Thérèse of Lisieux

Today is the Memorial of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), a figure from the Catholic tradition all too easy to sentimentalize about and thereby fail to appreciate her remarkable achievement. At the end of the nineteenth century amid a secularizing culture in Europe, a French girl from a small town in Normandy led a short, tragic, and holy life in a cloistered convent, leaving behind a spiritual classic that Charles Taylor notes in A Secular Age illustrates the possibility of religious faith amid moden disbelief (p. 765 and p. 850, n. 64). A century later, she was declared a doctor of the Church (one of only four women), and, as Dorothy Day wrote in 1949, "on the frail battleground of her flesh was fought the wars of today." For more on Thérèse and what she means for our world and for all of us in our various vocations, see this from the Houston Catholic Worker (on Dorothy Day's devotion to Thérèse), this from Rusty Reno, and this from Philip Zaleski.