Church inquiry opens Saint Thérèse of Lisieux's grave; only bones remain

LISIEUX, Normandy, September 6, 1910 AD — The coffin of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux was raised from the town cemetery here today, thirteen years after her death, out of a grave more than eleven feet deep, and when it was opened nothing was found of her but bones. The men who did the work had to slide boards underneath the coffin first, because its bottom was giving way.

St. Thérèse was a Carmelite of this town. She died in the convent infirmary on September 30, 1897 AD, at twenty-four. She was buried in the town cemetery on October 4, 1897 AD, the first of the convent’s nuns to be laid in a second plot of ground. Her uncle, Isidore Guérin, had bought that plot when he saw that she was dying. Her autobiography was published at Lisieux the year after her death and sold at once. Among the material the tribunal has to sort is a large correspondence about her from every country in Europe and from many places outside it. Bishop Lemonnier of Bayeux and Lisieux began the introduction of her cause in 1907 AD. The diocesan inquiry into her holiness opened at St Mary’s College, Bayeux, on August 3 of this year, and its findings must go to Rome before any question of beatification can be taken up. The grave was opened today as part of that inquiry, to make sure the remains had kept, and with no intention of putting them before the faithful to be venerated.

The plan was to do it quietly. It did not hold. The news got out, and hundreds of people walked up to the cemetery. The Carmel’s own record of the day counts several hundred in the crowd and describes them as silent and recollected from beginning to end.

Bishop Lemonnier stood at the lip of the grave. With him were Monsignor de Teil, vice-postulator of the cause, and Canon Quirié and Canon Dubosq, the vicars-general of Bayeux. The members of the tribunal, a month into their sittings, stood with them.

Raising the coffin was slow and difficult work. It lay at three and a half metres and was badly decayed. A man used to this kind of operation directed it: the director of the firm Henri de Borniol. He had boards pushed in under the coffin to take the weight, then had coffin and boards wrapped in heavy canvas and lashed together with stout leather straps. The two workmen who raised it were a father and son, one of them the carpenter who had made the coffin. It came up without mishap.

As the coffin came into sight, Bishop Lemonnier intoned David’s canticle to the Lord “who raises up the lowly from the dust… that he may place him with the princes,” in a voice full of emotion. The priests chanted Psalm 112, Laudate pueri Dominum (Praise the Lord, you children). While they were singing, the palm branch laid on her body at her burial in October 1897 AD was seen through the loosened boards, green and fresh.

The coffin was then opened. The father and son were standing close by, and both smelled a strong, sweet scent of violets, for which there was no natural cause. The Carmel’s record of the day notes the violets as well.

The clothes at first looked undisturbed. On a closer look the veil and the wimple were gone, and the coarse wool of the Carmelite habit had lost all body and tore at a touch. Nothing was left of St. Thérèse but her bones.

She had said, more than once in her last illness, that this was all that would be found. A novice, whose name the record does not give, told her shortly before her death: “You have loved God too much for that to happen. He will work a miracle for you, and we shall find your body incorrupt.” St. Thérèse answered: “Oh, no!.. not that miracle! That would be to stray away from my little path of humility, and little souls must not find anything in me to be envied.”

One of the doctors at the graveside wanted to give Bishop Lemonnier a fragment of bone. The bishop refused it and forbade anything to be carried away. He kept only the small box-wood cross that had been put into her hands at burial.

A new robe was laid on the remains and the head covered with a veil ringed with roses, freshly cut from the rose trees in the convent grounds. The old coffin was set inside a shell of lead and that inside a new one of oak.

Then Bishop Lemonnier gave the order to draw back the hangings that screened the Carmelite plot, and the coffin was set on trestles in front of the iron gate. For three-quarters of an hour people came past in a steady line with objects to touch to the remains. The bishop went first, with pieces of violet cloth he had brought for the purpose. Workmen who had nothing else with them held out their wedding rings. More than five hundred did so, some after waiting three hours.

When the last of them had passed, the official minute of the exhumation was written out on parchment stamped with Bishop Lemonnier’s arms, sealed into a metal case and placed in the lead coffin. A plate on the lid reads “Soeur Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus et de la Sainte Face” (Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face), “Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin”, and “1873–1897”. The seals of Bishop Lemonnier and of Monsignor de Teil were struck into the solder at the four corners.

A new grave, six feet deep and lined with brick, had been dug a few steps from the first. Bishop Lemonnier blessed it when he arrived at the cemetery, and had the coffin lowered into it before he left.

This evening the boards taken off the old coffin, some scraps of the clothing and the palm were carried back to the Carmel. The nun sent to gather them up smelled roses twice while she did it.

No doctor examined the bones today. On Bishop Lemonnier’s own authority the remains went back into the ground as they came out, in a new coffin, so that they would keep. The examination by sworn doctors that the Church requires before the later, Roman stage of the inquiry can close is still to come. The tribunal returns to its sittings. Her eldest sister, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, is the third witness, and is being heard from today until September 13.