Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus

Thérèse of the Child Jesus was born in Alençon, France, of honourable parents who were distinguished by the singular assiduity of their piety towards God. Hence, from an early age, under the prevenient grace of the Divine Spirit, her desire for religious life. She made a serious promise not to refuse God anything he seemed to ask of her. And this promise she did her utmost to keep until the day she died. At the age of five, having lost her mother, she entrusted herself entirely to Providence, under the vigilant care of her beloved father and her older sisters. It was under their guidance that Thérèse " leapt forward joyfully, like a giant, to run along the path of perfection ". At the age of nine, she was entrusted with her education to the Virgins of the Order of Saint-Benoît, at Lisieux, and she showed them a superior knowledge of religious things. When she was ten, she suffered for a long time from a serious and unknown illness. She was divinely freed from it, as she herself recounted, by the help of the Blessed Virgin who appeared to her smiling, and whom she had fervently invoked by means of novenas under the title of Our Lady of Victories. Filled with angelic fervour, she took great care to prepare herself for the sacred banquet at which Christ becomes our food.

It seems that as soon as she tasted the Eucharistic Bread, she felt an insatiable hunger for this heavenly food, and was inspired to pray to Jesus to turn all the consolations of the world into bitterness for her. Burning with a tender love for Christ the Lord and the Church, she desired nothing more than to enter the Order of Discalced Carmelites, in order to help priests, missionaries and the whole Church by her self-denial and sacrifices, and to win countless souls for Jesus Christ. This is what she promised to God at the time of her death. Because of her youth, she encountered many difficulties in entering religion. But she overcame them with incredible fortitude and, at the age of fifteen, was admitted to the Carmelite convent at Lisieux. It was there that God prepared her heart for marvellous ascents, and Thérèse, imitating the hidden life of the Virgin Mary, was like a fertile garden where the flowers of all the virtues grew, but above all an extraordinary love for God and neighbour.

To better please the Most High, having read in Sacred Scripture this advice: " If anyone is very little, let him come to me "She wanted to be little in spirit, and for this she abandoned herself to God for ever, as to a most loving father, in filial trust. She taught others this way of spiritual childhood, according to the doctrine of the Gospel, especially the novices whom obedience had entrusted to her to form in the love of religious virtues. Filled with apostolic zeal, she made a world swollen with pride and passionate about vanities love the path of evangelical simplicity.

Jesus, her Spouse, inflamed her with an intense desire to suffer in soul and body. Seeing, moreover, that the love of God was being neglected everywhere, she conceived a sovereign sorrow and, two years before her death, she offered herself as a victim to the merciful love of God. Then, as she tells it, she was wounded by the flame of heavenly fire so that, consumed by charity, rapt in ecstasy, and fervently repeating: " My God, I love you "She flew to her Spouse, at the age of twenty-four, on the thirtieth of September eighteen hundred and ninety-seven. And as she had promised, on her deathbed, to spread a continual shower of roses on the earth, she truly fulfilled her promise by performing countless miracles since she entered heaven. This is why the Sovereign Pontiff Pius XI, having first listed her among the Blessed Virgins, solemnly included her among the Saints two years later, at the time of the Great Jubilee, and declared her to be the special patroness of all missions.