World Mission Sunday, 19 October 1997.

back to Carmelite Saints