Angelus was born in Florence or near there; the year is unknown but it was before 1386. He was the first member of the reformed observance of Our Lady of the Wood, was many times prior of various houses and noted for his work in preaching the Word of God. He died in Florence in 1438.
Bartholomew Fanti was born in Mantua: the year is unknown, but in 1452 he was already a Carmelite priest of the Congregation of Mantua. For thirty-five years at the Order's church in Mantua he was spiritual father and rector of the Confraternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, for which he composed a rule and statutes. He is especially remembered for his love of the Eucharist. He died in 1495.
Frances was born in 1427, probably in Thouars in France. She was the wife of Peter II, Duke of Britanny. After his death, and under the direction of Blessed John Soreth, the prior general, she took the habit of the Carmelite Order in the monastery she had previously founded in Bondon. Afterwards she transferred to another foundation in Nantes, also erected by her, where she held the office of prioress and nourished the sisters with wise teaching. She is considered the foundress of the Carmelite nuns in France. She died in 1485.
Hilary Januszewski was born on 11 June 1907 in Krajenki (Poland). In 1927 he entered the Order of Carmel and was ordained on 15 July 1934. In 1939, Poland was occupied by the Germans and one year later, Fr. Hilary decided to present himself in exchange for an older and sick friar. He was sent to Dachau, where he was a model of prayer life, encouraging others and giving hope for a better tomorrow. He died from typhus on 25 March 1945, a few days before the liberation of the concentration camp. Fr. Hilary Januszewski was beatified by John Paul II on 13 June 1999.
Bl. Jacques Retouret was born at Limoges in France on 15th September 1746 to a merchant family. He was a serious young man, a lover of books and greatly gifted. At fifteen years of age, he entered the Carmelite house in his native city. After ordination, his zeal and learning were widely admired and large crowds of people were attracted by his way of preaching.
The French Revolution did not spare him. Like the majority of his fellow clergy, Jacques refused to accept the civil law, unilaterally introduced by the state. He was arrested and condemned, together with many other priests and religious, and sentenced to exile in French Guinea in South America. Jacques died at Madame Isle on 26th August 1794 at the age of 48 years. He was beatified, together with 63 other priests and religious, as martyrs for the faith, on 1st October 1995 by Pope John Paul II.
Mother Euphrasia was born on October 17, 1877. Her pious mother taught her to pray the rosary and to participate in the Holy Mass. She had a vision of Mother Mary at the age of nine and she offered her virginity to God eternally. Her father was opposed to her entering the Convent but eventually gave her permission to go to the Carmelite Convent in 1888. For the rest of her life she was immersed in prayer, in contemplation or praying the Rosary. People began to call her “The Praying Mother.” She was most devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and had a great longing to be with the Eucharistic Lord and participate in the Holy Mass and adore the Blessed Sacrament. She was canonized by Pope Francis on November 23, 2014 in Vatican City.
Saint Kuriakos Elias Chavara, co-founder and first prior general of the congregation of the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate, was born at Kainakary in Kersala, India, February 10, 1805. He entered the seminary in 1818, and was ordained priest in 1829. He made his religious profession in 1855, in the congregation he founded. Throughout his life he worked for the renovation of the church in Malabar. Above all, he was a man of prayer, zealous for the Eucharistic Lord and devoted to the Immaculate Virgin Mary. He died at Koonammavu in 1871. Kuriakose Kathanar was beatified on February 8, 1986 and canonized on November 23, 2014.
Born about 1305 in southern Perigord in France, Peter Thomas entered the Carmelites when he was twenty-one. He was chosen by the Order as its procurator general to the Papal Court at Avignon in 1345. After being made bishop of Patti and Lipari in 1354, he was entrusted with many papal missions to promote peace and unity with the Eastern Churches. He was transferred to the see of Corone in the Peloponnesus in 1359 and made Papal Legate for the East. In 1363 he was appointed Archbishop of Crete and 1364 Latin Patriarch of Constantinople. He won a reputation as an apostle of church unity before he died at Famagosta on Cyprus in 1366.
Raphael Kalinowski was born to Polish parents in the city of Vilnius in 1835. Following military service, he was condemned in 1864 to ten years of forced labor in Siberia. In 1877 he became a Carmelite and was ordained a priest in 1882. He contributed greatly to the restoration of the Discalced Carmelites in Poland. His life was distinguished by zeal for Church unity and by his unflagging devotion to his ministry as confessor and spiritual director. He died in Wadowice in 1907.
The following article on St. Thérèse is based on notes from the first presentation given at the Bay Area Regional Day of Recollection, 21 October 2023, by Father Mark Kissner, OCD. (House of Prayer, Napa, CA)
Speaker: Rev. Mark Kissner, OCD ⋮ Prior ⋮ Carmelite House of Prayer
On her death bed, Thérèse said that most of the saints in heaven wouldn’t recognize what we have made of them. She was more interested in a saint’s “real” life, not in the small details we have chosen to preserve and the analysis we’re left with that has become their legacy. She herself has been re-imagined as a sentimental woman, a “sweet” and innocuous saint. But beneath the sea of sentimentality she was a flesh-and-blood human being who struggled with scruples, the loss of her mother, her father's mental-health challenges, her crisis of faith, and doubts about eternal life. She lived with difficult people and died a painful death.
Of all these wounds, we’ll focus on three that Thérèse took to the grave. She struggled with them her whole life and was never completely free of them.
These life-long wounds made her rely on the grace of God.
Experiences of Separation and Loss. When Thérèse’s mother, Zélie, died, Thérèse was only 4½ years old. She was then sent to a Benedictine boarding school, where she stayed for 5 years. When Pauline (her second mother) entered the Carmel, Thérèse suffered another deep loss and she was bereft. She also suffered a major act of scruples, which led her to experience much suffering. Her lack of faith in her final years of life made suicide a very real temptation for her. At one point she asked her sister to remove all the medicine that was on a table by her bedside, for fear that in a moment of weakness she might take all the drugs. Even the saints know what it means to want it all to be over with!
Keep your good deeds hidden.
A lesson for us
To some of the nuns that lived with her, Thérèse was a mediocre nun. They never saw her virtues. Thérèse kept her good deeds hidden. This is a lesson for us as well: Keep your good deeds hidden.
The death of her mother, cut Thérèse’s life into “before” and “after”. It was so traumatic that Thérèse defined her life to that before-and-after event. Zélie‘s death was the inner emotional turning point of Thérèse’s life.
Her early childhood separations fed her feeling of abandonment. When she was a baby, Thérèse was given to a wet nurse named Rose to nurse her for 11 months because Zélie did not produce enough milk to sustain her child. Thérèse became very attached to Rose and bonded with Rose as if she were her mother. In her 11-month-old mind, Rose was “mother.” Even Zélie recognized the bond. At 11 months, Thérèse was weaned and returned to Zélie. This separation from Rose gave Thérese a sense of loss and a fear of being abandoned again. She felt the loss of Rose very deeply, as if she’d lost her mother. Out of her sense of loss she became very attached to Zélie. She clung to Zélie in an obsessive way. She was nervous and apprehensive. Zélie remarked that Thérése was different from her other children. When Zélie died a few years later, that was Thérése’s worst nightmare. It led to an intensification of her previous feeling of abandonment.
Thérèse responded by clinging to her family. She disliked strangers and felt safe only with her family. Her sister Pauline became Thérèse’s second mother. When Pauline left to join Carmel, Thérèse (age 11) was so traumatized that she became bedridden. After three months, Thérèse was cured almost instantly by the Blessed Virgin, whose statue, Thérèse said, smiled at her at the moment of her cure. Her inclination to cling to mother figures was something Thérèse had to fight all her life. It was a deep form of separation anxiety that she did not give in to. She chose to cling to Jesus instead.
This emotional scar was not an obstacle. It became a conduit to holiness because Thérése refused to be controlled by her emotions and desire to cling to mother figures. Thérése was also overly sensitive and she realized it as a drawback.
At the age of 14, she received the grace to leave childhood behind her. Thérèse’s “Christmas conversion” marked the end of her childhood and the beginning of adulthood. Jesus changed her heart, and so began the third period of her life. It gave her the strength to control her feelings. She realized it was more important to love others than give in to her own feelings.
We don’t have to be emotionally healed to grow in holiness.
Moral
Growth in holiness doesn’t depend on a change in our feelings. It depends on our response to the grace God gives us to deal with them. Love is a choice. Accept the death of your feelings in order to walk through the door to holiness. Thank God for the grace to master your emotions and grow in virtue. Thérèse never got beyond her feelings. They continued to exist and torment her. But she controlled them and put her complete trust in Jesus.
Moral: We don’t have to be emotionally healed to grow in holiness.
Thérése grew up in a time when Jansenism was rampant in the France. This movement proposed a life of moral rigor and asceticism. Jansenists preached that only a chosen few are to be saved and that you need to live a life of severe penance to be saved. It encourages an excessive introspection that inevitably leads to insipient scrupulosity. Thérése had a hard time believing that she was forgiven. In Chapter 4 of Story of a Soul she describes her difficulties. She remained scrupulous all her life. During the first years after she entered Carmel, a priest gave a sermon that troubled her deeply. The priest said that it was easy to offend God. Thérèse took this to heart, thinking that she had offended God in almost everything she did or thought. In Chapter 8 of Story of a Soul, she tells about another sermon by a different priest that highlighted a different message.
Don’t judge your spiritual life with an emotional yardstick.
Moral
He said that her sins did not offend God. He emphasized God’s love. But Thérèse still suffered from scruples and her doubts about being in the state of grace. Her internal battle was between two conflicting ideas: Believing God is merciful vs. feeling that God is merciful. Even though she did not “feel” God’s mercy, she believed in it by sheer strength of her will. She never really got beyond the wounds caused by her childhood and culture, but abandoned herself entirely to God in spite of her wounds.
Moral: Don’t judge your spiritual life with an emotional yardstick.
Question for us: Am I going to act on my faith in a merciful God or am I going to act on my feelings?
At one point in her final months of earthly life, Thérèse confessed, “I don’t believe in eternal life.” But her spirituality expanded. Everything is a grace from God, even the gift of faith. It wasn’t a matter of getting beyond the darkness but of how she dealt with being in the darkness. There are two kinds of faith:
1. One kind of faith is willing to jump into the darkness.
2. A second kind of faith is the willingness to sit in the darkness as long as God wills it.
Believe in God’s love without feeling loved.
Moral
By persisting in darkness, we can help others. Thérèse died in a state of temptation to abandon faith but in this context her faith persevered. When I do God’s will in an atmosphere of darkness, I am only being consumed by love. I see and feel Him without any support. Continue to say “yes” to God when it is beyond your ability to believe.
Thérèse chose to love her neighbor without feeling love. She chose to believe in God’s love without feeling loved. She chose to die in darkness without the confidence of God’s presence.
Moral: Faith, Hope, and Love are not emotions. They are actions.
Apostolic Exhortation: C’est La Confiance by Pope Francis
St. Thérèse teaches simplicity, love, trust, pope says in document by Cindy Wooden
“The Context of Holiness: Psychological and Spiritual Reflections on the Life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux” by Marc Foley. ICS Publications; Revised edition (January 4, 2021); ISBN-10: 1939272882; ISBN-13: 978-1939272881
