St. Therese of Lisieux teaches us love and trust in God’s mercy: Pope

“St. Therese is a great example for us as we face the end of our lives,” says Catholic Cemeteries director Peter Nobes as he discusses the newest statue at Gardens of Gethsemani cemetery – a bronze depiction of St. Therese of Lisieux.

The young French saint “understood death was a transition, rather than the end,” Nobes told The B.C. Catholic. Therese had confidence in God’s love, the very confidence that inspired the title of Pope Francis’ new Apostolic Exhortation, C’est la Confiance (It is the Confidence).

The papal document, released Oct. 15, couldn’t have come at a timelier moment for Mary Ann Waslen. Her family financed the Gardens of Gethsemani statue and surrounding plaza as a gift to commemorate the death of Mary Ann’s daughter, who is buried at the cemetery.

Maria Ellen, who died suddenly in 2019, had a special interest and devotion to St. Therese. So when her mother began looking for a way to remember her, Nobes suggested the popular saint would be fitting.

The Sept. 10 unveiling of the statue was attended by the Waslen family and Mary Ann’s pastor from Holy Rosary Cathedral, Father Stanley Galvon.

The statue – the first of the Little Flower at the cemetery – stands close to a pond near Maria Ellen’s grave. St. Therese is depicted with her characteristic Carmelite habit and holding the crucifix and roses she is so well known for.

A quote from the young Carmelite in September 1896 inspires the title of the papal document. “It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to love,” Therese wrote.

Those words, Pope Francis affirms in C’est la Confiance, “sum up the genius of her spirituality and would suffice to justify the fact that she has been named a Doctor of the Church.”

Francis explained his decision to publish the exhortation on Oct. 15 rather than on a date linked to the life of the saint, saying he wants Therese’s message to transcend those celebrations and be taken up as part of the spiritual treasury of the Church.

Oct. 15 is the feast day of St. Teresa of Avila, and the date of the publication marks St. Therese as the “mature fruit” of the reform of Carmelite spirituality by the great Spanish saint.

Pope Francis writes about the heart of Therese’s spirituality, that “little way” also known as the way of spiritual childhood.

The saint wrote: “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.”

For St. Therese, what counts is God’s action, grace, not personal merit, because it is the Lord who sanctifies. The Pope writes: “It is most fitting, then, that we should place heartfelt trust not in ourselves but in the infinite mercy of a God who loves us unconditionally and has already given us everything in the Cross of Jesus Christ. For this reason, Therese never uses the expression - common enough in her day - “I will become a saint.”

In our lives, where, says Francis, we are often “assailed by fears, the desire for human security, the need to have everything under control,” the trust and therefore the abandonment in God that Therese promotes “sets us free from obsessive calculations, constant worry about the future and fears that take away our peace.” 

In the last period of her life, in particular, she experienced the great “trial against the faith.” At that time atheism was greatly on the rise, and she “felt herself a sister to atheists,” often praying for them.

She believed in God’s infinite mercy and in Jesus’ ultimate victory over evil: her trust obtained the grace of conversion on the gallows of a multiple murderer.

Everything in God is love, even justice. “This is one of the loftiest insights of Therese,” says the Pope, “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.”

St. Therese wants to “gladden” the Lord and wants to match Jesus’ love. “She possessed complete certainty that Jesus loved her and knew her personally at the time of his Passion,” writes Pope Francis, “he contemplated the love of Jesus for all humanity and for each individual, as if he or she were the only one in the world.”

He goes on to say: “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.”

The interior trials experienced by St. Therese, which at times pushed her to the point of asking herself “if heaven really existed,” led the saint to “to pass from a fervent desire for heaven to a constant, burning desire for the good of all” and to the resolution to continue her mission even after death.

An earlier version of this story had incorrect information about Maria Ellen’s death that has been corrected.

With files from Vatican News