While Saint Thérèse of Lisieux seemed to live an ordinary life in a middle-class French family, her autobiography is far from ordinary. The Story of a Soul has inspired millions of Catholics to recognize that, for each of us, our “vocation is love!”1 The life stories of Thérèse’s parents, Saints Louis and Zélie Martin, can help us learn how to live our vocations within family life in an extraordinary way.
Louis-Joseph-Aloys-Stanislas Martin was twenty-two years old when he decided to travel from his native France to Switzerland. Upon arriving at the Grand-Saint-Bernard monastery in the Pennine Alps, he asked about obtaining permission to enter the community. But the monastery’s prior politely sent Louis home with encouragement to first learn some Latin. Louis dutifully returned to France and studied Latin, Greek, and French literature for over a year. However, after an illness interrupted his studies, Louis decided that God was calling him to remain a layman instead. He completed an apprenticeship in clockmaking and set up his own business in the city of Alençon.
Azélie-Marie Guérin—known to everyone as Zélie—also believed she had a religious vocation. But when teenage Zélie requested to enter the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, she was refused. The superior told Zélie that it was “not the will of God”2 for her to enter, perhaps because of her frequent headaches. Zélie accepted this rejection with peace, assumed that she would marry, and begged God to give her many children, all of whom (she promised) would be consecrated to Him. A few years later, Zélie heard an interior voice tell her to “Undertake the making of Point de Alençon lace.”3 She promptly completed courses in a professional school of lacemaking and established a lacemaking business in Alençon.
Several years later, Louis and Zélie crossed a bridge in Alençon from opposite directions, and their eyes met. Zélie heard that same interior voice say, “This is he whom I have prepared for you.”4 Three months later, twenty-seven-year-old Zélie and thirty-six-year-old Louis were married.
Louis and Zélie shared a love of God and were hardworking and intelligent. Both established their own successful businesses.
Louis was artistic, well-mannered, and patriotic. During his bachelor years, he carefully balanced the time he spent making clocks with the hours he spent in prayer and solitude. He took his faith seriously, refusing to open his shop on Sundays, for example. Although he lived like a monk, he seemed perfectly at ease in social gatherings.
Zélie was a beautiful and highly sensitive woman. Unlike Louis, she had had a challenging childhood. Her father was a gruff but loving man, but her mother was somewhat severe. Her strict mother never allowed her children to play with toys, and they were shown little affection.
After Louis and Zélie married in 1858, they initially agreed to live as brother and sister. This continued for about a year until their priest-confessor helped them re-evaluate their decision to remain chaste. Louis and Zélie then resolved to welcome into their home as many children as God willed.
Their first child, Marie-Louise was born in 1860. Then came Marie-Pauline in 1861, followed by Marie-Léonie in 1863, and Marie-Hélène in 1864.5 Zélie wrote frequently to her sister about the personalities and behavior (both good and bad) of her children. She loved being a mother and was determined to raise her children in the sort of affectionate home she had not experienced as a child. Yet she never spoiled them or lost sight of her primary goal as a mother: to help her children get to Heaven.
In 1866, Joseph-Louis was born. Both parents had longed to have a son who would become a priest. But that son died at the age of five months. Ten months later in 1867, Joseph-Jean-Baptiste was born, but he too died as an eight-month-old infant. Those devastating losses were followed by the birth of a healthy baby, Marie-Céline, in 1869.
Years later, Céline and Thérèse both wrote about growing up in the Martin home. From their descriptions, we know that Louis and Zélie made God’s presence as real for their children as the bouquets they placed around their home altar. The children watched their parents tactfully reach out to a wayward relative, gently encourage their servants to practice their faith, and help the needy. For example, they helped a poor mother they met on a train return home safely with her young children, even though the effort took them hours of additional travel time.
The year 1870 was a painful one for the Martin household. They lost their five-year-old daughter, Marie-Hélène, who died in February. Although a new baby, Marie Mélanie-Thérèse, was born in August of that year, she died two months later. Perhaps for related reasons, Louis decided to sell his watchmaking business and assist Zélie in her lacemaking business.
By 1871, Zélie had given birth to eight children, but only four of them were still alive. However, losing four children had not shaken Louis and Zélie’s faith. Instead, suffering had taught them to trust more profoundly in God’s will. Their ninth child, Marie Françoise-Thérèse—the future Saint Thérèse—was born in 1873.
Zélie had discovered a lump in her breast in 1865, but it did not seem to change over time. In 1876, the lump became painful. When she saw a doctor, he brusquely informed her that she had breast cancer and that nothing could be done.
Zélie accepted this news with characteristic resignation to God’s will. She agreed to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes only because her family desperately wanted a cure. They were disappointed, but Zélie was unfazed. As the cancer progressed, she endured months of agony but with unwavering faith in God. She died in 1877 with her family around her.
That left Louis alone to raise five young daughters, so he moved his family to Lisieux to be closer to extended family. Although his two older daughters “adopted” the younger two and acted as surrogate mothers to them, it was Louis who taught his daughters to love nature, enjoy silence when they went fishing with him, and to follow God’s call, wherever it led.
For the oldest child, Marie, that call led into the Carmelite monastery in Lisieux, where she became Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart (d. 1940). The second daughter, Pauline, entered that same monastery and became Mother Agnes of Jesus (d. 1951). It was Mother Agnes who recognized Thérèse’s genius and ordered her to begin writing her spiritual autobiography.
Léonie became Visitation Sister Françoise-Thérèse, died in 1941, and has been declared a Servant of God. Céline followed her sisters into the Carmelite community in Lisieux and became Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face (d. 1959). She was the last Martin daughter to die, and she wrote books about her holy parents and sister.
Shortly before Louis agreed to permit Thérèse to enter Carmel as a teenager, he experienced a paralytic attack. These attacks continued for several years until his death in 1894. While it is not possible to be certain about a medical diagnosis at this date, it seems most likely that he had a series of strokes. He gradually became physically incapacitated, suffered from lapses of memory, and lost the ability to speak. These were great trials for both him and his daughters, who deeply loved their gentle, affectionate father. Fully aware of his declining condition, Louis continued to trust in God until the very end, just like his wife, and died a peaceful, Christlike death, surrounded by his loved ones.
The marital love of Louis and Zélie Martin bore fruit in nine children, but there was spiritual fruit from that love as well. These two devout parents planted the seed of the Gospel in the hearts of their children, nourished their children’s faith in the good soil of a joyful, devout family life, and watched that seed bear fruit. Whether their children lived for only a few months or almost ninety years, they all died in the Catholic Church as daughters and sons of God.
One of the many remarkable things about Thérèse’s autobiography is her matter-of-fact acceptance of her impending death. Near the end of her final manuscript, Thérèse describes her reaction when she coughed up blood for the first time, an indication of the presence of the tuberculosis which ultimately killed her. Rather than being afraid, she was excited, seeing this as a “sweet and distant murmur that announced the Bridegroom’s arrival.”6
Clearly, Thérèse was spiritually precocious and well-educated about her faith. But her parents had done more than merely teach her passages from a catechism. They showed their children how to face death with peace through their acceptance of suffering and death. Their love of God bore spiritual fruit in their marriage, in the hearts of their children, and, through Saint Thérèse’s writings, in the whole world. The stories of the lives of Saints Louis and Zélie Martin remind us that love bears fruit, and there is nothing that can keep the Good News of God’s love for us from transforming our fallen world today, one family at a time.
Endnotes:
1 St. Thérèse of Lisieux, trans. John Clarke, OCD, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996), 194. Note that this passage is capitalized by Thérèse in her manuscript.
2 Fr. Stephane-Joseph Piat, OFM, A Family of Saints: The Martins of Lisieux, Saints Thérèse, Louis and Zelie (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016), 49.
3 Celine Martin, The Mother of the Little Flower: Zelie Martin, 1831-1877 (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books and Publishers, 2005), 2.
4 Piat, 54.
5 Marie-Louise was called Marie by her family. Subsequent daughters were known by their second given name.
6 St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 211.
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Another very nice summary of life of saints and in this article about St Therese parents. I was aware of some of the info in your article. Your complete summary brings to life a much clearer picture of their saintly life, and why they are models for living a faithful marriage and parental life, which involved enduring many trials. In some ways it is it incredible how they did not let their crosses (losing such young children) or other adversities impede their faith. They are truly examples of saints every catholic family needs to be aware and the need for a life built on faith, prayer and the sacraments.
Dawn Beutner mentions the heart 3X. So I have enough basis to respond to her essay as well as Carl Olson’s Noble Heart of the Good Samaritan .
“Wicked desires or thoughts of man’s heart had grieved the heart of God” (Gen 6:5-6). In The Joys, Sufferings twice Beutner refers to the seeds of love planted by Louis and Zélie in their children’s hearts. As wicked thoughts are described as originating in the heart so is love.
What it means as related to a physical organ that pumps blood, the heartbeat that maintains life, is the sensual nature of the primary theological charisma Caritas. As intellectual as St Thomas Aquinas was he was insistent that human love is expressed sensually. Not simply as an intellectual decision. It’s remarkable because man is a rational creature. Although cold reasoning doesn’t quite cut it. For example one might say Jesus suffered madness by his excessive acts of compassion during his passion.
Catherine of Siena dared calling him a madman. St Maria Faustina says similar in her diary [it seems women are more attuned to recognizing this we men more rational less affected]. Reading Therese’s Story of a Soul in my youth I thought how overly affectionate, silly, even ignoble if a man, it was for Therese to brush rose petals over the corpus of her religious crucifix. After years of pain and struggle not so.