the Dublin Review

1

 

Thérèse Martin believed in relics. In 1887, on a pilgrimage to Rome with her father and sister, she stopped in Padua to venerate the tongue of St Anthony. The tongue was a first-class relic: that is, a body part of a deceased saint. (Second-class relics are objects that have been in close physical contact with the flesh of a deceased saint; third-class relics include cloth that has touched a first- or second-class relic.) In May 1925, twenty-eight years after her death, Thérèse Martin’s own bones were divided, a consequence of her canonization that year. Some of the bones were taken from Lisieux, in Normandy, where she had been a Carmelite nun, to the Pope in Rome. Her sternum was placed in a reclining wax figure representing her last sleep. The rest were placed in a luxurious reliquary, paid for by ‘the people of Brazil’ under the guidance of a French missionary priest. Later, Pope Pius XI requested that Thérèse’s right hand and right arm, which had written the book Story of a Soul, be placed in a separate reliquary. In 1997, the centenary of her death, Thérèse’s bones were divided again. A new reliquary, a replica of the first, was built. It too had been paid for by Brazilian devotees, and it is known as the Centenary Reliquary. A portion of the bones was placed inside it, within a silver case that had been dipped in gold. The Centenary Reliquary weighs four hundred pounds and is protected by a perspex shell. This is the reliquary that toured Ireland between 15 April and 2 July 2001.

There have always been plenty of relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux. Even before her death, in 1897, her sisters were harvesting her hair, her handkerchiefs, her fingernail clippings. In the infirmary of the Carmelite convent at Lisieux, Thérèse told her fellow nuns to save the petals of a rose ‘because they will help you to give pleasure later on. Do not lose one of them.’ After her death the floorboards of her convent cell and the wooden slats of her bed were broken up and distributed amongst the faithful. The convent began mass-producing relics of Thérèse. Her sister Céline (Mother Geneviève of the Holy Face), who kept a record of these things, was amazed to find that in the twelve months from July 1909, 183,348 little pictures and 36,612 small relics had been sent out, on request.

The pictures produced in Lisieux by Céline at that time were issued when there were good photographs of Thérèse available, some of them dating from her time in the convent (we see her as Joan of Arc in a dramatic production by the novices), some of them taken by Céline herself. Céline had even taken photographs of Thérèse’s corpse. It seems that a decision had been made to paint an amalgam of ‘the best expressive elements contained in various photographs’. Production of relics and pictures had started ahead of time: in other words before Thérèse’s cause for canonization had been launched on an unsuspecting, but ultimately enthusiastic, Catholic Church. The pictures were in such poor taste that they turned Thérèse, long before her canonization, into the patron saint of kitsch, a position that she could be said to occupy to this day. As Ida Friederike Görres, in her 1959 book The Hidden Face: A Study of St Thérèse of Lisieux, put it: ‘These pictures enjoyed enormous popularity among simple souls – and caused aesthetic shudders among the less simple. Probably they were instrumental in erecting the stoutest wall between more intellectual Catholics and a deeper knowledge of the saint.’ To the middle classes, taste is everything. To the devout and to the Church authorities, it is nothing.

The visit of this saint’s corporeal remains to Ireland in 2001 – they toured the country in a specially adapted Mercedes called the Thérèsemobile – inspired devotion and discomfort in almost equal measure. Three million people are said to have visited the reliquary, to have been wheeled towards it, to have kissed it, to have laid their comatose children beside it, to have placed a rose (Thérèse’s flower) on it. The Sunday Business Post called it the biggest mass movement Ireland had ever seen. As Thérèse’s reliquary was given a military escort from the Rosslare ferry, some muttered not so much about state religion as state voodoo; for them, displays of Catholic enthusiasm in Ireland today are, as it were, too close to the bone. During the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979, the pontiff was flanked in the Popemobile by Bishop Eamon Casey and Father Michael Cleary, both of whom, we later learned, had fathered sons. In the nineties, revelations of institutionalized physical and sexual abuse of children in the care of religious personnel made Casey and Cleary look merely hypocritical. St Thérèse was a reminder of a type of innocent devotion, and perhaps a type of gullibility, that a lot of people wanted to forget.

‘We had thought this type of thing was dying out. … did not such a figure as Thérèse, and the host of her venerators and proclaimers, embody the very type of bourgeois Christianity which we were resisting, which in our youth we had fought to overcome[?]’ That was Ida Friederike Görres in 1959. In 2001 Bishop Brendan Comiskey, chairperson of the Relics Visit Organising Committee, dismissed the superior carping of what he called ‘self-styled intellectuals’ with regard to the religious activities of what he called ‘the peasantry’ – the Bishop being a member of the peasantry, naturally. Right on cue Kevin Myers, in the Irish Times, asked if the spectacle of Irish soldiers acting as ‘pallbearers’ for ‘an expensive catafalque’ came from 1951, the darkest days of an authoritarian Church in Ireland. Myers cited the defeat of the Mother and Child health-care scheme in that year, when the government had capitulated to the Catholic hierarchy. ‘Those days are over, we have been repeatedly assured: so if that is the case, why are the soldiers of this Republic, in full ceremonial dress, parading a Catholic ossuary through Rosslare town in the year 2001?’ It’s a good question.

 

2

 

Thérèse Martin had three blood sisters amongst the Carmelite community at Lisieux: Pauline, Marie and Céline. (A fourth sister, Léonie, the outsider of the family, joined another order of nuns.) The Martin sisters came from a family obsessed with religion. At the diocesan tribunal inquiring into Thérèse’s life and virtues, a preliminary to canonization, her sisters testified to the devout nature of their household. Marie described the family home as a place where ‘detachment from the good things of the world’ was encouraged.

Thérèse had a horrible death at the age of twenty-four. She died of what was then called galloping consumption, tuberculosis that had attacked not just her lungs but her intestines. She was unable to receive communion for the last six weeks of her life, because she was vomiting so much. A nun whom Thérèse had supervised as assistant novice mistress left the deathbed, because she could not bear to witness such agony; the prioress had refused to allow a doctor to administer morphine. Thérèse was remarkably brave. As an even younger woman she had prayed, ‘Take me before I can commit the slightest voluntary fault.’ (This was part of the prayer that she had pinned over her heart the day of her profession.) Later, in the third section of Story of a Soul, which she wrote when she was already ill: ‘I never did ask God for the favour of dying young, but I always hoped that this would be His will for me.’ When she started to cough blood one Good Friday night, she later wrote, ‘It was like the sweet and distant murmur that announced the Bridegroom’s arrival.’

She was buried not in the convent grounds but in the town graveyard. A recent law forbade interment in private graveyards, and the Martins’ maternal uncle Isidore Guérin had bought a plot specially for the Carmelite nuns. Thérèse was the first nun to be buried there. She was buried deep, because the grave was intended to hold four corpses. Before she died one of her fellow nuns had said to Thérèse that her physical remains might remain incorrupt – a sure sign of sanctity. But Thérèse had said she’d rather decompose like everyone else.

Her sisters prevailed on their prioress to erect a special headstone on Thérèse’s grave, bearing a saying of hers which endures as one of her slogans to this day: ‘I will spend my heaven doing good on earth.’ No other Carmelite nun in the graveyard was to get such an unusual memorial. The headstone made the grave easier to find. The fact that Thérèse was buried in a public graveyard meant that members of the public could visit, as they soon did in enormous numbers.

The main reason for the visitors, and for Thérèse’s vertiginous rise to sainthood, was Story of a Soul. The book, which appeared on the first anniversary of her death, was the result of assiduous work by her blood sisters within the convent. They can be said to have commissioned it, edited it, and censored it, to have distributed it and championed it. In this the three Martin sisters who remained at the Lisieux Carmel were extraordinarily prescient. They were public-relations geniuses at a time when public relations had yet to be invented. Like many geniuses they used events over which they had no control – the expansion of the missions, the First World War – as fuel for their own project. Their project was Thérèse.

She had been a precocious child. At eight she was in a class of fourteen-year-olds. Like many gifted children she was bullied there. She was withdrawn from the school by her devoted father and so, although she was bright, she was essentially uneducated. After she left school she studied history and science, but ‘I confined myself to a certain number of hours, unwilling to go beyond in order to mortify my intense desire to know things.’ Talking one day in the convent with Pauline and Marie, Thérèse was reminiscing about her childhood. Marie, the eldest sister, asked her to write down what she remembered. The first part of Story of a Soul was addressed to Pauline, the second part to Marie, and the third and final part to the convent prioress, Mother Mary Gonzague.

When a Carmelite nun dies it is customary to circulate a short obituary notice to other convents, so that her soul will be prayed for. It was the Martin sisters’ intention that Story of a Soul should be circulated in this way after Thérèse’s death. They also wanted it published in book form. Their uncle Isidore Guérin paid for the publication of the first 2,000 copies. The only snag was that Mother Mary Gonzague – of whom one cannot help feeling rather fond – insisted ‘for the sake of uniformity’ that all three sections of the book now be addressed to her. The Martin sisters bitterly resented this, and never forgave her. But they were playing the long game.

In 1910 Thérèse’s body was exhumed for the first time and it was found to have decomposed, although her outsize Carmelite habit (she had virtually starved to death) was almost intact. The bones, which were said by some witnesses to exude a sweet fragrance, were placed in a coffin of oak and lead and re-interred in an individual grave in the same Carmelite plot in the town cemetery. In 1917 the remains were exhumed again so that a church tribunal could examine Thérèse’s bones. Her sister Céline – tough girl – was one of the nuns from the convent who cleansed the bones and wrapped them in fine linen. The bones were placed in an oak casket, inside a lead coffin, inside a rosewood sarcophagus, and interred again in a brick-lined grave. As Thérèse moved nearer and nearer to sainthood her bones became more and more valuable. The third exhumation was in 1923. This time her body was to be interred within the convent walls. Devotion to Thérèse had grown in the intervening years and a crowd of thousands followed the new lead coffin to the convent, reciting the Rosary. There were no hymns or music, because Thérèse was not yet a saint. It was said that when the grave was opened there was a smell of roses, and a paralyzed little girl was cured; in the Carmel chapel a young blind girl was said to have been cured.

 

3

 

‘One of the things I noticed from the Thérèsemobile’, says Father J. Linus Ryan, a Carmelite priest at Terenure College in Dublin and the national co-ordinator of the tour of St Thérèse’s relics, ‘was lots and lots of little altars. With pictures and statues on them which weren’t the best in art, and that were chipped and old looking. And I thought to myself, “That’s in that family for fifty or sixty years.”’ Father Ryan remembers his own family’s picture of St Thérèse, at his childhood home in Kildare town. ‘It was a gooey kind of one, all sequins. I remember running up and down the hallway, trying to hide from her eyes.’
Father Ryan organized the first ‘Eurovision’ televised Mass, which was broadcast from the Carmelite church in Whitefriars Street, Dublin. In 1973, on the centenary of St Thérèse’s birth, he organized the celebration there. He has no doubt as to why St Thérèse has been so popular in modern Ireland. ‘She’s live, she’s modern, there are pictures of her as a little girl. Both houses that she lived in as a child are still standing. She played on a swing, the swing is still there.’

As leader of the Carmelite community in Kildare, where his family is from, Father Ryan had tried re-launch St Brigid, the greatest female figure of early Christian Ireland, as a saint for modern times. ‘But it’s a bit contrived,’ he says. ‘You’re trying all the time.’ He remembers a colleague of his, who had done a lot of research on Brigid, talking enthusiastically about how the saint would travel across the plains of Kildare, with her blonde hair streaming in the wind. ‘I said to him, Brian, she was a brunette. Brian was bringing his own image to it, you see. With Thérèse you’re all working from the same sources.’

At the turn of the century, according to Mary Kenny in her book Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, the devotion of ordinary Irish people was ‘very particularly centred on pious French women’. She names St Bernadette, St Thérèse, St Catherine Labouré (foundress of the Miraculous Medal), St Margaret Mary Alacogue (foundress of the cult of the Sacred Heart), and St Louise de Marillac. ‘People say the Irish are more inclined to worship foreigners,’ says Father Ryan. The Irish saints are ‘too far back’, he says. ‘Then you have Thérèse and her golden ringlets.’ In other words, it is an unequal contest.

Pilgrimages, outdoor devotions and night vigils, such as those that marked the tour of the relics of St Thérèse, have a long history in Ireland. The traditional climb of Croagh Patrick takes place at night. To the old Irish, says John J. O’Riordan in his book Irish Catholics: Tradition and Transition, ‘it was always sweeter to make a pilgrimage than to say one’s prayers at home’. That is still true, as the keepers of Lough Derg, Croagh Patrick and Knock well know. To this day Croagh Patrick is a secular devotion. It was never particularly supported by the Church authorities, who at one point during the nineteenth century prohibited the vigil Mass.

Along with these grand penances voluntarily undertaken, there was an intimacy about the older Church. As part of the custom of ‘holding stations’ in an area, Mass would often be heard in private houses. With its love of diminutives, the Irish language made things – at least things it loved – small. St Ide’s poem is addressed to Íosagán (Little Jesus). According to O’Riordan, Jesus was often addressed in this way, or as Son of Mary, in familiar and intimate style. Religious poems would be spontaneously recited by Mass-goers. It was not unusual for Jesus to be addressed as a brother or a neighbour would be. This was a Church, then, that was locally based and communal. It was not the sacramental, Mass-going church that we are familiar with, but parts of its legacy have been silently maintained.

The reliquary of St Thérèse visited every one of the twenty-six dioceses in the island of Ireland, coming to rest in the cathedral of each diocese and in whatever Carmelite community was in the vicinity. It flew to Lough Derg by helicopter. It entered Mountjoy prison. It went into Northern Ireland and was protected by the RUC. Once he had obtained the bishops’ approval for the visit, Father Ryan dealt with the administrators of the diocesan cathedrals. He won’t exactly say that he met with resistance. ‘I’ve led the national pilgrimage to Lisieux for the last forty years,’ he says. ‘Thérèse kept at them. I felt if we were going to bring the spirituality of St Thérèse then we should bring it to the people.’ A mobile library of religious books was part of the cortège. The retrofitting of the Thérèsemobile was paid for by what Father Ryan calls ‘a family of means’. He doesn’t know how much it cost. Hotel accommodation for Father Ryan and the drivers was paid for by another sponsor. ‘They just gave me the credit card. And we got another £3,000 for diesel.’

Some things about the visit of the reliquary did not surprise him at all. National co-ordinators of tours in other countries had told him, ‘Think big, and it will be even bigger than you think.’ Also, ‘Be ready for the confessions; there will be enormous numbers, and the quality will be high.’ He told Don Mullan, author of A Gift of Roses: Memories of the Visit to Ireland of St Thérèse, that when he was reporting on the visit to the Lisieux authorities, he had emphasized the success of the night vigils around the reliquary. ‘The Irish are natural night-owls, in contrast to the people of France who go to bed shortly after seven o’clock in the rural areas. I said people who came back from work had time to shower and dress up and have their evening meal, and hadn’t the constraint of trying to beat a church closing deadline; they knew that, no matter what time they arrived in the evening or into the small hours of the morning, they would find the church open.’

Mullan’s book contains a remarkable anecdote related by the main driver of the Thérèsemobile, Pat Sweeney, a retired Irish army regimental sergeant major. (Of the complaints about the army escort for the reliquary, Pat Sweeney told Don Mullan: ‘What a lot of these people would want to realize is that we prided ourselves on being Catholic.’) Pat Sweeney also told Don Mullan:

In Doneraile I saw a woman running along the side of the street, and I thought she had two heads. She heard that the relics were coming and she picked up her sister, who had no use of her limbs, and she threw her over her shoulder. She was running along the road and from behind you would think she had two heads … there were beads of sweat on her. I said, ‘My God, do you not have a wheelchair?’ She said, ‘No, I hadn’t time. I thought I was going to miss the relics and it’s very important to my sister.’

Father Ryan produced information sheets, a website, press packs, a souvenir brochure that contained a ‘vision statement’, and countless leaflets. He agreed to the making of a video of the visit which became the surprise best-seller of the subsequent Christmas. Father Ryan got a People of the Year Award, the Kildare Man of the Year Award, and a special medal from the Papal Nuncio on behalf of the Pope. He deserves it all, tough and clear-sighted as he is in his small rooms at the end of a long corridor in Terenure College. He hands me a brown envelope to hold all the printed material he is giving me. He has heard me on the radio talking about the St Thérèse video, and he’s a realist. ‘I don’t mind a bit of satire,’ he says.

 

4

 

St Thérèse was not a great mystic or reformer, like her fellow Carmelites St John of the Cross or St Teresa of Avilà. She was not a theologian. She was too sickly to be a missionary. Her social work seems to have consisted of helping an elderly nun to the refectory, and of smiling at another nun whom she did not like. Both events were minutely recorded.

The very narrowness of her experience is at the heart of her appeal. She inspires love rather than awe. Everything about ‘the Little Flower’, as St Thérèse called herself, has been made to seem small. She has been loved for this reason. Her life was a relentless effort to make herself small, like Alice in Wonderland. ‘Yet I feel within me other vocations,’ she wrote. ‘THE PRIEST, THE APOSTLE, THE DOCTOR, THE MARTYR.’ (Thérèse loved capital letters.) She narrates her time in the convent in Lisieux as a catalogue of petty triumphs and defeats, and of female masochism, which will be familiar to even the most amnesiac convent girl. (But the intensity of her language can be startling: ‘One day when I particularly desired to be humiliated, a novice took it upon herself to satisfy me and she did it so well that I was immediately reminded of Shimei cursing David. … And my soul enjoyed the bitter food served up to it in such abundance.’) She may have been a lion, but she amputated parts of herself to become a lamb. Her emotional reach only came back to her when she suffered her crisis of faith, which she recorded.

St Thérèse was cut to fit the Catholic Church’s image of virtuous females. As Ida Friederike Görres points out, old editions of Story of a Soul contain the following description of her: ‘She was tall of figure. She had blonde hair, grey-green eyes, a small mouth, fine and regular features. Her countenance, the colour of the lily, was harmoniously carved, well-proportioned, always sweetly serene, as if stamped with heavenly peace. Her carriage was full of dignity, at once simple and graceful.’

The physical description is demonstrably false – those photos again – but it shows that women could work as hard as men to present a saccharine fairytale of female sanctity, even women as tough, as determined and as able as Thérèse’s older sisters. Thérèse had to win every contest of femininity, including the physical beauty contest, and then reject beauty’s snare. Thus on her visit to Rome she is supposed to have been courted by a young man who found her physically attractive. He was gently rebuffed by the fourteen-year-old Thérèse, who, after all, had gone to Rome to plead with the Holy Father for permission to enter a convent at the precocious age of fifteen.

It was also on this visit to Rome, apparently, that Thérèse first looked critically at priests. Unsurprisingly, her parents had an inordinate respect for the clergy. Céline Martin later said of her parents’ attitude, ‘I have never seen the like of it. I remember as a child considering priests something like gods, so accustomed was I to seeing them placed altogether beyond ordinary mortals.’ We do not know in any detail what Thérèse witnessed on the family pilgrimage to Rome (her father and Céline were with her). ‘It was then’, Pauline told the beatification hearing, ‘that she saw what weak and frail men priests were, in spite of the dignity that raised them above the very angels.’ Or, as the Reverend Vernon Johnson has it in his horrible Catholic Truth Society pamphlet St Teresa of Lisieux, ‘They were not wholly freed from every weakness of human nature.’ He continues, ‘Above all her help was lavished on priests.’ Indeed, the male clergy seem to have been relieved to have a female saint of their own. Who knows what loneliness and guilt they shared with her?

‘Pray to her,’ said Pope Benedict XV. ‘It is her vocation to teach priests to love Jesus Christ.’ A remarkable statement. In 1915, a full decade before her canonization, Benedict had had a special medal of Thérèse struck for the French soldiers in the trenches. Thus Thérèse was promoted, or simply adopted, as a figure for male devotion. Father Ryan flatly denies my suggestion that she is a women’s saint. He says that Story of a Soul ‘is very sugary and off-putting, even for a woman’, but he understands Pauline’s enthusiasm for it. ‘She knew it was a marvellous work, a little gem, a spiritual hit,’ he says. According to Rev. Johnson, Pope Pius XI, who canonized her, viewed Thérèse as ‘the beloved star of his pontificate’ and ‘his consoling angel in all his trials’, and had a statue of her erected in his garden in Rome.

 

5

 

Thérèse’s father, Louis Martin, was a gentle, shy man who had tried to join a monastery but was refused because he did not have Latin. Thérèse’s mother, Zélie, a more dynamic character, tried to join a convent but was refused for reasons not recorded. Both Louis’s and Zélie’s fathers had been soldiers.
Louis became a watchmaker, and was so rarely seen in female company that neighbours assumed he had taken a vow of celibacy. Zélie started a lace-making business, which she ran with such flair that later Louis would give up his own business to work in it. (In most literature about Thérèse her mother’s profession is given, misleadingly, as ‘lacemaker’.) Thérèse grew up in a prosperous household, with maids and private lessons – Céline, for example, had painting lessons. When Thérèse entered the convent she was completely ignorant of housework.

It is possible that Zélie had started the lace business in order to provide herself with a dowry. She seems to have selected Louis, with his mother’s co-operation, as her husband. At first Louis wanted what was known as a Josephite marriage – that is, a marriage without sex. It took ten months for Zélie, or perhaps a confessor, to persuade him otherwise. They went on to have nine children. Zélie and Louis attended five-thirty Mass each morning – ‘the poor people’s Mass’, as they called it. Zélie also observed every religious fast, whether pregnant or not. Both Martins performed regular acts of charity. Zélie wrote to Pauline – her favourite daughter, and the one who was said to resemble her most – ‘how dreadful death is in a house where there is no religion’. Her own faith was so perfect that her neighbours said she did not grieve even when her children died; she lost four, two girls and two boys, one little girl at the age of five. Zélie frankly admitted that one of her ambitions was to see some of her surviving daughters enter the religious life.

Monsieur Martin gave some of his daughters nicknames associated with his trade – Pauline was Little Pearl, for example – but Thérèse was always Little Queen, something that was later to disturb the canonization authorities greatly, as they thought this would have made a girl-child uppity. But her sisters were ready for this. Although Thérèse was their father’s favourite, they said, he was always careful not to have the child praised to her face, and once upbraided a passer-by for giving Thérèse a compliment. As Pauline later told the hearings, ‘When she was a child we took great care to train her in humility and carefully avoided praising her.’

When Thérèse was four and a half, Zélie Martin died of breast cancer at the age of forty-six. Thérèse had been the only one of her children she had been unable to breast-feed, and she had probably had the tumour for years. Like her daughter twenty years later, Zélie in her final illness moved to a room at some distance from the others, so that her cries would not disturb them. Her daughters saw her, white and sweating, kneeling to say her rosary. Her pain was so intense that she could not lie prostrate for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

After Zélie’s death Pauline took over the rearing of Thérèse, punishing her by forbidding her to take her afternoon walk with their father, even though she knew that this would upset their father more than it upset the preternaturally obedient Thérèse. When Pauline entered the Carmelite convent, Thérèse seems to have experienced some sort of nervous collapse. She was ten years old. She had already experienced visions, despite Pauline’s later declarations that as a child Thérèse was ‘not a bit imaginative’. In a vision she had seen her father, older and more stooped, with a veil over his head. Later on Louis Martin had several strokes and went mad with what his daughters called cerebral paralysis. The poor man covered his head with a towel, or handkerchief, perhaps from shame. Neighbours said his insanity had been triggered by the fact that four of his five daughters had entered a convent, a sort of punishment for his pious hopes coming true. It is said that one of the photographs of Thérèse in the convent, as a plump sixteen-year-old novice, was taken purely to console M. Martin. It was taken by a priest, presumably with the permission of the prioress. But Louis Martin’s daughters, together in the convent parlour, stoutly denied that their vocations had brought about his collapse. They were much embarrassed and distraught at their father’s madness, but Thérèse was the most low-key, talking about it the least. Louis was hospitalized and only emerged when he became too weak to be disruptive. At that time he was released into Céline’s care. Céline joined her sisters in the Lisieux Carmel just two months after he died.

Louis and Zélie Martin have stout supporters in the cause of their own canonization. In 1994 they achieved venerable status on the ladder to sainthood. ‘The Pope was hoping that during the Year of the Family they’d produce a first-class miracle,’ says Father Ryan. ‘But it was not to be.’ You can’t help hoping that the Martins will make it, partly because they suffered so much for their religious faith, and partly because you can imagine them enjoying sainthood enormously, it being perhaps one of the few things they never prayed for.

 

6

 

‘“O Little Flower, in this hour show your power.” Say this sixteen times and St Thérèse will locate a lost object for you.’ So began a report on the visit of St Thérèse in the Irish Times of 1 May 2001. The narrative of Thérèse’s visit is a litany of these magical prayers – almost spells – and of spectacular religious faith. Thérèse promised that when she died she would let fall a shower of roses, and roses were everywhere. The scent of roses is taken to indicate her presence. Don Mullan smelled it in his car on the way from escorting the reliquary back to France. In his book many people testify to having smelled it. Nuns smelled it in the convent in Lisieux after Thérèse’s death. Her sister Pauline hard-headed as ever, told the canonization hearings: ‘I was afraid of illusions, and anyway as prioress, I felt it my duty to pay little attention to what the sisters were telling me.’

In her final weeks Thérèse had said: ‘Pray for those who are sick and dying, little sisters. If you only knew what goes on! How little it takes to lose control of oneself! I would not have believed it before.’ The sick came, or were brought, in great numbers to see her reliquary when it toured Ireland. The video of the visit contains footage of Mrs Anne Joyce bringing her comatose son Christy to the reliquary. Mrs Joyce tells the cameras, ‘Where there’s hope there’s life.’ She is a Traveller. Christy had been catatonic and physically disabled since contracting meningitis. Some months after the visit, the boy died.
One woman told Don Mullan that she was cured of a cancerous mole on her face having touched it with a petal of a rose that had brushed the perspex shell encasing the reliquary. Her doctor said, ‘These things happen.’

IDA FRIEDERIKE GÖRRES, The Hidden Face: A Study of St Thérèse of Lisieux, London: Burns & Oates, 1959.
REV. VERNON JOHNSON, St Teresa of Lisieux, Catholic Truth Society, n.d.
CHRISTOPHER O’MAHONY, ed. and trs., St Thérèse of Lisieux, by those who knew her: Testimonies from the Process of Beatification, Dublin: Veritas, 1975.
JOHN J. O’RIORDAN, Irish Catholics: Tradition and Transition, Dublin: Veritas, 1980.
ST THÉRÈSE of lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St Thérèse of Lisieux, trs. John Clarke, 3rd. edn, Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996.
AUDREY HEALY AND EUGENE MCCAFFERY, St Thérèse in Ireland, Dublin: Columba, 2001.
DON MULLAN, A Gift of Roses: Memories of the Visit to Ireland of St Thérèse, Dublin: Wolfhound, 2001.