St. Thérèse’s Teacher: Our Lady of the Little Way | Fr. John Saward | Homiletic & Pastoral Review | October 2011
St. Thérèse believed that the Blessed Mother was the living embodiment of “The Little Way.”
In July 1937, forty years after St. Thérèse’s death, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, came to Lisieux to give a first blessing to the basilica then being constructed in honour of the Little Flower. He had a meeting in the Carmel with Thérèse’s sister, Céline, in religion, Sr. Geneviève of the Holy Face. The Prioress gave her permission to take Pacelli’s photograph as he posed under an archway in the cloister. Afterwards, the Cardinal and the Carmelite had a private conversation. Sr. Geneviève kissed his hand, and then astonished him by saying: “Your Eminence, you’re going to be Pope after Pius XI. I’m sure of it. I’m praying for it.” Unsmiling, the Cardinal replied: “I’d much rather you prayed for me to have the grace of a happy death. That’s far more precious to me. May the good God be merciful and kind to me at that supreme moment.”
It was a wonderful reply: Eugenio Pacelli knew that no one gets to Heaven by an automatic process, and being a Cardinal, far from being a help, might well prove to be a hindrance. The Church teaches us, the saints never cease to remind us, that we must pray every day for the great gift of perseverance to the end, for the grace of a holy death. Céline, Sr. Geneviève, immediately responded with words that must have impressed and consoled the Cardinal: “If you follow the little way of spiritual childhood of our little St Thérèse, there is room only for confidence. She said there would be no judgement for children, and that you can remain a child even if you hold the highest of offices.”
We shall never know in this life what St. Thérèse, through Sr. Geneviève, did for the soul of Pope Pius XII; it may be that she helped him to grow in his trust in the merciful love of Christ, and, thereby, in that sanctity which was so evident to all the faithful when our Lord did at last grant him the grace of a happy death. Such is the mystery of the Communion of Saints: we are so intertwined as members, one of another under Christ our Lord as Head, that we can communicate his grace to one another. The saints help us to be saints. While they live, they encourage us by their example, and after death, they help us by their prayers in Heaven, even by their sacred relics on earth. For as the Church teaches us, their bodies were the members of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit, and will be raised by Christ unto glory, and serve him now as instruments by which he pours out graces of healing and conversion.
Who among the saints most helped St. Thérèse to learn, and to live, the doctrine of the Little Way? First, as she tells us so often in the story of her soul, her first instructors were those saints whom God’s Providence gave her as parents, Blessed Louis and Zélie Martin, and then, of course, she drew upon the wisdom of the saints of her own religious family, St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross. But St. Thérèse’s first teacher, under God, was of course his Blessed Mother, the Mediatrix of All Graces and the Queen of Carmel. As the Little Flower explains in her last and greatest poem, Pourquoi je t’aime, ô Marie, “Why I love you, Mary,” the Blessed Virgin is the living embodiment of the doctrine her divine Son gave St. Thérèse to teach. The Little Way is Our Lady’s way.
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