Welcome to The Way of the Fathers, a production of Catholic Culture. I’m Jim Papandrea. To support this podcast, go to catholicculture.org/donate.

Today we continue our series on the doctors of the church with Saint Therese of Lisieux. Now, going chronologically, the next doctor would be Saint John Henry Newman, but since he was just declared a doctor of the church about a year ago, we’ve already had our episodes on him at that time. To listen to those, look for Series 5, Episodes 23–25 of this podcast.

And so now we come to the doctor who lived most recently, though she follows Saint John Henry Newman by only about seven years. Saint John Henry Newman’s life spanned almost the whole 19th century. He died at the age of 89 in the year 1890. Saint Therese died at the age of only 24 in 1897. But there are, as of yet, no 20th-century doctors of the church. So, Saint Therese is our most recent and our fourth female doctor.

But that doesn’t mean we’re done with the doctors of the church, because if you’ve been following from the beginning of this, the fifth series in The Way of the Fathers podcast, you know that we actually began the series at the end of the early church period with the Venerable Bede. So, next month, we get to go back to the start of it all and pick up with the earliest doctors of the church, those who are both doctors and early church fathers.

Saint Therese of Lisieux is called the Little Flower and Saint Therese of the Child Jesus. And in spite of the fact that she only lived to be 24, she actually wrote more than a few of our other doctors. Many people only know her for her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, and they might think that’s all she wrote. Or all the talk about her being an exemplar of childlike faith might make people wonder why she’s a doctor of the church. Rest assured, by the time I’m done, you won’t have any doubts.

For historical context, we’ve jumped ahead about a hundred years from Saint Alphonsus Liguori. It’s now after the US Civil War and just after the First Vatican Council. Born in 1873, Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin was the youngest of nine children. You can see that her first name was actually Mary. In fact, all nine of the kids, even the boys, were named Mary. So it’s obvious why they didn’t go by their first names.

Therese almost didn’t make it to her third month of life. At just two months old, she was actually given to live with a nurse for a year. I guess that was the 19th-century version of a neonatal ICU. But the sacrifice paid off. She recovered and returned home healthy, at least as far as anyone could tell. But her mother would later notice that sometimes she could hear Therese’s heartbeat, implying that there was something abnormal there. So some speculate that perhaps she had a lifelong chronic heart defect.

It was a very disciplined household where little Therese learned early on to be obedient, though her mother and others admitted that she could be mischievous. She was described as having a heart of gold, but often stubborn; very intelligent, but sometimes obstinate. Both of her parents had their own small businesses. Her father was a watchmaker and her mother was a lacemaker. Her mother’s lace business did so well that her father retired from watchmaking to help manage and direct sales for the lace business. Both her parents attended daily Mass and set an example of generosity to the poor. And both of her parents are now canonized saints, Saint Louis Martin and Saint Marie-Azélie, or Zélie, Martin.

But Saint Therese’s mother died when she was only four years old, and that’s when the family moved to Lisieux to be closer to relatives. The loss of her mother seems to have turned her from precocious to very serious. An older sister took over as the mother figure in her life and taught her to pray. But when she was eight years old, she was sent to school at the local Benedictine Abbey, which was difficult for her. And a year after that, that same older sister, to whom she clung as to a mother, entered the Carmelite convent.

All of this was a lot of loss for her young spirit to take. But although she was very young, she was also very intelligent. And so all of this loss seems to be what gave her more of an eternal, big-picture perspective than most adults have, let alone children. From this time on, she would always see things in light of eternity, and she would always look forward to going to heaven, with a confidence that even a lot of very mature people don’t have.

She almost got her wish to go to heaven because she became very sick with some unknown illness that included hallucinations and convulsions. The family prayed for her, of course, and asked Our Lady for her intercession. At the lowest point, when they thought Therese was going to die, her sisters knelt in front of a statue of the Blessed Virgin and prayed. When Therese looked at the statue, she saw it move, and she saw Mother Mary smiling at her. And she got better.

Therese would later say that she believed the illness was caused by the devil who was trying to kill her. She would continue to suffer from severe headaches, so much so that she had to quit the Benedictine school and have a private tutor at home.

At the age of 14, Therese was already anxious to enter the Carmelite convent, where two of her biological sisters had already gone before her, and where one sister, that sister who was for a while like a mother to her, would eventually become the mother superior of the convent. But at fourteen she was too young, and so she worked for a while teaching the catechism to poor children.

At the age of fifteen she couldn’t wait any longer, and so she begged her father, who had taken up a kind of religious life of his own, though at home, and she begged him to let her enter the convent. He was at first reluctant to give up his youngest, but soon he relented. To mark the moment, he gave her a little white flower, because she was going to be transplanted from his home to the convent. She kept that flower for the rest of her short life, and this is one of our names for her, the Little Flower.

But 15 years old is still too young to enter the convent. She needed special permission. So the family set out on a pilgrimage, which would end in Rome, where she could ask the Holy Father for permission. This was Pope Leo XIII, and Therese did get to meet the Pope and ask for his permission to enter the convent.

The Pope said she had to obey her superiors, and she pushed it back on him, saying, “If you say yes, they will have to agree.” But he wasn’t having it. He blessed her and said, “If God wills it, you will enter,” which turned out to be a lesson about obedience before entering the convent. The once stubborn girl doesn’t get to just go right to the top, circumventing her immediate superiors like her own bishop. So she, like everyone, has to submit herself to those to whom she must be obedient.

So she had to go back to her bishop for the permission she wanted. The bishop did give his permission, but said that the final word about exactly when she could enter the convent would be up to the mother superior there. So again, deferring to the one who would be her authority once she entered. Incidentally, the mother superior was not yet her biological sister.

So in 1888, when she was still just 15, she entered the convent as a postulant. The mother superior at the time was a bit like a drill sergeant, always correcting Therese, though it was because she saw great potential in her. When Therese was shown to her cell on that first day, she said, “I am here forever.” And she never regretted that decision, even though it was not always easy. Life in the convent was hard, and it was often very cold in the convent.

But the next year, she became a novice. The following year, when she hoped to make her permanent profession, she was told to wait, and again she had to make a decision to submit her will to her superiors. But she had learned that lesson. Ironically, then, when the way was clear for her to make her profession, it was then that she had some doubts. She confided in her superiors, and they reassured her. Her religious name would be Sister Therese of the Child Jesus.

But even after her profession, some doubts returned. Not so much doubts about her vocation, but doubts about the faith. She went through a time of spiritual dryness in prayer, when prayer and meditation, and even her beloved rosary, seemed tedious, like she was going through the motions. Now, according to Saint John of the Cross, these can be signs that a person is taking the next step toward contemplative prayer, and I think it’s safe to assume that she did become a contemplative. Some even say that she was a mystic, referring to a moment of spiritual ecstasy that she described once while making the Stations of the Cross.

In any case, she described the next five years as a time of suffering in silence, putting on a happy face for the sisters, but experiencing headaches, nerve pain, nausea when standing for long periods, and chronic fatigue. During this time, there was an epidemic of influenza. Now remember, this was before the flu virus was even discovered, let alone antiviral medicine. Almost everyone in the convent became gravely ill, and some died. Therese was, perhaps for the first and only time, one of the healthiest of the sisters, and she and a few others took care of the sick and dying.

After this time, in 1896, when she was 23, she was put in charge of the novices, and for the rest of her life, which was only to be about another year and a half, she was a great source of mentorship and inspiration to not only the novices, but to all her sisters.

At some point, she and one or more of the sisters became devoted to the Holy Face of Jesus. Now, this comes from the image of Jesus’ face associated with the relic of Veronica’s veil, but it would soon also be associated with the image of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin as well. For Therese, though, it was the face of the suffering servant from Isaiah chapter 53.

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity, and as one from whom others hide their faces. He was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases. Yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.

So the wounded face of Jesus on the cross was where Saint Therese found her inspiration to endure her suffering. And so she and a few of the sisters requested permission to add to their religious names, and Therese became Sister Therese of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face.

Her suffering increased over time, and I’ll spare you the details, but she had contracted tuberculosis. Now she knew that she was going to heaven soon, and far from being down about her illness, she was actually excited about finally going to be with Jesus.

During her final illness, she said that God was allowing her to experience what people with no faith experience, what people whose consciences are weighed down with sin experience, and even what people who have suicidal thoughts experience. Now, to be clear, she never considered committing suicide, but she said that she could relate to those who did. She knew what it was like to have nothing to count on except the merciful love of God. And she said, “God is nothing but mercy and love.” And so she’s called the doctor of merciful love.

During this time, she even had more doubts, but she responded to them by doubling down on her prayers. And she is one of the great examples of holy suffering in our beautiful tradition. Now, I personally can’t claim that I’ve suffered much, but in my experience of observing those who suffer, I’ve seen people let their suffering drive them away from God, and I’ve seen people let their suffering drive them closer to God.

If you, as you listen to this, are suffering, I don’t know what you’re going through, but Saint Therese does, and I can only encourage you to, like her, double down on your prayers and let your pain drive you into the arms of the God who is nothing but mercy and love.

Well, Saint Therese continued her work in the convent as long as she could, but she was finally bedridden in 1897, with just a few months to live. Of course, they didn’t know how to treat tuberculosis yet, and so the things they did to her actually made her suffering even worse. But it’s said she kept her sense of humor right up to the end. She said that she was at peace, and she never complained. And most important for her, she offered up all of her suffering for the salvation of souls.

The last words she wrote in her autobiography were, “I fly to him through confidence and love.” She died with her sisters around her, holding her crucifix and with a smile on her face, looking at that same statue of the Blessed Virgin that had once smiled at her. After her death, the many miracles began immediately, with someone who touched her body being healed of an illness.

Now, although there were many problems in the world at the time, not least the same theological liberalism that Saint John Henry Newman opposed, Saint Therese was not responding to any particular heresy or addressing any current events. In fact, her life was one of intentionally staying out of all that. And she shows us how it’s possible to be detached from the world and not distracted by it.

Now, of course, some people are called to be apologists. Some are called to confront injustice or heresy or sin. But she shows us that this is not necessarily required of all of us. It is possible to be a contemplative who avoids controversy for the sake of prayer. Now, this doesn’t mean that being a contemplative exempts one from doing the works of mercy in the world, but it’s not as though being up on current events and always having an opinion about everything is a requirement for being a Christian.

In spite of her mischievous spirit, her confessor would say that Saint Therese had never in her life committed a mortal sin. But she thought of herself as a sinner. She believed that Jesus had saved her from sin proactively, that she would have been more of a sinner, but rather than forgive her after giving into temptation, she believed that Jesus had chosen to protect her from the temptation.

Now, we might think that’s strange, or we might think that perhaps she’s applying to herself what should only be ascribed to Our Lady. But what she’s really doing is expressing gratitude for the fact that she believed her life was relatively free of temptation. It’s a “there but for the grace of God go I” kind of thing.

So, far from looking down on sinners, she believed it was her gratitude for being saved from a lot of sin that led her to have such a heart for other people who really were sinners, and it motivated her to pray for their salvation. So, like many saints who don’t have too many of their own sins to worry about, she became intensely worried about other people’s salvation.

Along with one of her biological sisters, who was also a Carmelite sister, she prayed for a man who was awaiting execution, but who refused to repent or allow a priest to hear his confession. If you know the story, this is the famous story of the infamous murderer Henri Pranzini.

Saint Therese prayed for his soul, and at the last minute before the guillotine, Pranzini grabbed the crucifix from the attending priest and kissed the wounds of Christ. When Saint Therese heard about this, she knew her prayers for his salvation were answered.

Now, there’s more to the story that people don’t often talk about, like the fact that Pranzini was not even a Christian, let alone Catholic. But the point of these events for Saint Therese, and I would argue for us as well, is this: The life of prayer is a legitimate vocation and mission.

Our religious, who live cloistered in communities separated from the world, they’re not escaping from the world as some kind of cop-out. They have set themselves apart for the mission of prayer. And prayer can save souls, even when the person who prays has never met the person who needs salvation.

So, Saint Therese was intentional about her vocation. It would be one in which she would be a missionary by praying for the missionaries, and she would support the clergy by praying for them as well, and she would be an evangelist; she would save souls from a distance by her intercession.

Pope Saint Pius X, even before she was canonized, said that Therese was the greatest saint of modern times. Pope Pius XI canonized her in the year 1925, and Pope Pius XII said that she had rediscovered the heart of the gospel. Pope Saint John Paul II would remark that her holiness was recognized by the Church in the space of a few years. She was canonized less than 28 years after her death.

And just before her death, Saint Therese herself had said that when she got to heaven, it was then that her real mission could begin, the mission of bringing souls to God through the Little Way, through her intercession, from a distance, as it were. And I’m going to say more about the Little Way in the next episode.

Like many contemplatives, she thought of herself as a spouse of Jesus, but she also saw herself as a mother to souls by her intercession for their salvation. Officially, she is the patron of all missions along with Saint Francis Xavier and co-patron of France along with Saint Joan of Arc.

Pope Saint John Paul II also called her a patron of spiritual writers and, as the youngest doctor, a patron of young people. She is a model for young people because, in his words, she reached the maturity of holiness in the prime of youth.

Her feast day is October 1st, and her tomb can be visited in the Chapel of the Carmelites in the same Carmelite convent where she lived and died in Lisieux, France.

Next time on The Way of the Fathers: the legacy of Saint Therese of Lisieux. Thanks for listening.

Dr. James Papandrea is a senior fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and a Catholic member of the faculty at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. A theological consultant for EWTN’s series The Heresies, he is also the writer and presenter for The Original Church series on YouTube. See full bio.

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