St. Thérèse, seventeen, makes her vows with a prayer against her heart

LISIEUX, Normandy, September 8, 1890 AD — Last night, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux sent word into the choir, where the community was at prayer, and asked her novice mistress to come out to her. In the space of an evening she had become certain that she had no religious vocation at all, that she was unsuited to Carmel, and that by staying she had been deceiving the superiors who admitted her. Sister Marie of the Angels heard her out and laughed at it, and the certainty went as fast as it had come. This morning, on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Thérèse pronounced her vows in the hands of the prioress of this house, Mother Marie de Gonzague. She is seventeen and a half. Against her heart she carried a paper she had written.

Profession is the act of entering the religious state by the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, under a rule the Church has approved. It is made for life, and a dispensation from it is hard to get. For the vows to be valid the candidate must be at least sixteen and must have spent a year in the novitiate. St. Thérèse had been in the habit twenty months and turned seventeen in January. What stood between her and the vows was not the law but one man.

Canon Delatroëtte, the parish priest of Saint-Jacques in Lisieux, is the ecclesiastical superior of this Carmel, and the community cannot clothe or profess anyone he refuses. He had already refused to let her enter at all before she was twenty-one. When her profession fell due at the ordinary interval he forbade it, on account of her age, and she waited eight months more.

St. Thérèse came to this door on April 9, 1888, at fifteen. She got in only after ten months of asking her father, her uncle, her bishop and, at an audience in Rome, Pope Leo XIII. She was put to work in the linen room and given a staircase and a dormitory to sweep. Mother Marie de Gonzague stopped her in front of the whole community over a cobweb left in the cloister: “It is easy to see that our cloisters are swept by a child of fifteen. It is disgraceful!” Every afternoon at half-past four she was sent out to weed the garden. The prioress remarked in her hearing that the child did absolutely nothing.

She received the habit on January 10, 1889. A month later, on February 12, her father, Saint Louis Martin, had a severe attack of the brain disease he had suffered from for years. He was taken to the Bon Sauveur asylum at Caen, and he is there still.

At the end of that year Mother Marie de Gonzague told her she was not to think of her profession yet. St. Thérèse was using Surin’s Foundations of the Spiritual Life at her meditations that winter, and decided during prayer that her hurry for the vows had a good deal of self-love in it. So she told Our Lord she would wait as long as he pleased, and would spend the delay preparing a wedding dress: “I will set to work and carefully prepare a wedding-dress enriched with diamonds and precious stones, and, when Thou findest it sufficiently rich, I am sure that nothing will keep Thee from accepting me as Thy Spouse.”

What she meant by that was small and mostly invisible: folding the mantles the other sisters left about, and taking a large chipped jug when the good one was removed from her cell. Then the obstacle disappeared, and the day was fixed for today.

At the examination that precedes profession the candidate states, as the custom is, why she entered. St. Thérèse gave her reason in one sentence: “I have come to save souls, and especially to pray for Priests.”

The retreat before the vows gave her nothing. She went through it dry, and by her own account as though God had left her. Shortly before the day a blessing from Pope Leo XIII reached her through Brother Simeon, the founder of St Joseph’s College at Rome.

This morning, with last night’s certainty gone, the peace came back in a wave, and she pronounced the vows in it. She asked a great deal in the ceremony, and most of it was for other people: that every sinner on earth be converted, that Purgatory let its captives go today, that no soul be damned today. What she asked for her own life was written on the paper against her heart.

“O Jesus, I ask but Peace… Peace, and above all, Love… Love — without limit. Jesus, I ask that for Thy sake I may die a Martyr; give me martyrdom of soul or body. Or rather give me both the one and the other.”

The same paper asked that she might keep her vows perfectly, “that no one may think of me; that I may be trodden under foot, forgotten, as a little grain of sand.”

At the close of the day she laid her crown of roses at the feet of Our Lady, whose birth the Church keeps today.