St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus

Thérèse Martin was born in Alençon in 1873, the youngest of the nine children of Louis and Zélie Martin, both now canonized. She entered the Carmel of Lisieux at fifteen, with a papal permission she had gone to Rome to seek, and died of tuberculosis on September 30, 1897, at twenty-four. The Church keeps her memorial on October 1, the day after her death, because September 30 already belonged to St. Jerome. She had said she would spend her heaven doing good on earth. The speed of her fame was part of what she had asked. Pius XI canonized her in 1925 and called her the star of his pontificate. John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church on October 19, 1997, the youngest of the doctors and one of four women who hold the title.

The teaching that earned the doctorate is not a system. It is the “little way” written in Story of a Soul, in her letters, and in the plays and poems she wrote for her community. Thérèse had wanted to be a warrior, a priest, an apostle, a martyr. She found in 1 Corinthians 13 that the greatest of these is love, and that love could be practiced in the smallest obedience of a cloister: a smile toward a sister she disliked, patience with the sister who rattled rosary beads, the offering of her last months of darkness. She called this spiritual childhood. It is not immaturity. It is the Gospel sentence about becoming like a little child, aimed at people who think holiness requires extraordinary feats.

Her trial of faith at the end is part of the doctrine, not an embarrassment beside it. She sat at the table of sinners, as she put it, and could no longer feel what she believed. The Church canonized that darkness as well as the roses. The popular devotion of asking her for a rose is a custom that grew from her promise to let fall a shower of roses. It is not a contract, and it is not the memorial. The memorial is a doctor who taught confidence in mercy to a century that was about to trust technique instead.

October 1 is a memorial, in white. It is not a holy day of obligation. She is patroness of the missions, though she never left the enclosure, and of florists and aviators by later custom. The mission title is the one that matches her writing: she wanted to be love in the heart of the Church, and from that heart to reach every land. A parish that only sells roses on October 1 has the decoration and not the doctor.

The readings proposed for her memorial turn on spiritual childhood and on the love that bears all things. The Gospel of becoming like a child, and 1 Corinthians 13, are the texts she herself used. The collect asks that we may walk in her little way. Because she is a doctor, the homily may teach, but the Mass is still a memorial: no Creed is added merely for her fame, unless the day is a Sunday and the Sunday Creed is already required.