Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

Thérèse Martin was born at Alençon in Normandy on 2 January 1873, the youngest of the five surviving daughters of Louis and Zélie Martin, who were themselves canonized in 2015. Her mother died when she was four, and her father moved the family to Lisieux. She was a sensitive, easily wounded child; on Christmas night 1886, she later wrote, she received the grace to forget herself, and from then on she wanted only to love God and to save souls.

She asked to enter the Carmelite convent of Lisieux, where two of her sisters already lived, at the age of fourteen. When the bishop hesitated she went on pilgrimage to Rome and, against the rules of the audience, asked Pope Leo XIII himself. She entered the Carmel in April 1888, at fifteen, and took the name Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face.

Nothing remarkable happened to her there. She kept the rule, bore the small irritations of community life, and served as assistant to the novice mistress. In that ordinary life she found what she called her little way: to become small before God, to trust him as a child trusts its father, and to offer him every small act done with love. “My vocation,” she wrote, “is love.”

In 1896 she coughed up blood; it was tuberculosis. Through months of great pain, and a darkness of faith that lasted to the end, she went on trusting. She died on 30 September 1897, aged twenty-four. Her last words were, “My God, I love you.”

At the request of her prioress she had written the story of her life. Published a year after her death as The Story of a Soul, it went around the world. Pius XI canonized her in 1925 and named her patroness of the missions, with Saint Francis Xavier, though she had never left her convent. Saint John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church in 1997.