Today, the feast of
St. Thérèse of
Lisieux, Vatican Radio has posted Pope Benedict’s general audience address
from April 6, 2011, on
the life of the Little Flower:
I would like to invite you to
rediscover this small-great treasure, this luminous comment on the Gospel lived
to the full! The Story of a Soul, in
fact, is a marvelous story of Love, told with such authenticity, simplicity and
freshness that the reader cannot but be fascinated by it! But what was this
Love that filled Thérèse’s whole life, from childhood to death? Dear friends,
this Love has a Face, it has a Name, it is Jesus! …
Thérèse is one of the
“little” ones of the Gospel who let themselves be led by God to the depths of
his Mystery. A guide for all, especially those who, in the People of God, carry
out their ministry as theologians. With humility and charity, faith and hope,
Thérèse continually entered the heart of Sacred Scripture which contains the
Mystery of Christ. …
“Trust and Love” are
therefore the final point of the account of her life, two words, like beacons,
that illumined the whole of her journey to holiness…. Trust, like that of the
child who abandons himself in God’s hands, inseparable from the strong, radical
commitment of true love, which is the total gift of self forever, as the Saint
says, contemplating Mary: “Loving is giving all, and giving oneself”…. Thus
Thérèse points out to us all that Christian life consists in living to the full
the grace of Baptism in the total gift of self to the Love of the Father, in
order to live like Christ, in the fire of the Holy Spirit, his same love for
all the others.
The photograph above of St. Thérèse—taken three months before her death
in 1897—is found in the book
The Hidden
Face: A Study of St. Thérèse of Lisieux by Ida Friederike Gorres. Gorres
describes this image of Thérèse—in which the 24-year-old saint’s face appears deeply
lined and somewhat hardened, with visible dark circles under her eyes—as “so
different from the honeyed insipidity of the usual representations of her.” According
to Gorres, publication of the image was vehemently protested by the Carmel at
Lisieux.