Prayer to St. Thérèse of Lisieux

This is the beloved Novena Rose Prayer to St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus — the "Little Flower" — asking her to keep the promise she made from her deathbed: "I will spend my heaven doing good upon earth. I will let fall a shower of roses." From that promise came the custom of begging her for a rose as the sign that a prayer has been heard, and countless of the faithful testify to receiving one, in ways expected and unexpected.

Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin was born at Alençon in France in 1873, the youngest of five daughters of Louis and Zélie Martin — themselves now canonized saints. She entered the Carmel of Lisieux at only fifteen, and there lived a hidden life of nine years, dying of tuberculosis on 30 September 1897, at the age of twenty-four. Few outside her convent knew her name.

What made her one of the most loved saints in the history of the Church was her "Little Way" — the path of spiritual childhood. Convinced she could never accomplish the great deeds of the martyrs and missionaries, Thérèse discovered instead a way open to all: to remain little in the arms of God, to do the smallest things with the greatest love, and to trust Him with the total confidence of a child. She set it down in her autobiography, Story of a Soul, which spread across the world after her death.

St. Pius X is said to have called her "the greatest saint of modern times." Pope Pius XI canonized her in 1925 and, two years later, named her patroness of the missions alongside St. Francis Xavier — though she never left her cloister. In 1997 Pope John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church, only the third woman ever so honored. Traditional calendars keep her feast on 3 October, the day fixed at her canonization.

Her whole doctrine rests on one sentence of Our Lord: “Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3). The Little Way is not a spirituality of doing small things instead of great ones; it is that verse taken literally. And the tenderness the faithful have always felt in her is older than she is: “As one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you” (Isai. 66:13).