St. Thérèse of Lisieux, O.C.D. (1873-1897)
Feast Day - October 1st
Marie Françoise-Therese Martin was born into a devout French family; her parents Louis and Zélie are both canonized, and all her surviving sisters entered religious life. Her mother's death inaugurated a troubled childhood, but at Christmas 1886 Therese underwent a conversion experience that led her to find happiness in forgetting herself for others' sake. The next year she expressed her desire to become a Discalced Carmelite; she received permission at the young age of 15. Therese devoted herself to the religious Rule and went out of her way to love the nuns she least liked. Such small acts would prove foundational to her "little way" of holiness: "Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love." She prayed and sacrificed in particular for the sake of foreign missions. Declining steadily in the years before her death at 24, she was consoled to meet Christ even in the tuberculosis that would take her life. Patroness of France, missionaries
DonorMr. Douglas Hobbs In honor of |
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