The Lilies of Lisieux: The Four Sisters of St. Thérèse
Pauline, Marie, Léonie, and Céline followed quite different paths to religious life but all of them lived it heroically
Today we are pleased to offer a delightful guest article by Angela Cuba, who graduated from the University of Dallas (BA 2010, MA 2013) and has been a Catholic school teacher for twelve years. She is a member of the St. John Henry Newman Association of America and has been a guest on the podcast Newman on Tap. She also writes regular book reviews for Mater Dei Catholic Parish, FSSP.
May 17, 2025, marks the centenary of the canonization of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. A century of change and upheaval has radically altered the face of the Church she loved so well. What has become of the traditional Latin Mass, which was the cradle of St. Thérèse’s mysticism? Where is the theology of sacrifice and reparation, which is the foundation of the Little Way? What has become of the priesthood, for which she so courageously offered her death? Surveying the current ecclesial wasteland, she might weep with Jeremiah: “To what shall I compare thee? or to what shall I liken thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? to what shall I equal thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Sion? for great as the sea is thy destruction: who shall heal thee?”
In times of great spiritual crisis throughout the history of the Church, renewal comes most powerfully from holy religious. In the past, these religious were formed in their interior life by the ancient Mass, the continual round of the Divine Office, and the rigors of traditional asceticism. Their self-denial was a never-failing source of spiritual life for the entire Mystical Body. Overflowing with love of the Church and of Christ, these consecrated brothers and sisters transformed souls from behind their cloister walls.
In 2025, we find ourselves lost among the ruins. St. Thérèse’s beloved Carmel in Lisieux will soon become a museum due to lack of vocations, a fate that has been repeated almost daily in the Church for sixty years. When the sacred liturgy was torn apart, religious rules, asceticism, and even the evangelical counsels lost much of their meaning. Laboring under a self-imposed exile from the traditional forms of prayer, the Church became a vocational desert; few and far between were those life-giving oases where contemplative souls might find their rest. For years, almost no traditional orders existed; when they were allowed to grow, they grew rapidly, and, with equal rapidity, met with brutal suppression. Today, the suppression of traditional community life continues, as does the vocations crisis in the Church.
Does God still call men and women to religious life in such difficult circumstances? How is a young person to discern a vocation amid so much discouragement? What are the spiritual sources of a vocation to the cloister? The centenary of the Little Flower’s canonization gives us an opportunity to revisit the story of five souls called to consecrated life, and to find hope in a portrait from the past.
One Heart
In the archives of the Carmel at Lisieux is a photograph, at once striking and wistful. Four nuns stand amidst the ferns and ornamental trees of an outdoor garden. Three of the nuns look steadily at the camera, but one looks off in the distance, as if distracted, or perhaps seeing someone outside the frame of the picture. In the center of the four nuns is a deliberate gap. It is the invisible fifth who has brought the nuns together for the photograph, in mid-April 1915, for these nuns are the blood sisters of Sr. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, and they are gathered together for the last time on earth at the Lisieux Carmel for the second examination of her virtues in the process of her beatification.
We feel drawn into this holy circle of St. Thérèse, and almost take for granted the consolation the photograph affords, its portrait of a single heart shared among five souls.
Did it have to be so? Was it inevitable that the daughters of Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin would each join and persevere in a vocation to cloistered life? The story of how the photograph came to be is yet another intriguing facet in the tale of the “greatest saint of modern times” (as St. Pius X called St. Thérèse). The vocations of the sisters form a delicate and harmonious unity.
La Belle Époque
La Belle Époque in France, the period in which the sisters grew to maturity, was a time of rapid societal change and expansion. In the era between the French Revolution and the First World War (1789–1918), Our Lady appeared five times in France, setting the five-point shield of Her Name as a prophetic sign against the annihilationism of totalitarian ideologies that would arise in the twentieth century.
From Tours, devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus spread like wildfire. It was the century of the Curé of Ars and the Rue de Bac, of little Bernadette Soubirous and Lourdes. The Lisieux Carmel was founded in 1838, in this tide of great struggle and great spiritual heroism that is the inheritance of every son or daughter of France.
The personal story of the Martin family plays out against a backdrop of political chaos and religious persecution.1 Louis and Zélie bore with faith great suffering, the ravages of war, continual bereavement, financial loss, and an unending series of serious illnesses. Yet, despite it all, they were deeply happy in the Church and in one another. The life-giving spirituality of St. Francis de Sales entered the family through close ties with the Visitation sisters of Le Mans, and the liturgical piety of Dom Guéranger filled their home. The evenings spent reading aloud The Liturgical Year together flowed effortlessly into a mutual love of the Blessed Sacrament, nourished by devotion to the Mass and to Nocturnal Adoration.2 Zélie became a third-order Franciscan, and Louis, a third-order Carmelite. With admirable fidelity, they embraced the lay vocation, practicing good stewardship of their business, attending daily Mass together, giving generously to the poor, and raising their daughters with care.
These are the conditions in which God drew forth five vocations to the cloistered life from a single family.
Pauline’s Mystical Call
If any vocation was intuited beforehand, it was Pauline’s. She was Zélie duplicated, so to speak, and the deepest intimacy united them both. A touching, mystical scene took place at the deathbed of Madame Martin. Pauline, newly arrived from the convent school at Le Mans where she had concluded her education, came to tend Zélie, who was eaten up with cancer and rapidly declining. Zélie, in a state of extreme weakness and pain, took the hand of Pauline in her own, and said, “Poor little soul! What a vacation for you! And I who was rejoicing to have you back home for good. Oh, my Pauline, you are my treasure. I know well that you will one day become a nun.”3
As Pauline felt the interior call to religious life become stronger throughout the long years after her mother’s death, she looked naturally to the convent of Le Mans, where she had spent some of the happiest years of her life. Though the school closed in 1878, the cloister called. No doubt, the memory of her saintly aunt Sr. Marie-Dosithée, the Visitation nun whom Dom Guéranger praised for her piety and devotion,4 influenced Pauline greatly. She began serious conversations with the Mother Superior.
Pauline did well to discern as she did, quietly attentive to all the means Divine Providence afforded in her life, and her preparations to enter the Visitation follow our expectations: at Le Mans, she had established relationships and the blessings of familiarity. The path opened broadly before her.
But one’s vocation is ultimately a pure gift from God, a gratuitous participation in His own royal road of Calvary. It was in the week of Sexagesima, on Thursday, February 16, 1882, that Divine Grace awakened in gentle Pauline the seeds of mysticism, which seemed to be a spiritual inheritance of the mother she so loved and cherished.
Pauline arose early that morning to attend daily Mass with Louis and Marie at St. Jacques, the local parish. In the chapel where Mass was said stood a statue of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Her experience is best described in her own words:
I was at the 6 o’clock Mass at St. Jacques, in the Chapel of Notre-Dame du Mont Carmel with father and Marie. Suddenly a light flashed through my soul, and God showed me clearly that He did not wish me to go to the Visitation but to Carmel… I must say that the memory of a friend, predestined to die the preceding year, came to my mind. She must certainly have been praying for me. They had told me that she thought of entering the Carmel and would have taken the name of Agnes of Jesus. I remember that I felt myself blush with emotion, and in going up and returning from receiving communion I feared that this would be seen... I had never thought of the Carmel, and in one moment I found myself being impelled there with an irresistible attraction.
In a moment, Pauline’s desire was transformed, and the truth of God’s Providence revealed. Upon the choice of Pauline lay the fate of Little Thérèse, whose dominant inclination was to follow her “second Mother” wherever she went.
Hidden in those wee hours, in the humble quiet of Low Mass, lay the Little Way, and the hurricane of glory, and showers of roses from heaven, and the destiny of each of us who has found in St. Thérèse a saving friend when we were in deepest darkness.
At the time, of course, Pauline could not see into the great events of the coming years. But her long-cultivated virtues of adoration and obedience bore their fruit. She accepted God’s call, mystically given, with all the simplicity and trust that later became amplified in the heroic spiritual greatness of Thérèse. She entered the cloister on October 2, 1882, the feast of the Guardian Angels, and received the name chosen by her friend, becoming Sr. Agnes of Jesus.
The story of her trials in cloistered life and her labors as eventual Prioress is another tale altogether. God’s grace was sufficient for her. She persevered in her vocation. This child of the 19th century died full of years on July 28, 1951, as the dark clouds of the Second World War were receding, and as the storms of liturgical upheaval rolled onto the horizon. One biography recounts that, “just minutes leading up to her death, she made every attempt to pray aloud the prayer, which she often recited herself: ‘Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto thine.’” Mother Agnes’ final words are the key that unlocks her discernment to religious life, her love of sacrifice, and finally, her path to heaven.
Marie: A Soldier’s Valor
Marie was the first child born to Louis and Zélie after their nine-month attempt at a Josephite marriage. God rewarded the good parents by filling the soul of their daughter with all the firm rectitude and capacity for self-abnegation that inspired their initial desire. Marie was the first great heiress of the family’s legacy of military heroism.5
There was an instinctive and providential vigilance granted to this daughter, which was to carry her through a traumatic childhood and into a life of early responsibility. She was just shy of seven years old when her little brother Joseph Louis died in 1867, and she would experience that bereavement every year for the next three years: Joseph Jean-Baptiste would die in 1868; Hélène, their beloved little sister, would die on Marie’s 10th birthday in 1870, and the infant Mélanie Thérèse would die later in 1870, just before the horrors of the Franco-Prussian war broke upon the family. There can be little doubt that the suffering of Louis and Zélie impressed Marie deeply. At the age of 13, she herself nearly died of typhoid fever, and mysteriously recovered after Louis made a pilgrimage barefoot and fasting to Butte-Chamotte outside of Alençon, a distance of around fifteen miles.6
In the fires of trial, Marie developed a devotion to duty that was to become a powerful instrument of Divine Grace. She never thought of the cloister, nor, for that matter, would anyone else have thought of it for her. Religious life did not attract her. Neither was she drawn to marriage; enough for her was the daily management of their home, the care of an aging father, and the education of Céline and Thérèse. Pauline’s impending vocation to Carmel did not persuade her otherwise.7
In her loneliness, Marie made contact with a Jesuit priest reputed for holiness, Fr. Almire Pichon. He became her spiritual director in 1882, just before Pauline entered the cloister. He led her through modified Ignatian exercises, and the disciplined method unlocked the ardent love of her noble heart. Through careful counsel, Fr. Pichon discerned in Marie what no one, not even herself, could perceive. “As for me, I really hope to give you to Jesus,” he informed her after their first meeting.
It is important to point out that his guidance was true, whole, and confirmed by an interior grace given to Marie after the retreat, as she recounts:
I was caught in His nets… nets of mercy. I returned home with a light heart and filled with secret joy. So Jesus had also cast a special look of love on me. I was not tempted to imitate the young man in the gospel and go sadly away from Him.
Light and joy, and peace of heart in Christ: the signs of the gentle reign of the Holy Spirit, and the keys to true discernment, as St. Ignatius teaches. True obedience does not crush us, but sets us with childlike trust on the paths determined by Providence.
Marie’s obedience did not produce spontaneous feelings of tenderness. After two years of spiritual direction, she simply knew that her time had come. She who loved and cherished her freedom entered the Lisieux Carmel without enthusiasm, but in great peace, on October 15, 1886. She became Sr. Marie of the Sacred Heart, recalling the favorite devotion of Fr. Pichon. Sr. Marie’s vocation to Carmel was indeed willed by God, and she remained happy in it all her life, though it was full of trials and suffering originating both inside and outside the cloister walls. We may credit Sr. Marie with the inspiration of Story of a Soul, as she encouraged Mother Agnes to put St. Thérèse under obedience to write her memoirs.
Sr. Marie died in great agony, kissing the crucifix, whispering “My God, I love Thee,” on January 19, 1940, amid one of the coldest weeks recorded in a century. Bitter chill could not efface the memory of her hidden life, which long remained as an ardent warmth for the sisters as the guns of war thundered all around them. Her vocation represents a holy union of independence and obedience, harmonized and perfected by a total immolation of self to the merciful Heart of Christ.
Léonie: A Crushed Violet
There was something wrong with this child from the first, and everyone knew it. She was afflicted and unruly, plagued with disfiguring psoriasis, and debilitated with serious illnesses in her childhood. When she was well, it was obvious, for Léonie was famous for her outbursts and uncontrollable behavior.8 It helped little that Léonie’s childhood coincided with the period of the family’s most heart-wrenching sorrows. The two eldest were sent to school, and Léonie, who had always had difficulty learning, remained at home with parents who struggled to understand her amid their grief for the loss of four young children and the shock of the Franco-Prussian war.
In her vulnerability, Léonie gained the attention of the foolish maid, Louise, who began secretly threatening and even beating her into submission. This reign of terror lasted for months, eluding the attention of Zélie and Louis. Eventually, thanks to Marie, Louise was discovered, and Madame Martin furiously forbade her from approaching Léonie ever again. Léonie’s deliverance provided a near-miraculous opening for Madame Martin to bring her under her sole influence, and with no time to spare, for Zélie intuited that her time left on earth was short. In the end, having made minimal progress, Zélie offered her own painful death for Léonie’s reclamation.
Léonie did indeed experience a miraculous infusion of docility. Still, if she sometimes revealed a desire for religious life, this revelation was considered merely a child’s fancy, with little connection to any real future event. There is little wonder that when Léonie began at an early age to prattle about the Poor Clares, the first one to cast doubt was Madame Martin.9 After all, Léonie had been repeatedly removed from school. Cloistered life for Léonie was not just unthinkable, it was laughable.
One can imagine the shock and horror of the family when during the course of a family vacation, the 23-year-old Léonie announced that she had been accepted by the Poor Clares in Alençon. The Poor Clares took Léonie as a postulant with little forethought and no time for prudent consultation. The family’s distress was considerable, because the Poor Clares were famous for their austerity, which Léonie’s fragile health would never be able to bear. It was little surprise to anyone that Léonie returned home after just six weeks in the novitiate, broken in spirit from the harsh life she had found there.
Despite this embarrassing failure, Léonie’s desire for religious consecration remained undeterred. The next summer, she entered the Visitation at Caen, but once more her health broke down, and she returned home after six months, a victim of debilitating eczema and migraines. Amid the turmoil of her father’s illness, Léonie entered the Visitation once more in 1893, this time taking the habit in 1894. It was her third attempt at religious life in eight years. But in 1895, Léonie returned yet again to the world, this time as part of a mass exodus from the Visitation, which was the result of a superior who forced a harsh rigor on the sisters against the spirit of their founding.
Léonie was now very much alone, as Céline had entered Carmel in October 1894. Léonie kept up a loving correspondence with St. Thérèse, who was able to spiritually direct her sister from behind the cloister walls. Léonie, the crushed violet, was one of the first beneficiaries of Thérèse’s mature spirituality. The Sisters of the Visitation recount that “Thérèse, before she died, had confided: ‘After my death I will cause Léonie to return to the Visitation, and she will stay there…’” Thus, Heaven linked forever the vocations of Thérèse and Léonie, the two saint-sisters of the Martin family.
Léonie entered the Visitation permanently on January 28, 1899. She was welcomed back to Caen with open arms, as the convent had been set firmly back in the way of its own spirituality. Léonie, who took the name “Françoise-Thérèse” after her beloved sister, on her fourth attempt was a model religious for forty years. She died on June 17, 1941. On January 24, 2015, the cause for her canonization was opened, and her growing cultus may bear much spiritual fruit for the Church in our time.
Could anyone have imagined a more improbable ending? God alone knows how to draw the greatest fragrance from our fragile lives. It is the bruised violet that scatters its scent. Léonie’s failures were, in Christ’s Crucified hands, more powerful than all her dreams of success, and her weaknesses the most powerful instruments of His Providence.
Céline: A Vocation Deferred
Céline was destined for great things. From her childhood, she showed forth remarkable intelligence and vivacity. Louis, pleased with his little girl, named her, “The Valiant One #2” as a homage to Marie, whom she resembled. She pleased her mother too, for she was deeply pious from a young age. After Madame Martin’s death in 1877, thanks to the dutiful teaching of Pauline, Céline’s spirituality bloomed, though she must have kept this budding mysticism hidden amid the difficult circumstances of their family life. At the age of eleven, Céline offered her Virginity to the Divine Spouse, on the beautiful occasion of His offering Himself to her in the Blessed Sacrament on the day of her first Holy Communion.
This was to be a long engagement, and, by no human standards a certainty, for Céline’s pledge came amid a whirl of cares that would shape the course of her life. She felt her call to Carmel deeply, but when Thérèse announced her desire to enter religious life before her fifteenth birthday, Céline, then 18, quietly sacrificed her desire, for she knew that she alone would be left to care for Louis and Léonie after Thérèse’s departure.
At this juncture, not long after Thérèse’s entrance into Carmel, Céline was forced to reveal her vocation to Louis, who wanted to send her to Paris for art school. His piety did not prevent him from suffering the most extreme mental anguish at her revelation. The family always believed that as a result of his own self-offering,10 Louis experienced a rapid decline in health that led to episodes of psychosis and even disappearance. This great, holy man was reduced to being a danger to himself and others, and so he was hospitalized at Bon-Sauveur in Caen.
The soul once attracted to religious life and then thrown back into society finds itself in a wilderness. Wordly living cannot satisfy deep spiritual hunger, but for reasons that are often mysterious to the soul in question, God has asked her to linger amid the lights and shadows of a world completely unaware of that soul’s anguish. So it was with Céline.
To others, the cloister seemed an ill-fit for such an enchanting girl. Proposals were not long in coming. On the day of Thérèse’s entrance to Carmel, April 9, 1888, a neighbor, M. Albert Quesnel, asked for Céline’s hand in marriage. This event did not destabilize her resolution to enter religious life, but it did cause her great distress and self-questioning. (Albert followed this refusal by pursuing a vocation to the priesthood, in which he persevered until his death in 1935.) When later, yet another suitor (with some difficulty) was put off once and for all, Céline sank deeper into depression.11
She was alone, frustrated, and misunderstood by her family. The stress of her responsibilities caused Céline serious heart trouble,12 and her blood sisters in Carmel feared for her life. Only Céline’s warm correspondence with Thérèse kept her spirit anchored in her original promise.13 Carmel seemed beyond possibility, for there were already three members of the family there—far too many in the eyes of the other Carmelites, who were unhappy with the arrangement. Fr. Pichon likewise had his opinions. He recruited Céline to join him in Canada as a teaching sister, and, rather desperate, she began to put her affairs in order so as to follow him. Then Louis Martin’s long suffering ended with his death on July 29, 1894, and a miracle occurred: the Carmelites of Lisieux agreed to let Céline enter. She sent her regards to Fr. Pichon, who gave his blessing, and she entered Carmel on September 14, 1894.
Her vocation, long deferred, eventually bore forth its mystical holiness. Having grown old in religion, Sr. Geneviève of the Holy Face witnessed the eruption of liturgical and institutional changes in the final years of her life. Her biography recounts:
She showed more serenity than in the past to bear the suffering of things that change. Speaking of certain ornaments which had been the object of all her care, and which the modern taste for sobriety had set aside, she said: “I thank God for having allowed me to see this in my lifetime, and that I can detach myself from it with love. It is passing, the face of this world,” she repeated in the face of certain traditions that had become obsolete, at the sight of ancient customs thrown into the shadows. All her momentum is directed towards Heaven.
How incredibly sad that the traditions that had nourished the vocations of her and her sisters were now being deemed “obsolete” and that “ancient customs” had to be “thrown into the shadows”—with results all too apparent now, decades later! The fact is, everyone, in the face of death, must become detached from everything—but that is no reason to pretend that the condition of the entire Church all the time should be one of impoverishment and denudation. In fact, we need these helps along the way, to get us faithfully to the end.
Having fought the good fight, and seeing the Mountain of Carmel become a valley of tears, Sister Geneviève set her eyes on eternity. She died in ecstasy, quoting St. John of the Cross. As she breathed forth her soul, she was heard to say, “It is surely today! Today!” and she died repeating the Holy Name, “Jesus!” The day was February 25, 1959—a mere month after John XXIII announced there would be a Second Vatican Council. In this sense, one might say that the lives of the five sisters coincide with the great Catholic revival that was soon to be shattered and reversed.
Conclusion: Out of the Desert
The story of the Martin family resounds like a clarion call for the faithful in 2025. Catholic religious life in its traditional forms is powerfully attractive and desperately needed as the generations now maturing are longing for authentic spirituality, doctrinal clarity, and asceticism. The arid sands of liturgical experimentation and the novelties in religious life have left people thirsting after Living Water, that is, the superior, stronger Catholic religious life of our forefathers. We must work valiantly and without compromising to restore our traditional Rites for the glory of God and the salvation of souls, so that our historic convents and monasteries overflow once more, and places like the Lisieux Carmel will not be closed and lost forever.
Our Lord never ceases to call men and women to a more perfect way of life. At times, He also mysteriously allows obstacles to prevent the immediate fulfillment of a person’s vocation. Souls awaiting the Providence of God must exhibit heroic patience and perseverance, remembering that Our Lord always rewards great personal sacrifice, which unites us ever more deeply with Him.
On this 100th anniversary of St. Thérèse’s canonization, let us give thanks to God for the example of her blessed family, and seek their intercession for the restoration of the Roman Liturgy, nurse and cradle of religious vocations, and for a resolute return to traditional religious life. Then we too shall sing with the Little Flower and all the holy religious in Heaven:
The land that was desolate and impassable shall be glad, and the wilderness shall rejoice, and shall flourish like the lily. It shall bud forth and blossom, and shall rejoice with joy and praise: the glory of Libanus is given to it: the beauty of Carmel, and Saron, they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the beauty of our God. (Is. 35:1–2)
For the bibliography used in writing this article, click here.
By the time Louis and Zélie married in July 1858, horrors of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era had scarred France forever. In a century, the form of government in France changed at least five times, resulting in continual bloody civil war and upheaval. In 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke on France like a deluge. It was a war the French had provoked but were hopelessly incapable of winning. The Martin Family was not spared. In 1871, Louis and Zélie were forced to provide room and board for nine German soldiers when the Prussian army swept through Alençon, with their young daughters barely sequestered upstairs. It was a traumatic experience for the whole family. In the aftermath of the war, the outbreak of the Paris Commune left over 10,000 revolutionaries dead. The violence and instability of the times led many to fear an apocalypse, but Madame Martin learned to navigate the time by instead directing her energies toward daily acts of piety and charity, as her letters demonstrate.
Because of the intense desire of Louis and Zélie to offer their children to God, Ida Freidericke Görres, for all her brilliant insight into the spiritual development of St. Thérèse, would thus mistakenly conclude “that the children were all raised unequivocally to view the convent as their destiny” (Görres, Ida Fredericke. (2003). The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Ignatius, 46). Documentary evidence from Zélie’s letters demonstrates that the parents themselves had a more realistic and nuanced view of the matter.
Piat, The Story of a Family: The Home of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 255.
Kochiss, Companion to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 183.
See the fascinating account of the military careers of both her grandfathers in Kochiss, 168–75.
See Zélie’s letter of May 4, 1873 to Pauline, A Call to Deeper Love: The Family Correspondence of the Parents of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus 1863-1885, Society of St. Paul, 122.
See Kochiss, 125.
Monsieur and Madame Martin loved Léonie, as they did all their others; but this was a love which taxed all their patience and emotional resources. Today, we might investigate a medical diagnosis of autism or asperger’s syndrome; at the time, the Martin parents remained in a state of perpetual anxiety and frustration over their inability to instill docility in their daughter. For those interested in a deeper analysis of Léonie’s unique struggles and gifts, Fr. Timothy Gallagher’s podcast series examining her life is essential.
Zélie wrote to her sister-in-law in May of 1875, “Every day [Léonie] tells us that she’s going to become a Poor Clare, and I have as much confidence in this as if it were little Thérèse saying it.” At the time, Léonie was 12 and Thérèse was 3. See Martin, A Call to Deeper Love, 179.
“During the month of May, 1888, he went to Alençon, and in his old parish church, which was associated with so many memories for him, he had a particular grace, which he related to his three Carmelites on his return, in a visit to the parlor: ‘Children, I have returned from Alençon, where I received in the Church of Notre Dame such signal graces and such consolations that I made this prayer: “My God, it is too much! I am too happy; it is not possible to go to heaven this way. I wish to suffer something for you, and I offered myself…” The word victim expired on his lips, writes Thérèse, he did not wish to pronounce it before us, but we understood!’” (Céline Martin, The Father of the Little Flower, 71–72).
See Céline’s moving description of her own internal struggles at the time of Henry Maudelonde’s proposal, quoted in Clarke, ed., General Correspondence: Letters of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: Volume 2, 1891-1897, 733: “My cousin Marie, who loved me very much, believed she was pleasing me by reporting conversations that she had had with her cousins: ‘If you only knew how much Henry loved you; he is crazy about you.’ ‘Ah! I had no need of anyone’s telling me this, I was well enough aware of it!...What struggles! I belonged to Jesus alone, I had given Him my pledge, but I found the marriage vocation beautiful also; I had so to speak, two vocations, two attractions….I would have to speak only one word, give only one look! When I think back on it, I am seized with fright, my vocation was so close to foundering! It seems it was holding on only by a thread.”
See ibid., 714.
See Céline and Thérèse’s constant exchange of sympathy and encouragement in Clarke, ed., General Correspondence, vol. 2.
 | A guest post by
|
Reading this tribute to St. Therese and her sisters, I was struck again by how the great renewal the Church needs will not come through novelty, but through recollection—through the rediscovery of what was never lost in heaven, only forgotten on earth.
The meditation on the “invisible fifth” in that old photograph moved me. It reminds me of what I tried to describe in an essay (https://steveherrmann.substack.com/p/above-all-through-all-in-all) a moment when the veil lifted, not in a chapel, but in a parking lot. Everything—cars, asphalt, even a taillight—sang with presence. It was incarnational mysticism made visible, if only for a moment. And I understood something then that St. Therese always knew: that God is not found by ascending to the rare, but by descending into the ordinary. That the cloister is not a relic, but a radiant echo of the Incarnation, where dust and divinity are permitted to speak without interruption.
The Little Way is only little if one forgets its scale is eternity. What St. Therese saw through suffering and sacrifice was not a reduction of holiness but its saturation: that God fills all things. Not just monstrances and Masses, but coughs, crumbs, disappointments, delay. She lived what Paul declared: “above all, through all, and in all.”
May her centenary not be a eulogy, but a warning to the age: that to cut ourselves off from tradition is to exile ourselves from the soil in which the saints were grown. But also, that no exile is final, if the eyes of the soul remain open. The veil still trembles. Even now. Even here.
In two days will be the centennial anniversary of the canonization of the Little Flower, St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.
My career was taken from me for refusing the antidote to the worldwide sickness and thereafter it has been substantially altered. After a year or two of trying to put things back together, I wound up in the back pew of my weekly TLM, being told about a small school under the Saint's patronage. Walking out of Mass and encountering the headmistress disseminating information and receiving donations, I introduced myself and awkwardly explained, "I have no money, but my degree is English/Secondary Education and I've taught English, Latin, and American History-H at a classical school before." Taking a drive in the late summer of that year, I listened to an audiobook version of St. Therese', "Story of A Soul" in preparation for my first semester at the St. Therese School where I would soon teach Renaissance Literate and Latin I and II.
I was introduced to St. Therese around 1987. A member of the charismatic movement - a pediatric nurse - had a great personal devotion to her and used to talk about "getting a rose from St. Therese" all the time. Bishop Patrick Ahern, auxiliary of the Archdiocese of New York, talked of her as a Doctor of the Church back then. Gimme a break, Excellency. St. Therese may share the patronage of the missions with the great St. Francis Xavier,Apostle to the Indies, but that's quite enough! (I was going to be a Jesuit, and had devoured Fr. Broderick's biography of St. Francis Xavier in short order.). I gave St. Therese no further thought from about 1990 on. What did the contemplative St. Therese have to teach a man of action, after all?
Well, thirty-three years had passed and I was a man of substantially less action than before. I could be a flower in God's garden - of which He might make something big and important and extraordinary, or just let grow there quietly among all the other flowers till it was time for us all to be picked - or I could be a nothing. "Quia melior est dies una in atriis tuis super milia." So, I prepared and taught my little classes of both eager and ambitious students and my disinterested and uninspired ones. Every morning before I taught, I had the opportunity to pray at a pre dieu before the relics of St. Therese. The Little Flower, one will remember, sought her vocation kneeling at the papal slipper of Pope Leo XIII. The same Pope Leo who inspired the current Holy Father in his choice of choice of regnal name.
I do not ascribe anything para-miraculous to the fact pattern related above. It is providential, not miraculous. It is a full, conscious, actual participation in a Family History that has God as Father, the Church as Mother, and baptized Catholics as Her children. The Family Tree of the Cross has grown its branches out to this time I live in, to the reign of Leo XIV... and will continue through my current situation and that of the middle school and high school students I teach, on through their adult years and beyond. Unlike the new theologian - and the new Catholic who wants to be a sapling removed from the Tree and fertilized in different ground by the manure that the new theologian offers to shovel around his or her roots - let's be quiet and grow as flowers in the garden. Maybe God will make of each of us something great. Maybe He won't. Either way, that's ok.
You're going to be picked from the garden someday. Be ready.
Little Therese,on this great centennial, pray for me, a sinner.