Meet St. Thérèse of Lisieux Off the Record Barbara Stinson Lee

On page 6 of this issue Pope Benedict XVI talks about saints. He was speaking to his audience about what makes a saint – holiness and sanctity – and he encouraged everyone to try to be a saint. He mentioned that these summer months are just the right time to pick up a book, the biography or the autobiography of a saint. Oddly, I had just done that. I picked up Conrad de Meester’s new revised edition of “With Empty Hands,” a well written biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. In fact, “With Empty Hands” prompted me to pick up St. Thérèse’s autobiography, “Story of a Soul.”

Last week’s Intermountain Catholic also ran a little wire story about the parents of St. Thérèse. Pope Benedict has approved the beatification of St. Thérès’s parents, Louis and Marie Zélie Guerin Martin. The couple will be beatified Oct. 19, World Mission Sunday, during a Mass in the Basilica of St. Thérèse in Lisieux, France. Louis and Marie Zélie Guerin had nine children, five of whom joined religious orders. Louis was a watchmaker and Marie made lace.

“With Empty Hands” is the way Thérèse said she always wanted to meet God – with hands empty and open to him. Having had limited education, Thérèse followed two of her sisters, Pauline and Marie, into the Carmel at Lisieux. She entered religious life at the young age of 15. She was not overly influenced by her sisters (the third girl in the family, Léonie became a Visitandine sister). De Meester wrote that Thérèse was drawn to religious life by her “dream ideal... The ideal that had captivated the youngest Martin sister was neither an ideology nor an object, but a human being unlike any other. It was Jesus himself. Thérèse aspired to love Jesus passionately, with all her heart.”

Thérèse chose holiness early. She had chosen sanctity as her ideal at the age of nine. Even before she entered religious life (she and her father travelled to Rome so she could ask the pope if she could enter even earlier. He refused.) she had developed a remarkable relationship with Jesus.

“This little saint who, once she took up the religious life, never set foot outside the cloister, teaches us that we can all be apostles and missionaries in our God-given vocation,” De Meester wrote. “Wherever we find ourselves. Simply by our charity, prayer, and the cross of our everyday lives...”

Thérèse always saw herself as little, and she never wanted to be anything but little.

Her life in Carmel was short. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 24, but not before writing three major manuscripts that explained her remarkable relationship with God and how it developed. In 1992, Pope John Paul II named her a doctor of the church.

The little saint with empty hands was great summer reading.