5.45 St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Doctor of The Little Way

By Dr. James Papandrea ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 28, 2026 | In Way of the Fathers (Podcast)

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St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873—1897) is the youngest Doctor of the Church, but wrote more than some of the other Doctors. She has been called a doctor for the new millennium, and offers a striking contrast from our culture’s obsession with being rich and famous, by giving us an example of holiness as seeking to be poor and anonymous.

Links

The writings of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (The Institute of Carmelite Studies)—https://www.icspublications.org/search?type=product&q=Lisieux

The Story of a Soul—From St. Thérèse’s Original Notes—https://ascensionpress.com/products/story-of-a-soul-the-autobiography-of-st-therese-of-lisieux-catholic-classics

OR: https://www.icspublications.org/products/story-of-a-soul-the-autobiography-of-st-therese-of-lisieux

Her Last Conversations—https://www.icspublications.org/products/st-therese-of-lisieux-her-last-conversations

Pope St. John Paul II, Apostolic Letter The Science of Divine Love (1997)—https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1997/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19101997_divini-amoris.html

Dr. Papandrea’s Homepage: https://jimpapandrea.wordpress.com/

Dr. Papandrea’s latest book—Praying the Wisdom: Inspired Prayers for Lectio Divina and Contemplative Prayer: https://sophiainstitute.com/product/praying-the-wisdom/

Dr. Papandrea’s YouTube channel, The Original Church: https://www.youtube.com/@TheOriginalChurch

Theme Music: Gaudeamus (Introit for the Feast of All Saints), sung by Jeff Ostrowski. Courtesy of Corpus Christi Watershed: https://www.ccwatershed.org/

TRANSCRIPT:

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 our second episode on St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, and the youngest Doctor of the Church.

Bishop Patrick Ahern, who championed the cause of St. Thérèse of Lisieux to be named a Doctor of the Church, said of her that, “She is the amazing saint whom God sent to light up the dark sky of the 20th century,” and, “Thérèse is a saint for the next millennium.” So, even though we don’t have any 20th century Doctors of the Church yet, we have St.

Thérèse of Lisieux, who passed into what she called her real mission, that is, as an intercessor in heaven, just a few years before the turn of the 20th century, and who continues to be a saint for our confusing and distracting times. Even though she lived in a convent, she was not sheltered from suffering, and even though she didn’t have a lot of major temptations, she did struggle with great doubts right up to the end of her life, and she persevered in the faith because she was determined to, not because things were easy for her.

Of course, she would say it was the help of God’s grace that she could not have done it alone, but she also said that in the times of her worst doubts, even about eternal life, it was then that she prayed the most Acts of Faith. For her, praying Acts of Faith was in some sense also an act of defiance against the doubts.

It was a real, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief,” situation. As a saint, we tend to automatically think of her as extraordinary, but really she’s a saint and a doctor because she was ordinary, and she found a way of life of holiness in the ordinary, a way that ordinary people can follow. Her most famous book is, of course, The Story of a Soul, her autobiography.

There are actually two different versions of it. The first to be published shortly after her death was the result of the editing of St. Therese’s biological sister, who by this time was the mother superior of the convent. St. Therese gave her sister her notes, which she thought were imperfect, and gave her sister permission to edit them and even add to them from her own memory.

But St. Therese never actually intended to write it as a book for publication. It was written in three separate sections at three different times for the sisters of the convent at their Frequest. They wanted her life story, but they also wanted a written record of the things that Jesus had revealed to her.

Toward the end of her life, she tried to finish it, to bring it up to the present day, but by then she was too sick to do it, and so she never really finished it. And this is the version that was edited and brought to publication by her sister, and it’s been translated into over sixty languages. But again, Therese never thought it would be read by anyone other than the sisters in her convent.

So in it, she is completely transparent. And so it’s refreshingly free of all the explanations and justifications that you normally get in an autobiography. Actually, it reads more like St. Augustine’s Confessions than like a modern autobiography. Well, eventually, people wanted to see her original version.

So more recently, another edition was created directly from St. Therese’s notes. And there are many versions out there of the edited edition, so it’s very easy to find. But I’ll note in the description which edition of the autobiography is the one made from her original notes. The power of The Story of a Soul is in the fact that anyone can read it.

It’s very accessible to everyone at any level of spirituality. And yet it’s very profound. And I dare say it will bring anyone who reads it closer to God, who is mystery, but without feeling like you’re reading a mystical text. Unlike many of our doctors, St. Therese did not write as a scholar. She wrote as a simple person who had received wisdom not from education and study, but directly from God as spiritual insight, often coming to her through times of great trial in suffering and in doubt.

But the fact that it was not written by a scholar, per se, is one of the reasons it’s so accessible to everyone. It’s written by, and she would call herself, an ordinary soul, which makes it so relevant for the rest of us ordinary souls. In addition to her autobiography, she wrote prayers and poems and plays, and there are books out there of each of these.

Apparently, within the convent, they put on plays for certain feast days. And St. Thérèse was the house playwright and director, and it seems she often had the leading roles as well. There’s a great photo of her in costume as St. Joan of Arc, who wasn’t actually canonized yet at that time, but who was nevertheless the subject of not one but two of St.

Thérèse’s plays. And in the scene where Joan of Arc is martyred, St. Thérèse wrote herself into the role, already knowing that she was dying and seeing her own suffering as a kind of martyrdom which she was happy to suffer for her Lord. Some of her plays were apparently even musicals. The dialogue was interspersed with phrases of verse to be sung to the tunes of folk songs.

Another important book is her Conversations. This is actually a book of her sayings written down by her sister, the Mother Superior, in the last few months of her life. The collection was published as her Last Words, but now goes by the title of Her Last Conversations. And then later, another one of her biological sisters, who was also her sister in the convent, published her memoir called My Sister St.

Therese. St. Therese also wrote many letters of spiritual direction. And as we’ve seen with some of our other doctors, her conviction is that everyone is called to grow in holiness. Holiness is not something that’s only for the monastics. Holiness is for everyone. And for St. Therese, the way to holiness is what she called the Little Way, and she believed that if she could follow this way, anyone could.

The full name for St. Therese’s core message is The Little Way of Spiritual Childhood. Now, what is the Little Way? Well, remember that Christianity was first called The Way even before it was called Christianity. Christians were called followers of The Way even before they were called Christians. So this is not a special method for prayer or anything like that.

It’s a way of life. It’s a whole lifestyle. The heart of the Little Way is simplicity and humility, a life lived in contentment with not being rich and famous, but the opposite, being poor and anonymous. It’s the way of finding happiness in being small and hidden away and in being content with not self-sufficiency, but complete dependence on God.

In her words, “Desiring to be unknown and counted as nothing.” She said, “I desired that, like the face of Jesus, my face be truly hidden and that no one on Earth would know me.” Needless to say, that will not get you clicks on your YouTube channel, and we, in our world of social media narcissism, should be humbled by this.

Even when it came to teaching, St. Therese emphasized what Jesus said when he prayed, “I thank you, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” One of her biological sisters remarked about her, quote, “microscopic acts of virtue.”

Others have called her a miniature version of the Blessed Virgin, a reference to that line in the Magnificat, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” Dorothy Day would compare Saint Therese and her little way to the atom.

The atom is small, but has great power. Saint Therese had this great analogy of the kaleidoscope. When she was little, she had a kaleidoscope that she loved to look through. She found great joy in the colors and shapes, and she thought it was remarkably beautiful, always creating something new and surprising.

It amazed her. But at some point, she figured out that the colors and shapes were just scraps of paper and cloth. What made them beautiful was that inside the tube, there were three mirrors. And for her, those three mirrors became an analogy for the Trinity, taking the simplest created things, even imperfect pieces of things, and making them beautiful by adding symmetry and, and making something complete out of the scraps.

That’s what God does with us, scraps though we are. And all of this dovetails with what we’ve seen from other doctors and saints, that concept of total submission to the will of God, fulfilling the simplest duties of the faith in humility, not expecting anything more, and trusting God completely for the end results.

Now, just to give you a little sample of her poetry, this is from one of her poems, which is also a prayer. “You who know my extreme littleness, you are not afraid to lower yourself to me. Come into my heart, O white host that I love. Come into my heart, it longs for you. I wish that your goodness would let me die of love after this favor.

Jesus, hear the cry of my affliction. Come into my heart.” Now that reference to the white host is a reference to the sacramental host, and she wrote this in anticipation of her last communion before she died. St. Therese is definitely one of those saints, perhaps like St. Catherine of Siena, who is very focused on the love of God.

And let me just pause here to note how that phrase, the love of God, is intentionally ambiguous, even in Scripture. It means God’s love for us, but it also means our love for God. For St. Therese, to love God first means being supremely grateful for God’s love for us and for everything that comes to us, since everything, she said, is grace.

So there’s no room for complaining about anything. And then it means loving God in return. And a big part of that is what we would call paying it forward. In other words, since God doesn’t need anything from us, one of the primary ways we love God is by loving our neighbors. St. Therese talks about the new commandment that Jesus gave his disciples on the night of the institution of the Eucharist when he washed their feet.

She says, earlier, people had asked him about the greatest commandment, and after loving God above all else, he said, love your neighbor as yourself. But the new commandment goes beyond that. Now he’s not just saying, love your neighbor the way you love yourself. Now he’s saying, love your neighbor the way he, Jesus, loves them, even when they seem unlovable.

Pope St. John Paul II wrote that the core of her message is actually the mystery itself of the love of God. He went on to say, at the root, on the subject’s part, is the experience of being the Father’s adoptive children in Jesus. This is the most authentic meaning of spiritual childhood. At the root again, and standing before us, is our neighbor, others, for whose salvation we must collaborate with and in Jesus, with the same merciful love as his.

Therese understood that the 19th century person, following her contemporaries like Freud and Nietzsche, were looking for love in all the wrong places, to quote the song. St. Therese gives us a model for finding love in the right places. And of course, we still needed that in the 20th century, and we still need it in the 21st.

What it comes down to is trusting in providence to such an extent that one can let go of entitlement and self-promotion, being grateful to God to such an extent that one lets go of willfulness and complaining, and one is content to be small and do all the small things faithfully. She knew she would never do great things, so she was determined to do small things all for the love of God.

And then, in the true definition of irony, it turned out she did great things and continues to do great things through her intercession. And she would say that this is what Jesus meant when he said we should be poor in spirit. To be poor in spirit is to be poor in will, that is, weak of self-will and completely submitted to the divine will, even if, or especially if, the divine will is for us to be one of the weaker members of the body.

And so she famously wrote, Jesus does not demand great actions from us, but simply surrender and gratitude. So, far from being simplistic, St. Therese’s writings have been praised for not only her childlike simplicity, but also, quote, the depth of her doctrine and the clarity and simplicity with which she expresses it.

And interestingly, she did it all without writing against anyone or anything, because she was just writing about her own experience. Now, the story of St. Thérèse being declared a Doctor of the Church is interesting. It didn’t begin within the walls of the Vatican. Maybe she didn’t even seem like an obvious choice at first to many people.

The whole thing began with the grassroots of the laity and theologians, especially those who were disciples of St. Thérèse through her writings. After St. Thérèse died and people started reading The Story of a Soul, letters started coming into the convent in Lisieux. Within a very short time, they were getting fifty letters a day and more, telling how the intercession of St.

Thérèse had helped them or healed them. And she was canonized in the shortest time of any saint since they started the current canonization process. And within just a few years after her canonization, by about nineteen thirty-two, people started talking about the possibility of declaring her a Doctor of the Church.

But now remember that at that time, there were no female Doctors of the Church yet. But it turns out that earlier, in nineteen twenty-three, people had started calling for St. Teresa of Ávila to be declared a Doctor of the Church. But the pope at that time, Pius XI, had declined to do so. So when St. Thérèse was canonized, and then people began talking about her as a Doctor of the Church, well, it seemed like she could not be given that honor when her predecessor in the Carmelites had not.

But once Sts. Teresa of Ávila and Catherine of Siena were declared Doctors of the Church in nineteen seventy, it opened the door for the process to begin for St. Thérèse. So by the time of the centennial of St. Thérèse’s passing, Catholics in at least eleven different countries had begun petitioning their national conferences of bishops.

In nineteen ninety-three, the US bishops sent a letter to all the other national conferences, and it was as though the whole Catholic world called for St. Thérèse to be declared a Doctor of the Church. Pope St. John Paul II answered that call and proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church in nineteen ninety-seven, one hundred years after her death.

And I’ll include a link in the description to his apostolic letter, The Science of Divine Love. It is said that St. Thérèse was the one saint most frequently referenced during the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council, and some argue that her teachings were instrumental in shaping some of the documents from the council.

And she is quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church more than any other woman. It seems to be the consensus among everyone who reads St. Thérèse that she continues to speak to our times, even though she lived and died over a century ago, although that is actually not that much in the big picture since she is our most recent doctor.

So in the interest of pointing out some contemporary relevance, I already mentioned that she preferred to be poor and anonymous. She also preferred to be silent, even when wronged. She said that even if you feel that you have a legitimate grievance, quote, Never speak about any unpleasant situation, even to our mother, for the sole purpose of having it remedied.

Open your heart rather through a spirit of duty and detachment of soul. Whenever you realize that you are not in this frame of mind, it would be better to wait until your soul is at peace. To speak out, even when it is only a tiny spark of resentment that you feel, will only serve to add fuel to the fire.

In other words, no matter how much you feel you might have been wronged, never speak out in anger or resentment. Wait until you cool down and you can speak from a place of peace. And by the way, that may take great patience. With our culture so obsessed with self-promotion and with the kind of entitlement that causes us to go off in anger at people in other cars or at that poor customer service agent on the phone or behind the counter, St.

Thérèse would say, slow down, be quiet, and accept that everything comes to you as a gift from God. It might not be immediately obvious how obstacles or inconveniences or even suffering and doubts can be gifts from divine providence. But if it’s not immediately obvious, all the more reason to wait to speak.

And we should also not forget that her parents are saints. And I think this is important that we have a married couple as canonized saints who give us an example of not only the vocation of holy matrimony, but also parenthood. After all, all four of their daughters entered religious life. Finally, St.

Thérèse had a special devotion to the Feast of the Annunciation. That was the day she chose to enter the convent, and she was very conscious of the fact that it is the day of Jesus’ conception, when he was at his smallest. And this should remind us to be concerned for the smallest among us, the baby in the womb.

Since the Word became flesh, that is, became human at his conception, surely we can see that all people are to be protected from conception. So, I think the entry point for anyone wanting to read St. Thérèse is pretty obvious. You want to begin with The Story of a Soul. If you haven’t read it yet, you really should.

And then I would go to her Conversations, the sayings of her last few months. The Institute of Carmelite Studies is a great resource for all things Carmelite, from St. Teresa of Avila to St. John of the Cross to St. Thérèse, and so I’ll include all those links in the description. And I’ll close with a prayer for the intercession of St.

Thérèse. St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, whom Almighty God has raised up to aid and inspire the human family, for all those listening, pray that Jesus will grant us the grace of a childlike faith, simple and humble faithfulness in the small things, with no ambitions of things beyond our calling, and that we will reject all temptations to lift ourselves up, and that we will be content with whatever God has for us.

And for all those listening who are suffering, pray that Jesus will turn his face to them and give them the gift of hope and peace. Amen. Next time, on The Way of the Fathers, we go back to the beginning, to the early church, and to the earliest of the doctors of the church, St. Irenaeus of Lyon. Thanks for listening.