Called “the greatest saint in modern times” by Pope Pius X, canonized by Pope Pius XI just twenty-eight years after her death, and named a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II, Thérèse of Lisieux has become one of the most beloved saints of the Roman Catholic Church.

From an early age, Thérèse felt called to the religious life; even as a little girl she played at being a nun. On Christmas Even 1886, at age fourteen, she experienced a vision of the infant Christ and what she called a “complete conversion.” Thereafter she understood her vocation to be prayer for priests, and she began seeking admittance to the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. When she entered the order at age 17 as a Discalced Carmelite, she assumed the name Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.

Dedicated to what she called her “little way,” she led a simple, quiet life of prayer — in particular for priests — and small acts of charity. She struggled with illness throughout her life and suffered greatly from tuberculosis before her death in 1897 at age twenty-four. At age twenty-two, just two years before her death, her prioress instructed her to write her memoirs. The Story of a Soul, as it came to be called, commended a life “great love” rather than “great deeds,” echoing the insight of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, a book that had helped her to discover her vocation and develop her spiritual life. She corresponded with Roman Catholic missionaries to China and Indonesia as well as with young priests, pursing what she saw as the mission of the Carmelites, “to form evangelical workers who will save thousands of souls whose mothers we shall be.”

Towards the end of her short life, Thérèse experienced a profound sense of abandonment by God, but even this did not shake her love for God. On the verge of death, Thérèse confessed that she had “lost her faith” and all her certainty, and was now “only capable of loving”. She experienced her sense of separation from God as something to be born in solidarity with unbelievers. She “no longer saw” God in the light of faith, but nevertheless responded to him with a passionate love. In this experience, her youthful decision that her vocation was “to be love in the heart of the church” lost all hint of sentimentality. Her last words epitomize her “little way”: “My God, I love you.”