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St Therese of the Child Jesus

Updated: September 30, 2010 05:00 PM GMT
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The story of Therese Martin, the young French girl who longed to join the Carmelites and dedicate her life to Christ, is one of the fairy tales of our age. No doubt at all that Therese is the most popular Catholic saint of the last hundred years. In fact Mother Teresa took her own name from this saint. She was born in 1873, the youngest of nine children, to parents who themselves had wanted at one time to become religious. Two of her older sisters had already entered Carmel before her. Admitted when she was just 15, Therese “of the Child Jesus”, as she wished to be called, was favored by signal graces and blessings from God. Her characteristic was a boundless trust and confidence in God – much as a child trusts her parents – and a total willingness to sacrifice herself in love for his sake. “From God, one can never ask too much. One will get from him in proportion to one’s reliance on him!” she was wont to say, and describe it as her ‘Little Way’, that is, doing little things with great love. She became an inspiration and model for millions of ordinary folk. Her auto-biography, The Story of a Soul, written at the urging of her superiors, became an instant best-seller. Therese spent barely nine years in the convent at Lisieux, and died all too soon of tuberculosis, aged just 24. Most of her time was spent unnoticed, doing the various chores of daily life, and she was generally misunderstood by her many companions. Her special task, as she saw it, was to assist the priests and missionaries of the Church with her prayers and sacrifices. “There’s just one thing in life, she said: to love Jesus and to save souls for him, so that he may be more loved!” So phenomenal was the devotion to the ‘Little Flower’ (as she was called) she was proclaimed saint just 28 years after her death. With St Francis Xavier, she is also the patron of the missions. And in 1997, Pope John Paul II declared her a ‘doctor of the Church’, thus honouring her ‘little way’ of leading millions to God.

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