The sources of the biographical material are quoted at the end.
ELEMENTS OF THE
EUCHARISTIC TESTIMONY
ST THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX
Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) was a French Discalced Carmelite who is widely venerated in modern times. She is popularly known in English as the Little Flower. Thérèse has been a highly influential model of sanctity for Catholics and for others because of the simplicity and practicality of her approach to the spiritual life. She is one of the most popular saints in the history of the church although she was obscure during her lifetime. Pope Pius X called her “the greatest saint of modern times”.
Thérèse felt an early call to religious life and, after overcoming various obstacles, in 1888, at age 15, she became a nun and joined two of her elder sisters in the cloistered Carmelite community of Lisieux in Normandy. After nine years as a Carmelite nun, having fulfilled various offices such as sacristan and assistant to the novice mistress, in her last eighteen months in Carmel she fell into a night of faith, in which she is said to have felt Jesus was absent and been tormented by doubts that God existed. Thérèse died at the age of 24 from tuberculosis.
After her death, Thérèse became known globally through her spiritual memoir, The Story of a Soul, which explains her theology of the “Little Way”. As a result of her immense popularity and reputation for holiness, she was quickly beatified and canonized by Pope Pius XI, who completed the process just 28 years after her death. In 1997, Pope John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church. Her feast day in the General Roman Calendar is 1 October. She is well known throughout the world, with the Basilica of Lisieux being the second most popular place of pilgrimage in France after Lourdes.
St. Thérèse’s Eucharistic love began very young, in the Eucharistic piety of her parents, SS. Louis and Zélie Martin, who were daily Mass-goers and frequent recipients of Holy Communion at a time in which most Catholics, including daily Mass attendees and cloistered religious, received but a few times a year. The Martins would bring little Thérèse along with them to Mass each morning and her father would take her on afternoon walks, which would always climax in a visit to the Blessed Sacrament in some church or chapel.
She rejoiced to participate in Eucharistic processions and delighted to be able to throw rose petals before Jesus’ path. She would make 15-minute visits to the Blessed Sacrament on her own during recess at school and eagerly took part in Benediction.
Thérèse received her First Holy Communion at age 11 on 8 May 1884. She called it “the most wonderful day of my life … that first kiss of Jesus in my heart — it was truly a kiss of love. I knew that I was loved and said, ‘I love you, and I give myself to you forever.” “My exalted heart was not able to bear it without tears”, she wrote in her “story of a soul.” When she wept with joy, some of her fellow First Communicants asked her if she was crying because her mother, having died seven years before, wasn’t present. “As if the absence of my mother could make me unhappy on the day of my First Communion!” she later exclaimed with amazement. Thereafter, she would go to Mass daily and receive Holy Communion, like her father, even five days a week.
In Thérèse’s day, daily reception of Holy Communion was rare. In fact, you were not allowed to receive Holy Communion unless you had just been to confession. Thérèse longed for the Eucharist as a child. And after receiving her First Holy Communion, she wrote down every time she received it.
The open secret of the Christian life as a communion of love had, for her, its root and fruit in the awesome gift of what Jesus himself called, in his apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the “Sacrament of Love,” his Eucharistic presence.
It was a brutal shock to her after she entered Carmel at 15 that the superior, influenced by Jansenism, would only allow the nuns to receive on a few set days a year. Thérèse considered it the hardest cross of her time in religious life. She prayed through St. Joseph for a change and in late 1890, Pope Leo XIII took such authority away from religious superiors and gave it to confessors; her confessor, however, intimidated by the superior, kept Holy Communion infrequent. The only respite came during the influenza pandemic of 1891-92, when the confessor gave Thérèse “the unspeakable consolation of receiving Holy Communion every day,” a privilege lost once the pandemic abated and the superior was out of the infirmary.
For Thérèse, it wasn’t simply a matter of a human desire to receive Communion, but of divine desire. “It is not to remain in a golden ciborium that [Jesus] comes to us each day from Heaven,” she declared. “It’s to find another heaven, infinitely dearer to him than the first: the heaven of our soul, made to his image, the living temple of the adorable Trinity!”
As a 16-year-old, she wrote to her 19-year-old cousin, Marie Guérin, who because of scrupulosity was refraining from receiving Jesus regularly: “Dear little sister, receive Communion often, very often. … Jesus hasn’t placed this attraction in your soul for nothing! … It is impossible that a heart that rests only at the sight of the tabernacle offends Jesus to the point of not being able to receive him; what offends him and what wounds his heart is the lack of confidence!”
For her, Holy Communion was something for which there was no price too high to pay. In the throes of the tuberculosis that would end her life, she would still go down to the chapel and forsake medication – which was deemed to break the Eucharistic fast – on the days on which the nuns were permitted to receive. “There is no suffering too great to gain one Communion!” she stated.
Thérèse left us a guide as to how she would prepare for Holy Communion:
“I picture my soul as a piece of land and beg the Blessed Virgin to remove from it any rubbish that would prevent it from being free; then I ask her to set up a huge tent worthy of heaven, adorning it with her own jewellery; finally, I invite all the angels and saints to come and conduct a magnificent concert there. It seems to me that when Jesus descends into my heart, he is content to find himself so well received and I, too, am content.”
The year before she died, she wrote a beautiful poem entitled “My Wishes Before the Tabernacle”, in which she compared herself to the tabernacle key, the sanctuary lamp, the altar stone, the corporal, the monstrance, the paten for the host, the chalice and the grapes and wheat that are the raw materials for the Eucharistic sacrifice. The poem witnesses to the depth of her Eucharistic faith but also to her prayerful familiarity with these objects as Church history’s most famous sacristan.
She begged for faith like the tabernacle key, to open the place where the God of love resides and for the grace to burn like the sanctuary lamp to draw many souls to Christ’s Eucharistic love. She asked for her soul to be a fitting place, like the altar stone and the Bethlehem stable, for Christ to rest, and for her heart to be like a beautiful corporal to receive him purely. She petitioned to be like a priest’s paten to hold him, like a monstrance to reveal him, and like a chalice where his saving blood might flow anew. She entreated to be a ripe grape crushed each day to unite her sufferings to Christ’s blood, and a grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying so that she might be transformed into her Eucharistic spouse and with him bear much fruit.
As a child, simple and pure, Jesus humbled himself to be born in a manger. At every Mass, again, he humbles himself to become a small wafer of bread for us in the Eucharist. Humility and Love are the driving pulse at the heart of the Eucharist’s simplicity. For Thérèse, they were the driving pulse of her Little Way. Naturally, it was in receiving the Eucharist that her world made perfect sense.
Thérèse understood that she was a bride of Christ together with everyone else by virtue of her union with the Church but especially personally through her vows taken at Carmel. She often spoke of Christ as ‘My Beloved’. This mystical and marital union that we enter into in the Eucharist was vividly apparent to her. Looking back on her first Communion she wrote, “Ah! How sweet was that first kiss of Jesus! It was a kiss of love; I felt that I was loved, and I said ‘I love You and I give myself to You forever! There were no demands made, no struggles, no sacrifices; for a long time Jesus in the tabernacle and poor little Therese looked at and understood each other. That day, it was no longer simply a look. It was a fusion; they were no longer two, Thérèse had vanished as a drop of water is lost in the immensity of the ocean.
Her love of the Eucharist was noted in the papal Bull of her Canonization which spoke of her first Communion. It states…“As soon as she had tasted of the Eucharistic Bread, she felt an insatiable hunger for that Heavenly Food, and, as if inspired, she begged of Jesus, her sole delight, to ‘change for her into bitterness all human consolation.’ Then, all aflame with love for Christ and for His Church, she had a most keen desire to enter among the Discalced Carmelites, so that by her self-denial and continual sacrifices ‘she might bring help to priests and missionaries and the entire Church,’ and might gain innumerable souls for Jesus Christ…It would seem that this first Communion was the starting-point of her apostolic life and her devotion to the sanctification of priests”.
She spoke also of her quiet adoration before the Blessed Sacrament as a child. Out of loneliness at the Abbey, she learned to find consolation before the Lord. “No one paid any attention to me and I would go up to the choir of the chapel and remain before the Blessed Sacrament until the moment when Papa came to get me. This was my only consolation, for was not Jesus my only friend?”. In her writings, she described the Eucharistic adoration as Heaven on earth, “Heaven for me is hidden in a little host where Jesus, my spouse, is veiled for love. I go to that divine furnace to draw out life, and there my sweet saviour listens to me night and day.”
There was a Marian dimension too in her Eucharistic devotion. Thérèse saw in Mary a perfect model of receptivity to the eucharistic child, Jesus. “In her union with the eucharistic Jesus, Thérèse particularly desired to be adorned with Mary’s virtues. In fact, she realized that to be most pleasing to Jesus one must become like the Blessed Mother in such a way that, as she wrote to Mary, ‘when the white Host comes into my heart, Jesus, your sweet Lamb, thinks He is resting in you! She calls this sacramental union a ‘fusion’ where ‘all the joy of Heaven…entered my heart.’ It was a time of loving exchange between her soul and God. It was a time to ‘be his living temple’ like the virgin of Nazareth at the Annunciation”.
As a devotee of Mary, she understood that all of her little sacrifices could benefit other souls and advance the salvation of others. Thérèse offered herself to God as a living sacrifice consecrated to him. “Contemplating the Suffering Servant of Yahweh, stricken for the sins of his people, Thérèse realized that if she united her sufferings to the perfect self-offering of Christ, he would bring many souls to his Father through her”. As one author wrote, “Catholics who follow her ‘little way’ of heroic sacrifice by being faithful in the ordinary things in life- in a spirit of reparation to the rejected love of God are thus fulfilling Our Lady’s plea of participating in the salvation of souls”. As The Little Flower understood, it is in the context of the Mass that we add to the sufferings of Christ our own small, spiritual sacrifices. The source of strength, the food that built her up and enabled her to offer her sacrifices was Jesus the Incarnate Word fed to her in both Scripture and the Eucharist.
In her poem “Canticle of a soul having found the place of its rest,” remembering her Holy Communion, she expressed, “O Jesus! on this day, you have fulfilled all my desires. From now on, near the Eucharist, I shall be able to sacrifice myself in silence, to wait for Heaven in peace. Keeping myself open to the rays of the divine host; In this furnace of love, I shall be consumed; And like a seraphim, Lord, I shall love you.”
Saint Thérèse kept her eyes constantly fixed on Jesus, encouraging others to contemplate the great gift of the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, as she emphasized, “Do you realize that Jesus is there in the tabernacles expressly for you, for you alone? He burns with desire to come into your heart.”
Concluding reflections
- Thérèse had a powerfully realistic approach to the Eucharist. We can so often speak of the Real Presence without realizing what we are saying. But for her, the Eucharist is quite simply the living and present Person of Jesus, a Jesus who knows her personally, who loves her with the same love He showed on the Cross. She perceives Him not as an object to be consumed but as a Bridegroom to whom she is a Bride. She speaks of His kiss, of union and fusion with Him. The Eucharist brings heaven to earth, into her earth, her body and soul.
- Perhaps she finds this realism to be so easy and obvious because she is so child-like, uncomplicated, simple and direct in her manner of being. You could say that, in her turn, she was the one who was so real. There were no contrived complexes or sophistications. There was just herself, as she was, divest of pretence or of feeling that she had to do it all or even something to win His love. No, as a little child, she knew she would be loved just for being that.
- Her Eucharistic faith and devotion was not privatistic. It wasn’t some exclusive, private, individualistic experience. Thérèse was well aware that Holy Communion cannot be private, by definition. The Communion of love was open ended, universal, all-embracing. You don’t receive the Eucharist as some private blessing from God upon your priorities, views or chosen path. On the contrary, the Eucharist opens you out to the priorities, mind and will of Jesus. This consciousness in Thérèse is seen in her desire to “be love” in the heart of the Church, to be all the services and ministries of the Church, to go to the ends of the earth as a missionary, even if just in prayer. Perhaps you could say that the Eucharist for Thérèse universalises the communicant. It dispossesses us of our often so self-preoccupied concerns and renders us instruments of the concerns of Christ. As St. Augustine once put it: we do not transform the Eucharist into ourselves, but the Eucharist transforms us into Itself.
- Finally, there is in Thérèse, as there was in St. Carlo Acutis and so many others saints, a deep connection between true Eucharistic faith and devotion and the reality of suffering out of love for Christ and for the salvation of others. The Eucharist is the fruit of the Cross and whoever truly receives the Eucharist shares in that Cross through his or her own cross. Thérèse offered herself as an oblation or holocaust to God because His love, expressed supremely in the Eucharist, is cruciform. Here we see once again that there is no holiness apart from the Tree of our salvation. The roses which Thérèse showers from heaven are no romantic image but are rooted in the Wood of the Cross, the source of all grace and redemption.
Dear Saint Thérèse, shower upon us this night some roses of our Eucharistic Redeemer’s love. Pray for us that we will receive and adore the Sacrament of Love so as to be dispossessed of ourselves and our false self-concerns and projected outwards to give love, to become His Love, in the heart of our parish community. Show us the Little Way of humility and love. May Christ, as He once did for you, lift us up in his strong and loving arms, for we are too little and too weak to reach up to Him ourselves.
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/eucharist-is-big-secret-behind-litle-way
https://archokc.org/news/saint-therese-of-lisieux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thérèse_of_Lisieux