History of the Life of SAINT THERESE of Lisieux

Written by Benoît Santos - Updated on Oct 26, 2024

Are you passionate about stories of saints? Do you know the story of Saint Therese of Lisieux? Would you like to know a little more about the basilica built in honor of the Saint?

Our team is here to provide you with answers. We have found some very interesting information. In short, here is what we can say on the subject:

Saint Therese of Lisieux was born in 1873 in Normandy, France. She was a beautiful, lively, outgoing girl, despite the fact that her mother died when she was 4 years old. From a very young age, she wanted to go to Carmel. It is a reclusive monastery, with strict statutes: strict prayer life, fasting, confinement, silence, etc.

To learn more about the history and the Basilica of Saint Therese, we invite you to discover in this article:

The story of Saint Therese of Lisieux;
The series of beatifications;
Prayer and intercession.

If you would like to discover more stories about Christian saints, here are several articles available on our site that you can discover:

The story of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus

Saint Therese of Lisieux (Child Jesus) is one of the most venerated saints in the Catholic world. She is the founder of the "Little Way of Holiness", expounded in her book " The Story of a Soul " which has been copied many times and sold in all European languages and many others. She is one of the few women to have been given the title of " Professor of the Church ". She is also the heavenly patroness of all missions and all missionaries.

Thérèse was born in Alanson (a town in northwestern France) on January 2, 1873, into the deeply pious family of Louis Martin, a watchmaker, and his wife, Marie-Zélie Marten. Not only Teresa herself, but also her four sisters who would later become nuns, and on October 18, 2015. Pope Francis declared the Marten couple to be a holy family.

The family of Saint Therese of Lisieux

The Marten couple's five daughters absorbed their parents' sincere and fervent faith from an early age. Teresa was the fourth child, and when she was only five, her mother died of breast cancer. At nine, her older sister Pauline, whom she had chosen as her "second mother," left her to join the secluded Carmelite convent of Lisieux in Normandy, where Louis Martin had settled with his daughters after the death of his wife.

From that moment on, Teresa acquired the unshakable conviction that Carmel was the place where she had to go and where God wanted her to be. And according to Teresa herself, around the age of three, she never said "no" to God. At that time, Teresa was seriously ill (apparently it was a psychosomatic illness), but she was suddenly healed. After the whole family had prayed a lot for her, the figure of the Virgin standing in her room smiled at her. It must be said that Teresa consciously used the spiritual experience of her childhood as the basis for her mature spirituality.

The very first miracle of Teresa of Lisieux

At the age of 15, the first "miracle of prayer" happened in her life. She read in a newspaper about a trial in Paris, in which the criminal accused of murdering two women and a young girl behaved defiantly. And showed no signs of remorse. Having chosen him as "her sinner", Teresa prayed sincerely for him. She became certain that God heard her when she learned from the newspaper that this man had kissed the crucifix three times before his execution.

After this event, Teresa felt that God wanted her to enter the convent immediately. Without waiting for her to reach adulthood, and she began to take concrete steps in this direction. She managed to convince her father of her decision. But the provincial superior of the order and the local bishop were not convinced and advised her to wait.

One day, Thérèse saw among the pages of her prayer book a part of the image of the Crucified, a hand nailed to the cross, from which drops of blood fell: "I was struck by the sight of the blood flowing from the divine hand, and I felt great sadness at the thought of it falling to the ground, but no one picking it up!" Teresa testifies. Then she became aware of her place in life. She had to stand at the foot of the cross to collect the blood of the Redeemer and distribute it to all those it could purify.

Therese's request to the Pope to enter a convent

Thérèse of Lisieux, at the age of fifteen, after having participated in a pilgrimage to Rome, she managed to make herself understood by the Pope. She threw herself at his feet expressing her desire. To which Leo XIII replied that if it were indeed the will of God, she would enter the monastery. From this pilgrimage, Teresa acquired another conviction that would remain with her throughout her life: her particular vocation is to pray for the souls of priests.

During the pilgrimage, she was introduced to priests she had only seen in the altar area of the sanctuary. And in the confessional: 75 of the 200 French pilgrims were clergymen. During the interview preceding the pronunciation of her monastic vows, she said: "I came to save souls and especially to pray for priests.

It was for her constant prayers for priests (those who work in the missions) that Pope Pius XI proclaimed her heavenly patroness of missionaries and missions. Shortly after her return from her pilgrimage, Thérèse managed to obtain authorization from the ordinariate of her diocese. This meant that at the age of 15, she became a Carmelite nun at the monastery of Lisieux, where her two older sisters were already practicing.

The spiritual life of this daughter of Jesus

The young nun Teresa did not have an easy spiritual life in this convent. She was poor in human and intellectual gifts, dominated by a rigorous and moralistic spirituality with Jansenist overtones, that is, by the idea of God as a strict and inflexible judge who must be continually appeased by prayer and sacrifice. It is true that Teresa wrote about this: "I found life in the convent exactly as I had imagined it: no sacrifice surprised me...".

Teresa's first entry into the convent was also overshadowed by her father's serious illness, who even had to be placed in an asylum. Teresa commented: "Just as the venerable face of Christ darkened during the Passion, so the face of his servant must darken during the days of his pain." And one day she said to her sick father, "I will try to be your glory by becoming a great saint."

At the heart of her spirituality , Thérèse saw, on the one hand, the childhood of Jesus, requiring a simple and trusting abandonment to God. And on the other hand, the contemplation of his Passion, requiring belonging and sacrifice. She therefore asked to be called Sister of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face .

Demonstration of his love towards God

Teresa once explained her spiritual program as follows: "To remain children before God means to recognize our own nothingness. To expect everything from the good Lord , as a child expects everything from his father. Not to seek to change one's condition as one grows up... means never to attribute to oneself one's own good deeds... and never to fall into despair because of one's transgressions. For children often fall, but they are too young to have many bruises."

The positive, "active" pole of this image is that in a relationship with God only the love with which one abandons oneself to Him is significant. But if this love is authentic, everything in the world can be useful to express it, and from this point of view every little thing can be infinitely important. To express his love for his mother, a child can give her one of his toys. Of course, the mother does not need this toy per se. But anyway, the mother is touched by the child's attention and takes the gift very seriously.

Likewise, we have a thousand different ways of showing our love and appreciation for God: by giving Him a thousand small gifts, we can return to Him what He has given us, and He accepts our gifts, giving them new value and thus a relationship of mutual love between God and man is established, which characterizes the path that leads to holiness. It is by this "small path" that Thérèse of Lisieux joined the glorious cohort of spiritual mentors and teachers of the Church, becoming herself a "living teaching" and the "word of God" for our times.

Teresa's Monastic Life

Teresa's entire monastic life was serious and filled with tender love: patiently enduring the tiresome fiddling produced by one of the sisters during prayer ; not complaining when an inattentive neighbor splashes dirty water on her face while she is washing; gently eating the leftovers of food that no one else wants to eat; never showing that you are cold, because you cannot be a coward in the eyes of Him whom you love; obeying faithfully and joyfully, even when you involuntarily want to oppose it; treating with so much affection the sister who displeases you the most that it seems that you love her more than the others; folding the robes thrown away by the other sisters - in short, "not missing a single little sacrifice, looking, speaking, using every little thing and doing it with love."

Even one's weaknesses, omissions and small transgressions can be accepted by feeling like a child before God who constantly needs help, forgiveness and grace. At that time, the nuns were accustomed to sacrifice themselves "to divine Justice, to bear upon themselves all the punishments prepared for sinners." And such a consecration was considered in Carmel as the pinnacle of spirituality. And Teresa, at the age of 22, asked her superior for permission to sacrifice herself to the Merciful Love of God, which according to her was "a thousand times more demanding than justice."

She herself composed the formula of the dedication: “My God, I desire to love You and inspire You with love... but I feel my helplessness and ask You to be my holiness . As a sign of perfect love, I offer myself as a holocaust of Your merciful love, and I pray that You burn me to death... so that I may become a martyr of Your love, O my God!" For all this, what was common to Teresa was not a state of spiritual euphoria, but precisely a state of spiritual dryness: paradoxically, she was both happy because she loved God immensely and knew that he loved her immensely, and yet she felt no joy.

The death of the nun Thérèse of Lisieux

In her 24th year, she was struck down by pulmonary tuberculosis and died a year later. Having undergone in this last year of her life unusual physical suffering, serious spiritual and intellectual temptations; ("Into my mind penetrates the judgments of the most exalted materialists: The idea that in the future, thanks to progressive progress, science will find a natural explanation for everything. And that we will know the ultimate cause of all things, but for the moment it is only a mystery because there is still much to discover..."). The moral humiliation when she found herself involved in the highly publicized scandal of a provocation by Freemasons and anticlericals against the Church.

The abbot of the Carmelite province to which she belonged, a brilliant preacher known throughout France, had renounced the priesthood. He had married and become the founder of a Christian sect. It was with his intention that Teresa received her last communion of life... It was also during this last terrible year that Teresa completed her spiritual autobiography, which she had begun at the request of her mother superior. And which would later receive the title "The Story of a Single Soul".

In this book, Teresa tells of the great and varied desires that have always animated her heart. Until the day she realized that the Church is a Body in which all the members - and each of them has a role - act for the good of the whole. But this Body must also have a Heart, and her personal vocation is to be in this Heart, nourishing and supporting all vocations without exception. " In the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be love. "

The series of beatifications

Thérèse of the Child Jesus died on September 30, 1897 and was at the time an almost unknown nun. Although the monastery of Lisieux shared the firm conviction that she had gone to the Lord in a state of holiness. The abbess published The Story of a Soul with the funds of the monastery in a print run of two thousand copies. Against all expectations, this book was destined to be a resounding success. The distributions followed one after the other, the bishops and the great theologians of France expressing their admiration as well as ordinary readers. Very quickly, the book became popular in the Catholic world and among other Christian denominations.

Pope Pius X, who initiated the process of Therese's canonization , called her "the greatest saint of the New Age." Her intercession was invoked by hundreds of thousands of believers on the fields of World War I. And from 1915 to 1916, four million images of her were printed and distributed. In 1923, she was beatified by Pope Pius XI and on May 17, 1925, she was canonized as a saint. At that time, more than four thousand miracles were attributed to the intercession of Thérèse of Lisieux, and Pius XI called her "the star of my pontificate."

In 1929, in view of the growing number of pilgrimages to the saint's tomb, a magnificent basilica was built and consecrated in her name in Lisieux. Pope Pius XII proclaimed Saint Therese of the Child Jesus heavenly patroness of France, alongside Saint Joan of Arc. Pope John Paul II proclaimed her a teacher of the Church in 1997. The relics of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus are periodically exposed for veneration in different countries of the world. This invariably causes a large influx of believers, and not only Catholics. In 2000, the shrines of Saint Therese of Lisieux made a pilgrimage to the Catholic parishes of Russia.

Intercession and daily prayer

Great God, you call people close to you who expect nothing from themselves but hope for everything from you. Guide us on the path of humility and filiation that you showed to Saint Therese. Through her intercession , also complete our life in your glory and let us see your face. This is what we ask through Jesus Christ... Amen.

Lord, through Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, you wanted to communicate to us in a new and strong way that you are for us like a good father who does not let himself be embittered by the infidelity and guilt of us human beings. It is therefore easy for us to present our petitions to you:

    Guide your Church – its shepherds and all of God’s people – so that it can become a community that credibly lives and proclaims your Good News.
    Help us to accept one another in love, especially in the little things of daily life, and thus to live the following of Christ.
    Fill all Christians with missionary zeal, so that your kingdom of love and peace may spread and reach all peoples.
    To advise and help people in need and those who are sick in body or soul , those who seek and those who doubt.
Holy God, we thank you for giving us Saint Therese as a sister on our journey of life. Like her, fill us with confidence in you who live and reign forever and ever. Amen.

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The enthusiasm of this great Saint is expressed through her total trust in God. And her desire to share her experience of the encounter with God and all others. In a universal embrace of communion .