Louis Martin

Louis Joseph Aloys Stanislaus Martin was born on August 22, 1823, in Bordeaux, France, the son of a soldier in the post-Napoleonic army. His childhood was spent moving between garrison towns before the family settled in Alençon.

As a young man, Louis sought a life of religious consecration. He applied to enter the monastery of the Canons Regular of the Great Saint Bernard in Switzerland but was refused — he had not learned Latin, a requirement for admission. He returned to France, took up watchmaking, and opened his own shop in Alençon. He was a devoted Catholic: a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis, a regular at daily Mass, a man who spent hours before the Blessed Sacrament. He loved fishing and long pilgrimage walks.

He met Azélie-Marie Guérin on the Pont Saint-Léonard bridge in Alençon. They married on July 13, 1858, at the Basilica of Notre-Dame. Together they had nine children; four died young, including three sons in infancy and a daughter, Marie Hélène, at age five. The five daughters who survived all entered religious life — among them Marie-Françoise-Thérèse, who became Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

When Zélie died of breast cancer in 1877, Louis sold his business and moved the family to Lisieux in 1882 to be closer to his daughters' religious communities. In his later years he suffered a series of strokes and mental deterioration. From 1889 to 1892 he was cared for at the Bon Sauveur psychiatric institution in Caen — a suffering his daughter Thérèse described as his most painful trial, and one she offered for her own vocation.

He died on July 29, 1894, in Lisieux. He was beatified with Zélie by Pope Benedict XVI on October 19, 2008, and canonized by Pope Francis on October 18, 2015 — the first married couple in the history of the Church to be canonized together.