Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Virgin and Doctor of the Church

Thérèse Martin was born in 1873 at Alençon in Normandy, the youngest of five surviving daughters of Louis and Zélie Martin, a watchmaker and a lacemaker. Her mother died when she was four. Determined to follow her sisters into the Carmel of Lisieux, at fourteen she asked Pope Leo XIII himself, during a pilgrimage audience, for permission, and entered at fifteen in 1888. There she lived an ordinary, hidden life and described her “little way” of trust and small acts of love. At her prioress's request she wrote the memoirs published after her death as Story of a Soul, which went round the world. She died of tuberculosis on 30 September 1897, aged 24. She was canonized in 1925 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997.