Head nun says aloud the name St. Thérèse kept secret

LISIEUX, Normandy, October 2, 1882 AD — Saint Thérèse of Lisieux was nine years old. She needed to speak to the prioress of a convent with no one else in the room. A cousin of hers was coming on the visit too.

So St. Thérèse told her cousin that the two of them must be very good and polite and tell the prioress their little secrets. One would wait outside the room while the other spoke. Her cousin had no secrets and didn’t much like the plan, but she went out.

The convent was the Carmel of Lisieux. Its prioress was Mother Marie de Gonzague. St. Thérèse’s sister Pauline, who was twenty-one, was about to go and live there. St. Thérèse wanted to go with her.

Five years earlier, in August 1877 AD, St. Thérèse’s mother had died. St. Thérèse was four and a half. On the day of the funeral St. Thérèse hid her face against Pauline and said: “And Pauline will be my Mother.”

In the years after that, St. Thérèse told Pauline everything. Once St. Thérèse said she would like the two of them to go away to “a far-off desert.” Pauline answered that she wanted the same and was waiting until St. Thérèse was big enough to set out. St. Thérèse took that as a promise.

Then St. Thérèse overheard Pauline telling their eldest sister, Marie, that she would soon go to live in the Carmel. All St. Thérèse understood was that Pauline was leaving for a convent and would not wait for her. She cried bitterly.

Pauline comforted her and explained what life was like for a nun. St. Thérèse thought it over one evening. The next day she told Pauline that she wanted to enter the Carmel too. Pauline promised to take her there to tell the prioress.

That was the visit with her cousin, on a Sunday before Pauline went to live in the Carmel. With her cousin out of the room, St. Thérèse told Mother Marie de Gonzague that she wanted to be a Carmelite. The prioress listened, and she believed that St. Thérèse had a vocation. But she told St. Thérèse that the Carmel did not take anyone at the age of nine. St. Thérèse must wait until she was sixteen.

Tears in church, and people staring

Pauline entered the Carmel on October 2, 1882 AD. That morning St. Thérèse’s aunt took her to Mass, along with her other sisters and her cousins. They were in tears when they walked into the church, people stared at them, and they went on crying. St. Thérèse wrote: “I even wondered how the sun could go on shining.”

From that day Pauline no longer lived at home but inside the convent. Her family saw her in its parlour. St. Thérèse was in that parlour the same afternoon. Pauline was behind the parlour’s grating, and St. Thérèse saw her from the visitors’ side. As a nun, Pauline now had a new name, Sister Agnes of Jesus. St. Thérèse wrote: “Oh, how much I suffered in that parlour!”

What the prioress said out loud

On a later day St. Thérèse went back to the Carmel on a visit. That morning she wondered what name she would be given when she became a nun. She thought of the Child Jesus. She decided she would like her own name with his after it: Teresa of the Child Jesus. She was careful not to tell the prioress.

At the Carmel that day St. Thérèse was talking with Mother Marie de Gonzague. In the middle of their talk the prioress said to her: “When you come to us, little one, you will be called ‘Teresa of the Child Jesus.’”

When the family visited Pauline after that, St. Thérèse’s father and Marie had most of the time in the parlour. St. Thérèse was left two or three minutes with Pauline at the end, and she spent them crying. She did not understand that each of them could not have half an hour. St. Thérèse thought: “Pauline is lost to me.”