Thérèse, a Doctor of the Church
by Patrick V. Ahearn, D.D.

His Holiness Pope John Paul II conferred the title Doctor Ecclesiae on St. Thérèse of Lisieux on October 19, 1997. People in huge numbers have been requesting it from our Holy Father. Not just lay people, but a surprising number of Cardinals and Bishops, from every continent, wrote to the Pope urging him to make the proclamation. All the American Cardinals personally asked the Pope for it, as, one by one, they have gone on visits to Rome. Cardinal O'Connor of New York presented a formal petition to the Holy Father together with a position paper presenting a rationale justifying Thérèse's Doctorate and a dossier containing the requests for it from more Thérèse's "Credentials" as a Doctor
There are thirty-two Doctors of the Church, two of whom are women: St. Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena. They received their title from Pope Paul VI in 1969. There are three requirements for naming someone a Doctor: (1) holiness that is truly outstanding, even among saints; (2) depth of doctrinal content; and (3) an extensive body of writings which the Church can recommend to her members as free from error and faithful to her authentic tradition.
As regards these requirements: (1) nobody questions Thérèse's outstanding holiness. Nobody has ever doubted the validity of the oft-quoted encomium of Pope St. Pius X, who called her "the greatest saint of modern times." (2) She more than meets the second requirement. She has sounded the depths of God's Merciful Love as no saint, perhaps, has ever done before. (3) The third and final requirement concerns her writings, and I would like to comment on them at some length.

Her Significant Body of Writings

St. Therese has left us a body of writings that is very large. Most do not know that. She has given us more prose than St. John of the Cross and three times more poetry, which is astonishing in view of the fact that he was a university professor who died at the age of forty-nine whereas Thérèse never went to high school and died at twenty-four. The quantity of her writings continues to astonish the world.

What about the quality and, first of all, the quality of her style? In this regard she cannot match some of the great Doctores Ecclesiae, St. Augustine, for example, who was truly a great stylist, a renowned rhetorician, and a writer who wielded words like weapons and whose works will last forever for their literary excellence as well as for the religious wisdom they contain. Thérèse was not concerned with style, nor even conscious of it, when she wrote. She wrote at the command of her superiors. Across the cover of each of the notebooks containing her autobiography she scrawled the words "Notebook of Obedience." She wrote in brief snatches of time afforded by the daily convent schedule; and later, when she became very sick and was dispensed from the daily horarium, she was interrupted frequently by sisters passing by who thought they were doing her a favor when they stopped to chat with her. She smilingly closed her notebook until they left. She did not make a preliminary draft of what she wrote, nor did she make corrections. When someone asked her one day how she could write so easily, she answered with a twinkle in her eye: "I just write whatever comes out of my pen." She might drop in a little humor as she went along, as when she interrupted herself to remark, "I'm running out of ink and just had to spit in the inkwell."

She was blessed with a lively imagination and a faultless memory on which she could draw at will for anecdotes and illustrations. The faded jam sandwich in her picnic basket when she was a little girl was remembered close to twenty years later for evoking in her the bittersweet melancholy caused by the passing of time, which immediately induced a deep longing for eternity. Anyone who has ever experienced nostalgia  and who has not?   will respond to an image like that and be touched by it. The sailboat on the sunlit sea at Trouville, where she went on vacation with her family, became the image of her own life's voyage to the port where God waited for her to come home when her voyage was ended. Once in a while her style rose to a level of lofty eloquence, as when she wrote about the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland, seen through the windows of her speeding train, an experience which lifted her young heart to the grandeur and glory of God. Her artless prose is candid and clear, and her words convey what she wants them to say. They carry great depths of meaning, yet one need not search to find it, as sometimes happens with important writers. With all respect to Teresa of Avila and to John of the Cross  and surely great respect is owed to these two Doctors of the Church who so strongly influenced Thérèse  they are not always easy to follow. Thérèse is. What "came out of her pen" so readily slips as readily into the reader's mind.

As a child she heard her father read to his daughters in the evening from some of the French classics, often from the fables of La Fontaine. This prepared Thérèse to write some of the finest fables ever created. I invite your attention to the story of "The Little Bird" in Manuscript B. It is two pages long and describes the almost indescribable mystical experience she was having. It is a masterpiece of the fable genre, deserving, for the clarity of its meaning to be in an anthology, all under the humble image of le petit oiseau. She could mine a metaphor for all it is worth.
As with all true art, her writings can be revisited with profit. They never grow stale, and their meaning deepens with every reading. They are not static but mobile, like the great paintings which hang in our museums, waiting for visitors to return and study them again. Recently at a confirmation I spoke about the Story of a Soul, and a man who was a sponsor said to me, "Bishop, I have read that book seven times in the course of my life." He is not the only one who can say that. To many, Thérèse's autobiography has given food for thought for a lifetime.

The Importance of Her Doctrine
This leads us to the content of her doctrine, which is extremely rich and profound. Much of Thérèse's initial fame was based on the amazing power of her intercession. Long before she was canonized, people flocked to her grave in the town cemetery of Lisieux, beseeching her for favors which she granted with profligate generosity. The chapel walls of her Carmel are covered with plaques dating from the early nineteen hundreds   votive offerings of thanks to "Little Sister Thérèse" for her miracles and near miracles. Authors speak of this as "the storm of glory," and it surely was a storm. It is said that almost every French soldier in the First World War carried her picture in his wallet.

Doctor of the Merciful Love of God

Father Marie Eugene was one of those French soldiers. He saw very heavy action in the First World War; and, to the end of his days, he believed that he came out of the war alive because Thérèse, whom he deeply loved, watched over him. Soon afterward he entered the Carmelites, and later became Vicar General of the Order, a renowned preacher, an authority on Carmelite spirituality, and a candidate himself for canonization. He had an especially deep understanding of St.Thérèse. In 1947 he gave a lengthy lecture which was entitled "Thérèse, Doctor of the Mystical Life." That was fifty years ago, and he did not hesitate to call her a Doctor then.

The point is that, as time has passed,Thérèse has come to be seen not so much as someone who answers prayers, though she still does so quite dramatically, but rather as one of the most outstanding mystics in the history of the Church. Far more than for the power of her intercession, she is known for the depth of her insight into the mystery of Who God Is. She knew God deeply because she loved him deeply. "How can I fear a God," she asked, "who is nothing but Mercy and Love?" That was her definition of God: "Nothing but Mercy and Love." Everything else in the Little Way and in her spiritual doctrine follows from that profound intuition. She will be known as the Doctor of God's Merciful Love.

Therese and the Second Vatican Council

The doctrine of Thérèse, which flows from the source of this unfathomable mystery, covers more ground than we might at first imagine. It is interesting to observe how it bears upon the major themes in the great proclamation of the Church's thought which found expression in the Second Vatican Council. Serious scholars now point to the similarity between many conciliar teachings and those of Thérèse. By a process as subtle as osmosis, her thoughts filtered down to many of the council fathers.

Therese's understanding of heaven  Her eschatology was new and radical. She rejected the notion of heaven as eternal rest. How could I rest, she asked, as long as there are souls to save; if heaven is rest, I don't want to go there. "I will spend my heaven doing good on earth." When she was close to death her dear friend and spiritual brother, Maurice Belliere, wondered how she could continue to love him once she reached heaven and found out how wretched he was. In the last letter she wrote him, on August 10, 1897, she said: "I assure you, my little brother, that you don't understand Heaven the way I do. To you it seems that, participating in God's Justice and holiness, I will not be able to excuse your faults as I did while on earth. Are you then forgetting that I shall participate also in the infinite mercy of the Lord? I believe that those in Heaven have great compassion on our wretchedness. They remember that when they were fragile and mortal like us they committed the same faults as we and went through the same struggles, and their fraternal tenderness becomes greater than it ever was on earth. That is why they never stop protecting us and praying for us. I will love you more once I am in heaven than I ever could on earth."

What joyous light these words shed on our beautiful doctrine of the Communion of Saints, the friendship that binds together those in heaven and those on earth in a Church which spans the ages. They, all the faithful departed, and we are one; and soon we shall be together in the life that never ends. How real this all becomes when we look through the eyes of the "greatest saint of modern times."

Thérèse and the Bible The Council's stress on the importance of God's Word in Scripture accords perfectly with the mind of Thérèse. In a day when scripture reading was far from common, she steeped herself in the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New, and kept the words she read stored up in her amazing memory. She found nourishment in the Book of Proverbs: "If anyone is very little, let him come to me." She learned from Isaiah: "As a mother caresses her infant, so will I console you; I will carry you on my bosom, and I will dandle you on my knees." These texts delighted her and became the foundation stones on which she set her doctrine of the Little Way. She loved the letters of St. Paul  she is a most Pauline saint  particularly the Second Letter to the Corinthians. In its pages she "found [her] vocation at last, to be Love in the heart of the Church." What saint ever said that he or she wanted to be Love? Most of all, she read St. Paul's great Letter to the Romans many times and in it found confirmation of her clear understanding of the relationship between faith and works. St.Thérèse carried a copy of the four Gospels inside her habit and she read them until she nearly knew them by heart. In the end, she forsook almost all other reading except those Gospels.
Thérèse and the Blessed Virgin Mary  St. Thérèse's Mariology coincides with that of the Second Vatican Council. She rebelled against the distortions of her age, which exaggerated Mary's privileges to the point of nearly denying her humanity Thérèse saw Mary as the quintessential little soul. Mary is, said Thérèse, "more a Mother than a Queen." The Second Vatican Council said the same thing. The fathers of the council placed their treatment of the Blessed Virgin within the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, devoting chapter eight of that great conciliar document to Mary. What kind of a mother would she be, Thérèse had asked sensibly, if her children did not look like her and could not imitate her?

Certainly Thérèse herself imitated Mary. A priest who knew her well called her "a ravishing miniature of the Virgin Mary," a delightful description. How she loved the Mother of Jesus! With a hand that trembled and could no longer dip her pen in the inkwell, she picked up her pencil for the last time, and this is what she wrote: "O Mary, if I were the Queen of Heaven and you were Thérèse, I would want to be Thérèse so that you might be the Queen of Heaven." Famous last written words, worthy of a Doctor of the Church, easy to understand and easy to rememberand such an astonishing thing to think of saying!

The Universal Call To Holiness  Finally, let us touch one more theme of the Second Vatican Council, its universal call to holiness. Could any of its themes be more important? Holiness is the Church's "most important product." Thérèse dreamed of the day when everyone in the world might be holy, so that God might have from every human heart the love for which He longs.

Thérèse took God's call to holiness seriously and knew it was for everyone, for ordinary people like us whom she called "the army of little souls." Holiness of life and ardent love for God is not for the elite but for the rank and file. She is the democrat of mysticism. Every one of us is called by God to His intimate friendship, to receive the love He pours out upon us in a torrent, and to give back to Him the love for which He begs. "Love is repaid only by love," she often said, quoting St. John of the Cross. We need to hear the Church's universal call to holiness not from an institution but from a person, from one who lived God's love to a degree unheard of in our modern world, from a saint, who is universally attractive, even charming, from a popular saint with a joyous smile and a ready wit who loved to amuse people, who had the most radiant blue eyes her cousin Marie Guerin used to tease her when they were young about her beautiful eyes to make her blushfrom a saint who is so easy to love and who, with all that, is still in dead earnest about the mission God gave her to lead the army of little souls.

Our Need for a New Doctor of the Church
The last saint (before Thérèse) to be declared a Doctor of the Church was born in the Seventeenth Century, St. Alphonsus Liguori. The earth has done a lot of turns since then, and we needed a new Doctor. One who lived in the same world that we live in, a world of science and technology, in which a huge percentage do not believe in God or at least do not accept the claim of Jesus to Lordship of the Universe. One who speaks to us in the here and now of this awesome century. One whose faith in her own immortality was under siege for the last year and a half of her life. One who passionately loved atheists and longed to give them the comfort of the Gospel. One who in the last days of her life was strongly tempted to suicide, and confessed to surprise that more people in pain and distress do not destroy themselves, especially if they do not believe in God. (Does that not have relevance in the time of assisted suicide and when so many teenagers are tempted to end their lives?!) One who clung to her faith in Jesus with the courage of a thousand martyrs and against all kinds of odds.
We need a Doctor of the Church who battled with neurosis and watched her father, whom she all but adored, spend nearly four years at the end of his life in a mental institution (often in those days called the madhouse), and through all those hard experiences kept her radiant smile and made others laugh; and in whom we can see ourselves, with our poor human weakness and all the onslaughts of anxiety which many of us endure. Finally, we need a Doctor of the Church, a woman who, in the best of times and in the worst of times, to the last breath of life steadfastly maintained, "I have never been interested in anything but the truth!" and who never faltered in proclaiming it.
By placing her in the Doctor's Chair and putting on her shoulders the Doctor's Gown, the Church calls us all to sit at the feet of this astonishing young woman, to restudy the Gospel and be filled anew with its light.
Jean Guitton has called Thérèse, "a relay station of [Christ] the Light of the World." How we need His Light to shine upon us as we march into the next millennium.
With profound gratitude we thank Pope John Paul II for the service he rendered the Church when he confered the Doctorate upon "the greatest saint of modern times."

Bishop Patrick V. Ahern is the Auxiliary Bishop of New York.