St. Thérèse of Lisieux

Who they were

Thérèse Martin was born in Alençon in Normandy, the youngest of nine children, five of whom survived. Her mother died when she was four. She entered the Carmelite monastery at Lisieux at fifteen, after petitioning her way up through a bishop and eventually to the pope during an audience, where she was told to be quiet and was carried out by guards. She got in anyway.

She lived nine years as a Carmelite and died of tuberculosis at twenty-four. Externally almost nothing happened. She never founded anything, never travelled, never held office, and was not widely known outside her monastery during her life.

What she left was a manuscript, written under obedience to her prioress, published after her death as Story of a Soul. In it she describes what she called her little way: the conviction that holiness is not reserved for people capable of heroic acts, and that small things done with love are not a lesser version of the spiritual life but the actual substance of it. The book spread with unusual speed.

She also wrote, in her last eighteen months, about a loss of any felt sense of God, describing a darkness in which the thought of heaven brought her nothing. That section is often omitted from popular accounts. It is a large part of why people who feel nothing when they pray find her trustworthy.

She was canonized in 1925, named a patron of the missions despite never leaving France, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997.

Why people turn to St. Thérèse of Lisieux

People turn to Thérèse for the small daily struggles because that is precisely what she wrote about, and because she is one of the few saints whose recorded interior life includes long stretches of feeling nothing at all. The custom of asking her for a rose as a sign comes from a promise attributed to her about spending her heaven doing good on earth. Roses are a devotional custom rather than a guarantee, and treating one as a required answer misses what she actually taught.

How to ask their intercession

Ask her plainly, about something small if that is what you have. Her whole argument is that the small thing is not beneath asking about. She is also the one to ask when prayer has gone flat and you are continuing without any sense that it matters, because she wrote a great deal about doing exactly that.