Saints› Thérèse of Lisieux
October 1
Thérèse of Lisieux
Theresia a Iesu Infante
1873–1897, France
Born Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin in Alençon, France, the youngest of nine children in a family that has itself been canonized in part (her parents Louis and Zélie Martin are also saints). After her mother’s early death she was raised by her elder sisters and her father, all eventually entering religious life themselves.
Thérèse entered the Carmelite monastery in Lisieux at fifteen, after a personal appeal to Pope Leo XIII during a pilgrimage to Rome. She lived only nine years in religious life, dying of tuberculosis at twenty-four. Her superior had ordered her, on obedience, to write down her recollections; the manuscripts became Histoire d’une âme, published a year after her death.
The book made her one of the most-read Catholic authors of the twentieth century. Her “little way” — the conviction that holiness is not the work of grand gestures but of small acts of love offered with great love — has shaped popular Catholic piety more than any other single text since the Imitation of Christ. She was named Doctor of the Church in 1997.