Sacred Calendar

Fourth Lesson - She Would Refuse God Nothing

Teresa of the Child Jesus was born at Alencon in France of honorable parents distinguished by singular and constant piety toward God. From her earliest years, preveniently moved by the Holy Spirit, she desired to lead the religious life. She earnestly promised that she would refuse God nothing He seemed to ask of her, and she strove faithfully to keep this promise until death. Having lost her mother in her fifth year, she entrusted herself wholly to God's providence under the watchful care of her most loving father and elder sisters. With them as her teachers, Teresa rejoiced to run the way of perfection like a giant. At nine years of age she was entrusted for education to the Benedictine nuns at Lisieux, where she appeared to excel in the knowledge of divine things. In her tenth year a mysterious and grave illness long tormented her. As she herself relates, she was divinely delivered through the help of the Blessed Virgin, who appeared to her smiling and whom she had sought to invoke in a novena under the title of Our Lady of Victory. Then, filled with angelic fervor, she took the greatest care to prepare herself for the sacred banquet in which Christ is received.

Fifth Lesson - Sacrifice for the Church and Souls

When she was first refreshed by the Eucharistic Bread, she seemed to draw from it an insatiable hunger for this heavenly food. Hence, as if inspired, she asked Jesus to turn every worldly consolation into bitterness for her. Burning thereafter with most tender love for Christ the Lord and for the Church, she desired nothing more urgently than to enter the Order of Discalced Carmelites, so that by self-denial and her sacrifices she might assist priests, missionaries, and the whole Church, and win innumerable souls for Christ Jesus. When already near death, she promised that she would continue this work before God. On account of her youth she encountered many difficulties in embracing the religious life; overcoming them with incredible strength of soul, she happily entered the Carmel of Lisieux at fifteen years of age. There God disposed wonderful ascents in Teresa's heart. Imitating the hidden life of the Virgin Mary, she brought forth, like a watered garden, the flowers of every virtue, but especially an eminent charity toward God and neighbor.

Sixth Lesson - Littleness That Offers Everything

That she might please the Most High more perfectly, when she had read in Sacred Scripture the admonition, "If anyone is little, let him come to me," she desired to be little in spirit and therefore entrusted herself forever with filial confidence to God as to a most loving Father. She taught others this way of spiritual childhood according to the doctrine of the Gospel, especially the novices whom obedience assigned her to form in the pursuit of the religious virtues. Thus filled with apostolic zeal, she opened to a world swollen with pride and enamored of vanity the way of evangelical simplicity. Jesus her Spouse inflamed her completely with the desire to suffer in both soul and body. Moreover, perceiving the love of God everywhere neglected, she was pierced with the deepest sorrow and, two years before her death, offered herself as a victim to God's merciful Love. Then, as she herself relates, she was wounded by a flame of heavenly fire. Consumed by charity and rapt in ecstasy, she fervently repeated, "My God, I love Thee," and at twenty-four years of age, on September 30, 1897, flew to her Spouse. Received into heaven, she truly fulfilled and continues daily to fulfill through innumerable miracles her dying promise to send down upon earth an unending shower of roses. Pope Pius XI enrolled her among the Blessed Virgins and, two years later during the great Jubilee, solemnly numbered her among the Saints and constituted and declared her the special Patroness of all Missions.