Saint Thérèse receives the black veil at seventeen, and cannot stop crying

LISIEUX, Normandy, September 24, 1890 AD — Saint Thérèse of Lisieux received the black veil of a professed Carmelite this morning, at seventeen. At the taking of the veil the grille that shuts the choir off from the church is opened, and the prioress leads the newly professed nun to the gate so that her father or her mother can bless her through it. Saint Louis Martin was not in the church. Bishop Flavien Hugonin of Bayeux and Lisieux was to have presided, and at the last minute he could not come.

Her father had been in the Bon Sauveur asylum at Caen since February of last year. He had had several smaller attacks before that, and at sixty-six one left him paralysed and his mind broken. Two of her sisters, Céline and Léonie, travelled over to Caen once a week to see him, and the family had expected him here this morning. Her uncle Isidore Guérin, who had refused his consent when she first asked to enter, opposed his coming at the last hour. Isidore Guérin was afraid the strain of the day would kill his brother-in-law.

St. Thérèse pronounced her vows sixteen days ago, on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, before the prioress of this Carmel, Mother Marie de Gonzague. The vows bind for life, and a dispensation from them is hard to get.

Three years ago, on Pentecost Sunday, St. Thérèse sat down beside her father in the garden at Les Buissonnets and told him she wanted to enter Carmel. She was fourteen and a half. He cried, and then he agreed, and he picked a small white flower out of the low stone wall beside them and gave it to her. He had pulled it up by the roots without breaking them. No one else would say yes. Her uncle told her it made no sense for a girl of fifteen to enter so strict an order, and that letting a child try it would bring the faith into disrepute; he changed his mind five months later. Canon Delatroëtte, the Carmel’s superior and the Bishop’s delegate, who could refuse any applicant admission, then ruled that she could not enter before she was twenty-one. So her father took her to Bayeux to see Bishop Hugonin, and she put her long hair up that morning for the first time, to look older. The bishop would not say yes and would not say no, and told her that she ought to rejoice instead of weeping.

Her father took her to Rome instead, on the diocesan pilgrimage. On the morning of November 20 the pilgrims heard the Pope’s Mass in his private chapel, and were taken in to see him afterwards. Father Révérony, the vicar-general of Bayeux, had announced in a loud voice beforehand that no one was to speak to the Holy Father. St. Thérèse knelt in front of Pope Leo XIII and asked him, in honour of his jubilee, to let her enter Carmel at fifteen. The Pope looked at her and said: “Well, well! You will enter if it is God’s Will.” The Noble Guards had to lift her off her knees, and Pope Leo XIII laid his hand on her lips and then raised it to bless her. The bishop sent his permission to the prioress, and St. Thérèse entered the Carmel on April 9, 1888 AD, at fifteen. She received the habit nine months later.

The veil is given to the newly professed only in the morning. At a veiling in this house the black veil lies ready on the altar, in a silver basin. The curtains and the frames of the grille stand open through the whole ceremony, and the newly professed nun receives Communion kneeling near the large gate, a lit candle in her hand. The sister kneels with her head bowed, and the priest lays the veil over her head so that it covers her face: Accipe velum (receive the veil). The prioress then ties the small veil and puts the large one over it, and the Te Deum (We praise Thee, O God) is sung. The white veil St. Thérèse had worn as a novice came off, and the black veil of a professed Carmelite went on. She was crying, and could not stop.

St. Thérèse wrote of the day: “This feast was indeed veiled in tears. Papa was too ill to come and bless his little Queen; at the last minute Mgr. Hugonin, who should have presided, was unable to do so, and, for other reasons also, the day was a painful one. And yet amid it all, my soul was profoundly at peace. That day it pleased Our Lord that I should not be able to restrain my tears, and those tears were not understood. It is true I had borne far harder trials without shedding a tear; but then I had been helped by special graces, whilst on this day Jesus left me to myself, and I soon showed my weakness.”