Thérèse of Lisieux

Thérèse Martin was born on January 2, 1873, in Alençon, France, the youngest of the nine children of Louis Martin and Zélie Guérin — five of whom survived to adulthood, all daughters. Both parents were deeply devout; both were canonized by Pope Francis in 2015. When Thérèse was four years old, her mother died of breast cancer. Her father moved the family to Lisieux to be near Zélie's relatives, and the city became the center of the family's life.

Three of Thérèse's four older sisters entered the Carmelite monastery in Lisieux before her. Thérèse had wanted to enter since childhood and, at fifteen, sought permission from her bishop and then from Pope Leo XIII himself during a family pilgrimage to Rome in 1887. Permission was eventually granted, and she entered the Carmel de Lisieux on April 9, 1888, at the age of fifteen. She made her religious profession on September 8, 1890, taking the name Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.

In her nine years at Carmel, she developed what she called her "Little Way" — a path of spiritual childhood and total trust in God's mercy, pursuing holiness not through heroic deeds but through small acts performed with great love. At the direction of her sister and prioress Pauline, she recorded her memories and spiritual reflections in what became her autobiography, Story of a Soul, published after her death. It became one of the most widely read Catholic books of the twentieth century.

Thérèse was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1896 and died at the Carmel on September 30, 1897, at the age of twenty-four. She was beatified by Pope Pius XI on April 29, 1923, and canonized on May 17, 1925. In 1927, Pius XI named her co-patron of the missions alongside Francis Xavier — a remarkable designation for a woman who never left France. Pope John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church in 1997, one hundred years after her death.