The Saintly Parents of the Little Flower

The Saintly Parents of the Little Flower

 
The Little Flower

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux was born the second of January 1873 in Alençon, Orne, France.  Her parents gave her the name Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin and she would live only to the age of twenty-four; passing unto eternal life after having contracted tuberculosis, on the thirtieth of September 1897, in Lisieux, France.  In the English speaking world, she is often referred to as the Little Flower of Jesus, or simply the Little Flower.  

The Little Flower, Saint Thérèse joined the Order of Discalced Carmelites on the ninth of April 1888. It is recorded that a few months earlier while on a diocesan pilgrimage to Rome, during a General Audience with Pope Leo XIII, she knelt at the Pontiff’s feet and asked his permission to enter the Carmelites.  In response he blessed her and said if it was God’s will, it would happen. A few months later with the recommendation of the Bishop of Bayeux, she became a postulant in the Carmelite Order.  

Saint Thérèse would come to exhibit her unique call to holiness by what became know as the petite voie, the “little way”.  She wrote in her autobiography:

 
I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way – very short and very straight little way that is wholly new. We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have lifts instead. Well, I mean to try and find a lift by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection. […] Thine Arms, then, O Jesus, are the lift which must raise me up even unto Heaven. To get there I need not grow. On the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less. (Saint Thérèse de Lisieux (2012). The Story of a Soul. The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux With Additional Writings and Sayings of St. Therese.)     

The Little Flower only wrote of the “little way” three times, but after her death her sister Pauline would promote her sister’s spirituality under the phrase “the little way of spiritual childhood”; her spiritual little way would come to make her one of the most popular saints of the modern era. Of course the life of the Little Flower brings us to the question of what her parents were like and how did they influence her sanctity.  

The Saintly Parents

Saint Louis Martin (1823-1894) and Saint Marie-Azélie Guérin Martin (1831-1877) were the parents of five vowed religious women, including Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.  Married in 1858, they had nine children, of which four died in their youth.  The five female children who did live into adulthood, all became members of the Discalced Carmelite Order. 

It is very rare in the history of the Church, that both parents of a proclaimed saint, that they themselves receive the honors of the altar and become recognized as saints also.  In 1994 Pope Saint John Paul II declared them Venerable, in 2008 they were Beatified, and on the 18th of October, 2015 - Pope Francis presided over their Canonization during the World Synod of Bishops on the family in Rome.  Appropriately, their daughter Saint Thérèse is the patron saint of missions and the 18th of October, 2015 was World Missions Day.  It was the first time in the history of the Church that a married couple were canonized together. 

Saint Louis Martin was born in 1823 in Bordeaux, France, into a military family that moved often, due to military assignments in the French army.  Rather than following his father into the military, he became a watchmaker, with the hopes that after mastering the obligatory learning of Latin, he would enter the Carthusian Order and  monastic life. However, he was never able to reach the proficiency of the Latin language required by the Carthusians, which he took as a sign that possibly he had no vocation to the monastic life.  He then continued in his profession of watchmaking.  

Saint Marie-Azélie (Zélie) Guérin was also born into a military family, in Gandelain, France in 1831.  She studied to be a lacemaker under the direction of the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Alençon, France, eventually having her own lacemaking business.  Like her sister who was a nun in the Visitation Order, Zélie as she was called, wanted to enter the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul.  She was never able to enter due to her constant respiratory difficulties and recurring headaches.  

Saints Louis and Marie-Azélie met on the Saint-Leonard Bridge in Alençon, and Zélie said an interior voice said to her; “This is whom I have prepared for you.” They both realized in a short few months of courting, that their love was a “religious calling” and that their vocation to follow God in prayer and service would be realized in their marriage and family life.  They were married on the 13th of July, 1858 in Notre-Dame d’Alençon; he was thirty-five and she was twenty-seven. 

It is said that she was the dominant figure in the household, while he was the dreamer, who often traveled to make pilgrimages, to such famous sites as Chartres, Lourdes, multiple times to Rome, Constantinople and other religious destinations.  He kept the attic of their house as his monastic prayer and study space.  

When they were married they had decided to live in perpetual chastity, but in the same way that they were guided to marriage instead of vowed religious life, soon they were directed by their spiritual director who was a priest friend of theirs, to become parents and create a holy household.  During the next fifteen years they had seven girls and two boys.  However, in an age of high childhood mortality both of their boys and two of their daughters passed into eternal life before them.  Their last child was Saint Thérèse and all of the living daughters would eventually enter Religious Life.

Saints Louis and Marie-Azélie taught their children prayer, the acceptance of simple everyday duties; their sanctity nurtured the religious vocation of their daughters and the “little way” of Saint Thérèse, an acceptance of doing the small things, the routine things in life, in a holy way.  

Conclusion

In 1877 Saint Marie-Azélie passed away of cancer, at the age of forty-six and her husband, Saint Louis (called “the patriarch" by his friends) passed away in 1894 at the age of seventy-one.  At their beatification, Cardinal Saraiva Martin who was then the Prefect for the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, cited the words of Saint Thérèse concerning her parent’s sanctity: “God gave me a father and a mother who were more worthy of heaven than of earth.”   

In the United States there are three major shrines that honor the Little Flower and her parents: The National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica in Royal Oak, Michigan, The Shrine of the Little Flower in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower in San Antonio, Texas. 

 
“Just as the sun shines equally on the cedar

and the little flower, so the Divine Sun 

shines equally on everyone great and small.”

 
- Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower   

 
Rev. David A. Fisher