Fr Paul Gooley reads from the Gospel of Matthew (18: 1-5) in which Jesus says, ‘whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me’. Afterwards Fr Paul shares a little about St Therese of the Child Jesus, whose memorial we celebrate today.

Fr Paul says Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin was born in Alençon, in France, on 2 January 1873. Her mother, who already had breast cancer, died when Thérèse was four, and the family moved to Lisieux. Thérèse became a nun at the Carmelite convent there at the age of 15, after a long battle against the superior, who insisted that 16, or even 21, would be a more sensible age.

Therese died of tuberculosis at the age of 24.

But in 1895 Mother Agnès of Jesus, the prioress, had commanded Thérèse who was 22 years old to write her memoirs. Thérèse took a year to fill six exercise books. She presented them to the prioress, who put them in a drawer unread.

A year after Thérèse’s death, the memoirs were published in a small edition of 2,000. This was the first spark that ignited a “storm of glory” that swept the world. Miracles started to happen: conversions, cures, even apparitions.

The beatification process opened thirteen years after Thérèse’s death. She was canonized in 1925, the Pope having suspended the rule that forbids canonization less than 50 years after someone’s death. Her parents, Louis and Zélie Martin, were canonized by Pope Francis on 18 October 2015. Their feast day is 12 July.

100 years after Thérèse’s death, Pope John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church, joining St Catherine of Siena and St Teresa of Ávila.

What makes St Thérèse so special?

She was physically weak and psychologically vulnerable. For her the great saints were giants, they were inaccessible mountains, and she was only an “obscure grain of sand;” but she was not discouraged. We can’t all hug lepers or go off and become missionaries and martyrs. But we all do have daily opportunities of grace. Some of them may be too small to see, but the more we love God, the more we will see them.

So today, Fr Paul says we ask, ‘St Therese of the Child Jesus…Pray for us!’