On 15 October 2023, the Vatican published Pope Francis' Apostolic Exhortation entitled "It is confidence", on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face (1873-1897), focusing on the spirituality of this great saint, based on her "little way of spiritual childhood", "the lift that should take us to Heaven", that is, trust in the merciful love of God, who loves us like a Father. This reminds us of that other great invocation transmitted by God to Saint Faustina Kowalska, "Jesus, I trust in You".
In these times, when we worry about a future that seems uncertain, we need more than ever to trust in God, who loves us infinitely and who, despite appearances, remains in control of human history through His providence and omnipotence, and ensures that His plan of love is fulfilled for us. Since at the end of our life on earth we will be judged on love, and "in the end, only love counts", this trust in God that leads us to love, taught by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, is an example for us all to follow. Here are some excerpts from this exhortation.
by Pope Francis
"It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love". These striking words of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face say it all. They sum up the genius of her spirituality and would suffice to justify the fact that she has been named a Doctor of the Church. Confidence, "nothing but confidence", is the sole path that leads us to the Love that grants everything. With confidence, the wellspring of grace overflows into our lives, the Gospel takes flesh within us and makes us channels of mercy for our brothers and sisters.
Saint Therese is one of the best known and most beloved saints in our world. Like Saint Francis of Assisi, she is loved by non-Christians and nonbelievers as well… We would do well to delve more deeply into her message as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of her birth in Alençon January 2, 1873) and the centenary of her beatification. Yet I have not chosen to issue this Exhortation on either of those dates, or on her liturgical Memorial, so that this message may transcend those celebrations and be taken up as part of the spiritual treasury of the Church. Its publication on the liturgical Memorial of Saint Teresa of Avila is a way of presenting Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face as the mature fruit of the reform of the Carmel and of the spirituality of the great Spanish saint.
The earthly life of Saint Therese was brief, a mere twenty-four years, and completely ordinary, first in her family and then in the Carmel of Lisieux. The extraordinary burst of light and love that she radiated came to be known soon after her death, with the publication of her writings and thanks to the countless graces bestowed on the faithful who invoked her intercession.
The Church quickly recognized her great significance and the distinctiveness of her evangelical spirituality. Therese met Pope Leo XIII during a pilgrimage to Rome in 1887 and asked his permission to enter the Carmel at the age of fifteen. Not long after her death, Saint Pius X, sensing her spiritual grandeur, stated that she would become the greatest saint of modern times. Therese was declared Venerable in 1921 by Pope Benedict XV, who, in praising her virtues, saw them embodied in her "little way" of spiritual childhood. She was beatified a century ago and then canonized on May 17, 1925 by Pope Pius XI, who thanked the Lord for granting that she be the first Blessed whom he raised to the honour of the altars and the first Saint whom he canonized.
In 1927, the same Pope declared her the Patroness of the Missions. Therese was proclaimed one of the patron saints of France in 1944 by Venerable Pius XII, who on several occasions developed the theme of spiritual childhood. Saint Paul VI liked to recall that he was baptized on September 30, 1897, the day of her death, and on the centenary of her birth he wrote a Letter on her teaching to the Bishop of Bayeux and Lisieux.
On June 2, 1980, during his first Apostolic Journey to France, Saint John Paul II visited the Basilica dedicated to her, and in 1997 declared her a Doctor of the Church. He also referred to Therese as "an expert in the scientia amoris". Pope Benedict XVI returned to the subject of her "science of love" and proposed it as "a guide for all, especially those in the people of God who carry out their ministry as theologians". Finally, in 2015, I had the joy of canonizing her parents, Louis and Zelie, during the Synod on the Family. More recently, I devoted one of my weekly General Audience talks to Saint Therese, as part of a cycle of catechesis on apostolic zeal. (See page 25.)
In the name that Therese chose as a religious, Jesus stands out as the "Child" who manifests the mystery of the Incarnation, and the "Holy Face" of the one who surrendered himself completely on the Cross. She is "Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face". The name of Jesus was constantly on her lips, as an act of love, even to her last breath. She had also written these words in her cell: "Jesus is my one love". It was her interpretation of the supreme statement of the New Testament: "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8.16).
One of the most important insights of Therese for the benefit of the entire People of God is her "little way", the path of trust and love, also known as the way of spiritual childhood. Everyone can follow this way, whatever their age or state in life. It is the way that the heavenly Father reveals to the little ones (cf. Mt 11:25).
In the Story of a Soul, Therese tells how she discovered the little way: "I can, then, in spite of my littleness, aspire to holiness. It is impossible for me to grow up, and so I must bear with myself such as I am, with all my imperfections. But I want to seek out a means of going to heaven by a little way, a way that is very straight, very short, and totally new".
To describe that way, she uses the image of an elevator: "the elevator which must raise me to heaven is your arms, O Jesus! And for this, I had no need to grow up, but rather I had to remain little and become this more and more". Little, incapable of being confident in herself, and yet firmly secure in the loving power of the Lord's arms.
This is the "sweet way of love" that Jesus sets before the little and the poor, before everyone. It is the way of true happiness. In place of a Pelagian notion of holiness, individualistic and elitist, more ascetic than mystical, that primarily emphasizes human effort, Therese always stresses the primacy of God's work, his gift of grace. (…) Her boundless confidence encourages all who feel frail, limited and sinful to let themselves be elevated and transformed in order to reach greater heights. "If all weak and imperfect souls felt what the least of souls feels, that is, the soul of your little Therese, not one would despair of reaching the summit of the mount of love. Jesus does not demand great actions from us, but simply surrender and gratitude".
This insistence of Therese on God's initiative leads her, when speaking of the Eucharist, to put first not her desire to receive Jesus in Holy Communion, but rather the desire of Jesus to unite himself to us and to dwell in our hearts. In her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love, saddened by her inability to receive communion each day, she tells Jesus: "Remain in me as in a tabernacle". Her gaze remained fixed not on herself and her own needs, but on Christ, who loves, seeks, desires and dwells within.
The confidence that Therese proposes has to do with more than our individual sanctification and salvation. It has an integral meaning that embraces the totality of concrete existence and finds application in our daily lives, where we are often assailed by fears, the desire for human security, the need to have everything under control. Here we see the importance of her invitation to a holy "abandonment".
The complete confidence that becomes an abandonment in Love sets us free from obsessive calculations, constant worry about the future and fears that take away our peace. In her final days, Therese insisted on this: "We who run in the way of love shouldn't be thinking of suffering that can take place in the future; it's a lack of confidence". If we are in the hands of a Father who loves us without limits, this will be the case come what may; we will be able to move beyond whatever may happen to us and, in one way or another, his plan of love and fullness will come to fulfillment in our lives.
Together with faith, Therese experienced a deep and boundless trust in God's infinite mercy: "confidence that must lead us to Love". Even in her darkness, she experienced the complete trust of a child that finds refuge, unafraid, in the embrace of its father and mother. For Therese, the one God is revealed above all else in his mercy, which is the key to understanding everything else that can be said of him: "To me he has granted his infinite mercy and through it I contemplate and adore the other divine perfections! All of these perfections appear to be resplendent with love, even his Justice (and perhaps this even more so than the others) seems to me clothed in love". This is one of the loftiest insights of Therese, one of her major contributions to the entire People of God. In an extraordinary way, she probed the depths of divine mercy, and drew from them the light of her limitless hope.
Before entering the Carmel, Therese had felt a remarkable spiritual closeness to one of the most unfortunate of men, the criminal Henri Pranzini, sentenced to death for a triple murder for which he was unrepentant. By having Masses offered for him and praying with complete confidence for his salvation, she was convinced that she was drawing him ever closer to the blood of Jesus, and she told God that she was sure that at the last moment he would pardon him "even if he went to his death without any signs of repentance". As the reason for her certainty, she stated: "I was absolutely confident in the mercy of Jesus". How great was her emotion when she learned that Pranzini, after mounting the scaffold, "suddenly, seized by an inspiration, turned, took hold of the crucifix the priest was holding out to him and kissed the sacred wounds three times!" This intense experience of hoping against all hope proved fundamental for her: "After this unique grace, my desire to save souls grows each day".
Therese was conscious of the tragic reality of sin, yet she remained constantly immersed in the mystery of Christ, certain that "where sin increased, grace abounded all the more" ( Rom 5:20). The sin of the world is great but not infinite, whereas the merciful love of the Redeemer is indeed infinite. Therese testifies to the definitive victory of Jesus, through his passion, death and resurrection, over all the powers of evil. Filled with confidence, she dared to explain: "Jesus, allow me to save very many souls; let no soul be lost today… Jesus, pardon me if I say anything I should not say. I only want to give you joy and to console you". [48] This now leads us to consider another aspect of the breath of fresh air that is the message of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.
At the end of the Story of a Soul, Therese presents us with her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love. Once she surrendered completely to the working of the Spirit, she received, quietly and unobtrusively, an abundant outpouring of living water: "rivers, or better, the oceans of graces that flooded my soul". [59] This is the mystical life that, apart from any extraordinary phenomena, offers itself to all the faithful as a daily experience of love.
Therese practised charity in littleness, in the simplest things of daily life, and she did so in the company of the Virgin Mary, from whom she learned that "to love is to give everything. It's to give oneself". While preachers in those days often celebrated Mary's grandeur in ways that made her seem far removed from us, Therese showed, starting with the Gospel, that Mary is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven because she is the least (cf. Mt 18:4), the one closest to Jesus in his abasement. She saw that, if the apocrypha are full of striking and amazing feats, the Gospels show us a lowly and poor life lived in the simplicity of faith. Jesus himself wanted Mary to be the example of a soul that seeks him with a simple faith. Mary was the first to experience the "little way" in pure faith and humility. Consequently, Therese did not hesitate to write:
"Mother full of grace, I know that in Nazareth
You live in poverty, wanting nothing more.
No rapture, miracle or ecstasy
Embellish your life, O Queen of the Elect!…
The number of little ones on earth is truly great.
They can raise their eyes to you without trembling.
It's by the ordinary way, incomparable Mother,
That you like to walk to guide them to heaven".
In the heart of the Church, I shall be Love
From Saint Teresa of Avila, Therese inherited a great love for the Church and was able to plumb the depths of this mystery. We see this in her discovery of the "heart of the Church". In a lengthy prayer to Jesus, written on September 8, 1896, the sixth anniversary of her religious profession, the saint confided to the Lord that she felt driven by an immense desire, a passion for the Gospel that no vocation, by itself, could satisfy. And so, in seeking her "place" in the Church, she turned to chapters 12 and 13 of the First Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians.
There, in Chapter 12, the apostle employs the metaphor of the body and its members to explain that the Church embraces a great variety of hierarchically ordered charisms. Yet this description was not enough for Therese. She continued her search and read the "hymn to charity" in Chapter 13. There she came upon the eminent answer to her question, and wrote this memorable page:
"Considering the mystical body of the Church I had not recognized myself in any of the members described by Saint Paul, or rather I desired to see myself in them all. Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church had a body composed of different members, the most necessary and most noble of all could not be lacking to it, and so I understood that the Church had a Heart, and that this Heart was burning with love. I understood it was love alone that made the Church's members act, that if Love ever became extinct, apostles would not preach the Gospel and martyrs would not shed their blood.
"I understood that Love comprised all vocations, that love was everything, that it embraced all times and places… in a word: that it was eternal! Then, in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love... my vocation, at last I have found it… my vocation is Love! Yes, I have found my place in the Church, and it is you, O my God, who have given me this place; in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be Love. Thus I shall be everything, and thus my dream will be realized".
The transformation that was taking place enabled her to pass from a fervent desire for heaven to a constant, burning desire for the good of all, culminating in her dream of continuing in heaven her mission of loving Jesus and making him loved. As she wrote in one of her last letters: "I really count on not remaining inactive in heaven. My desire is to work still for the Church and for souls". And in those very days she said, even more directly: "My heaven will be spent on earth until the end of the world. Yes, I want to spend my heaven in doing good on earth".
In those words, Therese expressed her most assured response to the singular gift that the Lord was granting her, the remarkable light that God was shedding upon her. In this way, she arrived at her ultimate personal synthesis of the Gospel, one that began with complete trust and ended in total abandonment for the sake of others. She had no doubt about the fruitfulness of that abandonment: "I think of all the good that I would like to do after my death". "God would not have given me the desire of doing good on earth after my death, if he didn't will to realize it". "It will be like a shower of roses".
She had come full circle. "C'est la confiance". It is trust that brings us to love and thus sets us free from fear. It is trust that helps us to stop looking to ourselves and enables us to put into God's hands what he alone can accomplish. Doing so provides us with an immense source of love and energy for seeking the good of our brothers and sisters. And so, amid the suffering of her last days, Therese was able to say: " I count only on love". In the end, only love counts. Trust makes roses blossom and pours them forth as an overflow of the superabundance of God's love. Let us ask, then, for such trust as a free and precious gift of grace, so that the paths of the Gospel may open up in our lives.
The centre of Christian morality is charity, as our response to the unconditional love of the Trinity. Consequently, "works of love directed towards one's neighbour are the most perfect manifestation of the interior grace of the Spirit". In the end, only love counts.
The specific contribution that Therese offers us as a saint and a Doctor of the Church is not analytical, along the lines, for example, of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Her contribution is more synthetic, for her genius consists in leading us to what is central, essential and indispensable. By her words and her personal experience she shows that, while it is true that all the Church's teachings and rules have their importance, their value, their clarity, some are more urgent and more foundational for the Christian life. That is where Therese directed her eyes and her heart.
As theologians, moralists and spiritual writers, as pastors and as believers, wherever we find ourselves, we need constantly to appropriate this insight of Therese and to draw from it consequences both theoretical and practical, doctrinal and pastoral, personal and communal. We need boldness and interior freedom to do so.
At times, the only quotes we find cited from this saint are secondary to her message, or deal with things she has in common with any other saint, such as prayer, sacrifice, Eucharistic piety, and any number of other beautiful testimonies. Yet in this way, we could be depriving ourselves of what is most specific about her gift to the Church. We forget that "each saint is a mission, planned by the Father to reflect and embody, at a specific moment in history, a certain aspect of the Gospel". Indeed, "to recognize the word that the Lord wishes to speak to us through one of his saints, we do not need to get caught up in details… What we need to contemplate is the totality of their life, their entire journey of growth in holiness, the reflection of Jesus Christ that emerges when we grasp their overall meaning as a person". This is all the more true in the case of Saint Therese, since we are dealing with a "Doctor of synthesis".
From heaven to earth, the timely witness of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face endures in all the grandeur of her little way.
In an age that urges us to focus on ourselves and our own interests, Therese shows us the beauty of making our lives a gift.
At a time when the most superficial needs and desires are glorified, she testifies to the radicalism of the Gospel.
In an age of individualism, she makes us discover the value of a love that becomes intercession for others.
At a time when human beings are obsessed with grandeur and new forms of power, she points out to us the little way.
In an age that casts aside so many of our brothers and sisters, she teaches us the beauty of concern and responsibility for one another.
At a time of great complexity, she can help us rediscover the importance of simplicity, the absolute primacy of love, trust and abandonment, and thus move beyond a legalistic or moralistic mindset that would fill the Christian life with rules and regulations, and cause the joy of the Gospel to grow cold.
In an age of indifference and self-absorption, Therese inspires us to be missionary disciples, captivated by the attractiveness of Jesus and the Gospel.
A century and a half after her birth, Therese is more alive than ever in the pilgrim Church, in the heart of God's people. She accompanies us on our pilgrim way, doing good on earth, as she had so greatly desired. The most lovely signs of her spiritual vitality are the innumerable "roses" that Therese continues to strew: the graces God grants us through her loving intercession in order to sustain us on our journey through life.
Dear Saint Therese,
the Church needs to radiate the brightness,
the fragrance and the joy of the Gospel.
Send us your roses!
Help us to be, like yourself,
ever confident in God's immense love for us,
so that we may imitate each day
your "little way" of holiness.
Amen.
Given in Rome, in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, on 15 October, the Memorial of Saint Teresa of Avila, in the year 2023, the eleventh of my Pontificate.
Pope Francis
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