OCTOBER 3D, ST. THÉRÈSE OF THE CHILD JESUS, VIRGIN

Month in honor of the Most Holy Rosary of the BVM.

Today is the First Saturday of October.

Therese of the Child Jesus was born in Alencon in France. Her parents were estimable people, well known for their piety and their love of God [and now canonized Saints]. From her earliest childhood, endowed by a special grace of the Holy Ghost, she yearned to enter the religious life. She promised God with the utmost sincerity that she would deny Him nothing He might ask of her. She kept this promise faithfully to the end of her life, although she had to suffer a great deal to keep it. Her mother died when Therese was but five years old. From then on the child committed herself to the providence of God, under the vigilant care of a most tender father and her elder sisters. Under their teaching Therese raced as joyfully strong as a young giant along the way of perfection. At the age of nine she was sent to school at Lisieux to the Benedictine nuns, where she made remarkable progress in her knowledge of divine things. In her tenth year she was ill for a long time of a serious and mysterious malady. From this, as she herself relateth, she was delivered only by the power of God Himself, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who appeared to her with a smiling countenance, and to whom under the title of our Lady of Victories, she was constantly making novenas. Filled with angelic fervour she prepared herself at this time with the utmost care to receive Christ in the sacred Banquet of her first Holy Communion. After being refreshed for the first time with the Eucharistic Food, Therese seemed to develop an insatiable hunger for the celestial Food. Then, as if by inspiration, she asked Jesus to turn all her earthly consolation into bitterness. After that she burned with a most tender love for Christ the Lord and for His Church. More than anything in the world she wanted to enter the Order of the Discalced Carmelites, where by self-sacrifice she might assist priests, missionaries and the whole Church, and so gain innumerable souls for Christ Jesus. All this, she promised God would do for her, even when apparently she lay at the point of death. Her extreme youth was an obstacle which hindered her entrance upon the religious life. Even this she overcame by her incredible courage of soul. She entered Carmel at Lisieux happily at the age of fifteen. There God fashioned the heart of Therese in a marvellous way, teaching her to ascend to Him step by step. Imitating the hidden life of the Virgin Mary like a well-watered garden she bore flowers of every virtue, especially an abiding love of God and neighbor. That she might please the most high God to greater degree, when she read in Sacred Scriptures the warning, "Whoever is a little one, let him come unto me," she determined to be a little one in spirit. As such she consecrated herself forever with childlike confidence to God, her most loving Father. The way of spiritual childhood, following the teachings of the Gospel, she taught to others, especially to the novices who training in the pursuit of religious virtues she undertook in obedience to her superiors. Overflowing with apostolic zeal she pointed out to a world filled with pride and a love of vanities, the simple way of the Gospels. Meanwhile Jesus, her spouse, inflamed her with a desire to suffer both in soul and in body. Moreover, perceiving that the love of God was everywhere rejected, she became filled with grief and two years before her death, offered herself as a victim of love to the merciful God. She writeth that she was then wounded by a flame of fire from Heaven, whereupon she became consumed by love, rapt as it were in ecstasy. Repeating over and over again the fervent words, "My God, I love thee," she passed on to her Spouse on the 30th day of September, in the year of our Lord 1897, at the age of twenty-four years. As she was dying she promised that she would let fall upon earth a ceaseless shower of roses. This promise she hath indeed fulfilled in Heaven, and her shower of roses hath continued to this very day. The Sovereign Pontiff Pius XI. added her name to the Virgins declared as Blesseds, and two years later, at the time of the great Jubilee, listed her among the Saints. He also appointed and declared her Patroness of all the missions.