Some Catholics of her day offered themselves as victims to the justice of God: they asked to draw onto themselves the punishments reserved for sinners, so that the sinners might be spared. A young nun in the Carmel at Lisieux — the convent of Discalced Carmelites in that Normandy town — thought about these people in 1895 and found their offering great and generous. She also found that she had no wish to make it. Was justice, she asked, to be the only thing in God that received such victims? On 9 June 1895 she offered herself instead to his merciful love.
That choice carries the claim Thérèse of Lisieux is remembered for. Holiness, she held, is not a summit reached by effort and penance; it is given to anyone who admits they cannot climb and trusts God to carry them. In Story of a Soul she set the saints beside herself as a mountain beside a grain of sand, and instead of climbing the rough stairway of perfection she went looking for a lift, which she found in the arms of Christ. She called this her little way, and its one condition was to stay small. In the Act of Oblation, the prayer she wrote for that June day, she told God she would come before him at the end of her life with empty hands, and asked him not to count her works.
The idea grew out of what she could not do for herself. Her mother, Zélie Martin, died in August 1877, when Thérèse was four and a half, and the departure of her sister Pauline for the Lisieux Carmel in 1882 reopened that loss. By her own account, her sensitivity through her early teens was such that no reasoning could correct it. On Christmas night 1886, when she came home from midnight Mass, her constant tears largely dried up. She wrote that a small miracle had been needed to make her grow up in a moment, and that God had done it; she called that night her complete conversion. In her telling the change came from outside her, and the rest of her teaching kept that shape.
The following summer she tried the same trust on a stranger. Henri Pranzini, condemned to death for murdering two women and a child, was going to the guillotine unrepentant. Knowing that she could do nothing by herself, she offered Christ's merits for him and asked only for a sign. The day after the execution she read in the Catholic newspaper La Croix that Pranzini, who had made no confession, had turned on the scaffold and kissed the crucifix three times. She called him her first child. In April 1888, at fifteen, she entered the Carmel herself.
On the night before Good Friday 1896 she coughed blood, the first sign of the tuberculosis that killed her. In the Easter season that followed, the thought of heaven, her happiness since childhood, became what she called a subject of combat and torment, and it did not lift. Until then she had assumed that people who denied another world were speaking against their own belief. In her last notebook, written in the summer of 1897, she pictured herself seated at a table of bitterness where sinners eat, asking pardon for her unbelieving brothers and willing to stay there as long as God wished. She died on 30 September 1897, aged twenty-four.
Pauline, by then Mother Agnès of Jesus, edited the notebooks into Story of a Soul, and in October 1898 the convent sent it to 121 Carmels in France and 18 abroad in place of the usual obituary notice. Pope Pius XI canonised her in 1925, and two years later named her patron of the missions on an equal footing with Francis Xavier, the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary to Asia.
The sentimental image that grew around the book provoked a reaction. In 1944 Ida Görres, a Bohemian-born Catholic writer, published Das verborgene Antlitz — in English, The Hidden Face — a portrait that stressed Thérèse's humanity. In 1956, at the request of Pius XII, the manuscripts appeared in facsimile, and readers could see how much of the familiar text was Pauline's. On 19 October 1997, a century after her death, John Paul II proclaimed her the thirty-third and youngest Doctor of the Church, a title the Church gives to saints whose teaching it commends to all its members.