Young Teresas

1.

Teresa Kim-I

(Korea, d. 1837)

A pious virgin, she was strangled in prison with six other Christians. Age unknown.

Teresa Kim

(Korea, d. 1840)

A pious virgin, she was strangled in prison after her parents had been killed. Age unknown.

Teresa Manganiello

(Italy, 1849–1876)

A pious virgin from a peasant family, she was known locally as the “Wise Illiterate of Montefusco.” She hoped to found a new congregation devoted to helping the poor, but died of an unknown illness. She was twenty-seven.

Teresa Chen Jinjie

(China, 1875–1900)

A pious virgin, she was stabbed to death by Boxers while on her knees in prayer. She was twenty-five.

Teresa-of-Jesus Fernández Solar of Los Andes

(Chile, 1900–1920)

A pious virgin, she entered a convent but died of typhus before she could become a nun. She was twenty.

Teresa Demjanovich

(USA, 1901–1927)

A pious virgin from a family of Ruthenian immigrants in New Jersey, she hoped to become a nun, but died shortly after of appendicitis in a hospital in Newark. She was twenty-six.

Teresa Bracco

(Italy, 1924–1944)

A pious virgin from a peasant family whose village was raided by German troops. A soldier dragged her into the fields; she resisted; he strangled and shot her. She was twenty.

2.

Thérèse of the Infant Jesus and of the Holy Face

(France, 1873–1897)

Her family was pious; her four older sisters were nuns; she was the last remaining daughter. Her father had a mental breakdown, threatened her with a gun, and was institutionalized. She was then given permission at the age of fifteen, which was unusual, to join her sisters in the Carmelite convent in Lisieux.

She was shy and unremarkable, a model nun in her compliance to the rules and duties. Her life was uneventful. She had no visions; she performed no miracles nor practiced spectacular austerities. She wrote a few religious poems, two plays about Joan of Arc for the nuns to stage among themselves, and some spiritual meditations. She believed that God was not a cruel judge, but a loving Father, perhaps unlike her own. Her favorite metaphor was the newly-invented elevator, and she believed that one could rise up to God not only through great works but through small everyday acts of kindness and love. In her last years she suffered from the ravages of tuberculosis and died at twenty-four. On her deathbed, her sister Céline told her: “You are my ideal, and this ideal I shall never be able to reach.”

Céline and her sister Pauline—now Mother Agnes, the abbess of the convent—vowed to make that ideal known to the world, and they both lived long lives, dying in the 1950s, to accomplish the task. Within a year after her death, Mother Agnes cobbled together the scattered writings, made 7,000 revisions and additions to the text, and published it as Thérèse’s autobiography, The Story of a Soul. Céline took charge of the iconography, as the impact of visual images had again become evident in the Church with the first photographs of the Shroud of Turin in 1898 and the success of St. Bernadette of Lourdes, the first extensively photographed saint.

Mother Agnes had allowed Céline the rare privilege of having a camera and a darkroom in the convent, and she had often photographed their sister. In her first effort at posthumous representation—the frontispiece for the autobiography—she heavily retouched one of her portraits to give the rather plain Thérèse an ethereal glamour.

An ally, Monsignor Roger de Teil, told her that she needed more than a “simple bust”: an attribute was necessary to represent “the devotion of believers with a mark of its own.” Céline came up with the icon of “Thérèse of the Roses,” roses being a perennial Catholic symbol, with their color like the blood of Jesus, their thorns likes his crown, and their heavenly fragrance and beauty. She collaged and retouched a photo of Thérèse, slightly smiling with a beatific gaze, holding a crucifix covered with roses. Another placed Thérèse meditating in a rose garden. Her last words were now reported as “At my death I will let fall a shower of roses.” She became known as the Little Flower.

Céline modeled her work on the popular, old-fashioned sentimental religious imagery being produced on the rue Saint-Sulpice. She altered her photographs to copy the Saint-Sulpicean versions of various saints, changing Thérèse’s clothes or inserting her into familiar deathbed tableaux. Artists were commissioned, and they produced scenes of Thérèse cuddling the baby Jesus, Thérèse at Joseph’s carpentry shop with the child Jesus running toward her, Thérèse with Joan of Arc, even—to the displeasure of some in the Church—Thérèse as an angel with the Holy Family and, more scandalously, Thérèse’s face as the Virgin in an Annunciation scene. She was shown performing miracles among missionaries in the Congo or rescuing a car going off a cliff. Céline maintained strict control over all the images and even sued the makers of other ephemera.

The success of the book and the images led to an industry, monopolized by a single company dedicated solely to creating Thérèse devotional items. There were shelves of spinoff books and pamphlets for adults and children, devotional cards to carry in a purse or wallet, postcards, lithographs, calendars, souvenir albums, exercise books, writing paper and blotters, short silent films, lockets, charms, badges, brooches, scarf pins, necklaces, bracelets, medallions, napkin rings, and gift boxes to hold them.

Simultaneously, Mother Agnes employed her connections to the most powerful elements of French Catholic conservatism, from the anti-Dreyfusards to Charles Maurras and the Action Française, all of whom used Thérèse as a rallying-point against the secular government and the anticlerical factions of the fractious first decades of the century. With the onset of World War I, she was refashioned as a beacon for the French troops, portrayed bringing the light of God and scattering roses on a battlefield or ministering to a dying soldier. There were postcards of soldiers making a pilgrimage to Thérèse’s grave emblazoned with her supposed words “I love France, the Fatherland.” (In World War II, Agnes’ connections to the Vichy government led to the sisters producing images of Thérèse showering rose petals on Marshal Pétain.)

Pope Pius X, who died in 1914, had already prematurely called her “the greatest saint of modern times.” His successor, Pope Benedict XV, dispensed with the required fifty-year delay between death and beatification. She was declared “Venerable” in 1921, beatified in 1923, and canonized in 1925 by Pope Pius XI, only twenty-eight years after her death and, remarkably, only five years after Joan of Arc was finally declared a saint. The celebration for Thérèse was far more elaborate than that held for the heroine of France. Long-neglected customs of decoration were revived; hundreds of workmen spent weeks hanging the dome of St Peter’s with torches and tallow lamps; 60,000 people crowded into the Basilica, and half a million gathered in St. Peter’s Square.

Although she never left her convent, in 1927 she was named Co-Patron of the Missions, with St. Francis Xavier. In 1944 she was named Co-Patroness of France, along with Joan of Arc. In 1997, she became the youngest Doctor of the Church—an honor that, at the time, had been given to only thirty-two saints since 1298 for significant contributions to theology and doctrine. (Among the men were Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John of the Cross, and there were only two previous women: Teresa of Ávila and Catherine of Siena.) Both of her parents were also declared saints—the only married couple to be simultaneously canonized in the history of the church—and one of her other sisters remains in the process toward sainthood.

Her basilica at Lisieux became second only to Lourdes as the most-visited shrine in France. (At seven, Edith Piaf was cured of blindness there.) In her centennial year of 1997 it received two million pilgrims. A waxworks museum with dioramas of her life opened in Lisieux in 1929, and in the town one can buy Thérèsette, a table liqueur, St. Thérèse paté, and St. Thérèse boudin. Among many others, biographies of her have been written by such disparate writers as Vita Sackville-West, Dorothy Day, and Kathryn Harrison.

Her relics continually travel the world, including a visit to South Africa in 2010 to coincide with the World Cup. The astronaut Ron Garan took a relic on the Discovery space shuttle, circling the globe for two weeks, for she had supposedly said: “I would like to travel over the whole earth to preach your name and to plant your glorious cross on infidel soil. But oh, my beloved, one mission would not be enough for me. I would want to preach the Gospel on all five continents simultaneously and even to the most remote isles.”

One of the nuns who organizes the tours told a journalist: “It is not bones that people meet when they come to see the reliquary. They are meeting a friend.” When her relics came to America, the New York Times called her the “Emily Dickinson of Roman Catholic sainthood.”