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.
Thank you for this beautiful and well-sourced account. It gives a whole new understanding to Léonie, who was clearly a challenging child. I admit to having been a little reticent in embracing the beatification of Zélie, for I mistakenly believed that she and the whole family had somehow unfairly closed ranks against her because she was so dissimilar spiritually. I didn't know about the long-standing behavioural problems or the possibility of her being "on the spectrum" (as we would say today). Under the circumstances I can see that they were simply exasperated on a human level, and I'm deeply gratified to know of Thérèse’s helpful correspondence and Léonie's subsequent success.
Considering the misguided innovations of that one Visitation superior, we do well to remember that there were serious problems in some convents, and Thérèse found as much in her own Carmel. Even so (apart from her misreading the Martin family's view of Religious life for the girls) Ida Görres' biography provides an excellent analysis of the Church's difficulties after decades of destruction and the entrenched cultural animus, and thus it was a miracle that Religious life prospered as much as it did.
I can't recommend Fr. Timothy Gallagher's podcast series enough. It is inspiring, warm, and thorough. He carefully illuminates Servant of God Leonie's goodness, and the tender relationships she had with her sisters and St. Zelie. It is wonderful listening!
What a wonderful post about the Martin girls. I too am going to print it and keep it with my many books about St Therese and her family. What a terrible shame about the dwindling Lisieux Carmel. If only they would adopt the Latin Mass and the traditions of their order, they would see a true influx of vocations, as has happened anywhere tradition takes hold. I really am grieving to read of this. It does not have to be this way. O Therese, save your Carmel!
"It does not have to be this way." EXACTLY. And that is why you wonder where the blindness comes from.
You actually meet people who think: "If the Novus Ordo and modernized religious life isn't attracting young candidates anymore, it must mean that our age is just not suited anymore to the religious life." Why not draw THIS conclusion: "it must mean that our age needs the forms of religious life and liturgy hallowed and proved by countless centuries of trial."
An inspiring tapestry of interwoven vocation stories. One quibble: "The day was February 25, 1959—a mere seven months before the opening of the Second Vatican Council." Perhaps I am misinterpreting the word "opening," but didn't the council formally convene in Oct., 1962?
Thanks, Greg. I'll update the article to state that the day was February 25, a mere month after John XXIII announced there would be a Second Vatican Council.
The Council was announced in January 1959 and the Anteprepatory Commission was appointed in May of that year. Still, inexcusable error on my part. Hopefully, in the Theresian spirit, what I lack in perfection I will through God's grace make up in humility! All is grace!
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.
Amen!
I agree! It is a joy and a grace to fall more and more in love with Tradition by deepening one's relationship with St. Therese and the Martin family.
Ohhh, how I love your contrasts! I must copy, print and save so I can continue to savor your words.
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.
Thank you for your beautiful words, from a fellow teacher!
Thank you for bringing new voices to T & S. (It's not that I'm tired of yours, Dr. K.!)
Variety is always a good thing (as long as it's united to quality)!
Thank you for this beautiful and well-sourced account. It gives a whole new understanding to Léonie, who was clearly a challenging child. I admit to having been a little reticent in embracing the beatification of Zélie, for I mistakenly believed that she and the whole family had somehow unfairly closed ranks against her because she was so dissimilar spiritually. I didn't know about the long-standing behavioural problems or the possibility of her being "on the spectrum" (as we would say today). Under the circumstances I can see that they were simply exasperated on a human level, and I'm deeply gratified to know of Thérèse’s helpful correspondence and Léonie's subsequent success.
Considering the misguided innovations of that one Visitation superior, we do well to remember that there were serious problems in some convents, and Thérèse found as much in her own Carmel. Even so (apart from her misreading the Martin family's view of Religious life for the girls) Ida Görres' biography provides an excellent analysis of the Church's difficulties after decades of destruction and the entrenched cultural animus, and thus it was a miracle that Religious life prospered as much as it did.
I can't recommend Fr. Timothy Gallagher's podcast series enough. It is inspiring, warm, and thorough. He carefully illuminates Servant of God Leonie's goodness, and the tender relationships she had with her sisters and St. Zelie. It is wonderful listening!
What a wonderful post about the Martin girls. I too am going to print it and keep it with my many books about St Therese and her family. What a terrible shame about the dwindling Lisieux Carmel. If only they would adopt the Latin Mass and the traditions of their order, they would see a true influx of vocations, as has happened anywhere tradition takes hold. I really am grieving to read of this. It does not have to be this way. O Therese, save your Carmel!
"It does not have to be this way." EXACTLY. And that is why you wonder where the blindness comes from.
You actually meet people who think: "If the Novus Ordo and modernized religious life isn't attracting young candidates anymore, it must mean that our age is just not suited anymore to the religious life." Why not draw THIS conclusion: "it must mean that our age needs the forms of religious life and liturgy hallowed and proved by countless centuries of trial."
Amen. Tradition is saint~making and that’s what our souls crave.
An inspiring tapestry of interwoven vocation stories. One quibble: "The day was February 25, 1959—a mere seven months before the opening of the Second Vatican Council." Perhaps I am misinterpreting the word "opening," but didn't the council formally convene in Oct., 1962?
Thanks, Greg. I'll update the article to state that the day was February 25, a mere month after John XXIII announced there would be a Second Vatican Council.
Thank you Dr. Kwasniewski!
You are so right! Thank you for the correction, and for the kind words.
The Council was announced in January 1959 and the Anteprepatory Commission was appointed in May of that year. Still, inexcusable error on my part. Hopefully, in the Theresian spirit, what I lack in perfection I will through God's grace make up in humility! All is grace!