The gate opened for a father who was not there

LISIEUX, Normandy, September 24, 1890 AD — Saint Thérèse of Lisieux was given the black veil of a Carmelite nun this morning. She is seventeen.

Three years ago, on Pentecost Sunday, she sat down beside her father in the garden at Les Buissonnets. She told him she wanted to enter Carmel. She was fourteen and a half. He cried, and then he said yes. Flowers were growing in the low stone wall beside them. He picked a small white one and gave it to her, pulled up by the roots without breaking them.

Nobody else would say yes

Her father, Saint Louis Martin, was the only one who agreed. Her uncle, Isidore Guérin, said a girl of fifteen had no business entering that order. Letting a child try it, he said, would make people think less of the faith. Five months later he changed his mind. Then Canon Delatroëtte, the priest in charge of the Carmel, ruled that she could not enter before she was twenty-one. He could turn away anyone who applied.

So her father took her to Bayeux to see Bishop Hugonin. That morning she put her long hair up for the first time, to look older. The bishop would not say yes and would not say no. He told her she ought to be glad instead of crying.

Her father took her to Rome instead, on the pilgrimage from their part of France. On the morning of November 20 the pilgrims heard the Pope’s Mass in his own chapel. Afterwards they were taken in to see him. A priest from Bayeux, Father Révérony, had said out loud that nobody was to speak to the Holy Father. St. Thérèse knelt down in front of Pope Leo XIII anyway and asked him 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. Pope Leo XIII put his hand on her lips and then raised it to bless her.

The bishop sent his permission to the prioress. St. Thérèse entered the Carmel of Lisieux on April 9, 1888 AD, at fifteen. Nine months later she was given the habit. Sixteen days ago she made her vows in front of the prioress, Mother Marie de Gonzague. Those vows are for life.

The morning of the black veil

One ceremony was still ahead of her, and it came this morning. The black veil is only given in the morning. At a veiling in this house it lies ready on the altar in a silver basin. The grille is the screen that shuts the nuns’ part of the church off from everyone else’s. It is opened, and the newly professed nun kneels near the big gate to receive Communion. She holds a lit candle.

Then the prioress walks her to the gate, so that her father or her mother can bless her through it. The grille was open this morning, and her father was not in the church.

Her father was sixty-six when one of several attacks left him unable to move, and his mind gave way. Since February of last year he had been living in the Bon Sauveur at Caen.

Two of her sisters, Céline and Léonie, went over to Caen once a week to see him. The whole family had expected him here this morning. At the last minute her uncle said her father should not come. Her uncle was afraid the strain of the day would kill him. Bishop Hugonin was supposed to lead the service, and he could not come either.

The sister kneels with her head bowed. The priest lays the veil over her head so that it covers her face. The prioress ties the small veil and puts the large one on top of it. The white veil St. Thérèse had worn as a novice came off. The black veil of a Carmelite went on.

St. Thérèse wrote about the day afterwards: “That day it pleased Our Lord that I should not be able to restrain my tears, and those tears were not understood.”