Eightieth Anniversary of St. Thérèse
as Patroness of the Missions
December 14, 1927– 2007
Dámaso Zuazua, ocd,
General Secretary of the Missions
"Let me assure you - in the name of the constant tradition of the Church - that your life not only proclaims the Absoluteness of God, but also has a wonderful and mysterious power of spiritual fruitfulness”. John Paul II.
Lisieux, June 2 1980
On December 14, 1927 the Congregation of Rites published a degree, by a decision of Pius XI, declaring that St. Thérèse of Lisieux was the special patroness of both men and women missionaries. She was given this title “equal to St. Francis Xavier, with all the rights and privileges that went with this title.”[1] They were rights and privileges of the liturgical cult.
In this way St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552), the greatest missionary in the Church after St. Paul, shared his title of heavenly protection of the Missions with the Carmelite Saint of Lisieux. From the time she entered Carmel (at the age of 15 years and three months) until her death Thérèse never left her Carmel. St. Francis Xavier, had already been declared since 1748, "Patron of all the lands to the east of the Cape of Good Hope”[2], and in 1904 he was named “Patron of the Work of the Propagation of the Faith.”[3] Isn’t there an invitation to make a deeper reflection on this “patronal brotherhood”? Someone questioned: “Does not this very fact of the two patrons put together have a message to us today?”[4]
1.First considerations
Among the numerous titles that the Church has granted to St. Thérèse, the one for the Missions is the most attractive, more so than her recent ecclesiastical doctorate (1997). It is amazing that she was compared with the holy Jesuit, who had a reputation of mythological proportions in evangelizing the East. His spiritual principle had been: To “love those people to whom we are sent and to make ourselves loved by them.” Thérèse of the Infant Jesus, Patroness of the Missions, was named without having ever left the convent, without ever having gone to a missionary land. But the motto of her monastic life was: “To love Jesus and to make him loved.”[5] She consecrated herself whole heartedly to this task: “Just as a torrent, throwing itself with impetuosity into the ocean, drags after it everything it encounters in its passage, in the same way, Jesus, the soul who plunges into the shoreless ocean of your love draws with her all the treasures she possesses.. Lord, You know it, I have no other treasures than the souls it has pleased You to unite to mine; it is You who entrusted these treasures to me.”[6] It is a declaration that reflects Thérèse’s missionary awareness. This spirit embraces, guides and gives sense to her whole life.
This message had been well understood in Carmel and in the Church. Before being designated as Universal Patroness of the Missions, four and a half years earlier, just Beatified on April 30 1923, she had already been declared Patroness of the Carmelite Missions. The current came before. But the waters came after. Already in 1921 in the magazine “Carmel and its Missions” said: “Since the eminent missionary spirit of our sister, Sr. Thérèse of the Infant Jesus, is known by all, it is natural that, after Our Holy Mother Teresa, we can confide to her soul all our missionary works. To you, then little Flower transplanted in Carmel, who has taken so many souls to Jesus, we entrust to you the dear Missions, our missionaries, this magazine, their collaborators, their readers, all those that want to alleviate the multiple necessities of your brothers, far from family and homeland.”[7]
One month later, again in 1921, the same Italian Carmelite missionary magazine inserted an article on “The little patroness of the Missions.” Comparing her with St. Teresa of Jesus, we “affirm that her great heart [that of Teresa of Jesus] had to exult when she saw well reproduced in this way her own apostolic zeal in the spirit of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who could be defined as the miniature of the great Teresa from Avila.”[8]
At the ecclesiastical level on July 29 1926, Pius XI declared her to be the Patroness of the Indigenous Clergy or of the Papal Missionary Work of St. Peter the Apostle.[9] In this statement he showed the clear will of the Church to remind the faithful of the firm evangelical principle, embodied in the heart of one person, Thérèse, that appeared more visible and more pedagogic or catechetical. By her strong charismatic attraction of extraordinary importance with the witness of her life and with the verve of her language, Thérèse of the Infant Jesus and of the Holy Face offered in the most visual form the evangelical counsel “to beg the owner of the harvest” (Mt 9, 38).
In order to understand the idea that St. Thérèse had of the Missions we have to take into account the theological implications of her environment, the historical context and her country. Let us reproduce an idea of missionary work that could reflect the Teresian mind in the French context of the 19th century: To “save souls is to be missionary, it is go, and live and work among peoples that don't know about the salvation that Jesus Christ merited for them, to guide them to benefit from his redeeming Blood, to teach them the truths of the faith, and to help them to enter in the universal Church. It is also simply to unite themselves by prayer to the multitude of those who do not know Christ and to bring them to Him.”[10]
Vatican II defined the missionary activity in these terms: “The special end of this missionary activity is the evangelization and the implantation of the Church among peoples or groups in which it has not yet taken root.”[11] The practical consequence, in general for all Christians, is found in the approach and question of Paul VI: “It would be useful if every Christian and every evangelizer were to prayerfully examine this thought: men can gain salvation also in other ways, by God's mercy, if we preach the Gospel to them; but as for us, can we gain salvation if through negligence or fear or shame- what St. Paul called “being ashamed of the Gospel”(Rm 1, 16) - or as a result of false ideas we fail to preach it?”[12]
The same Pope described evangelization in these terms: “to evangelize is first of all to bear witness, in a simple and direct way, to God revealed by Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit, to bear witness that in His Son God has loved the world - that in His Incarnate Word He has given being to all things and has called men to eternal life”.[13]
In his missionary encyclical “Redemptoris missio” John Paul II describes missionary service in this way: “The missionary must be a “contemplative in action.” He finds answers to problems in the light of God's word and in personal and community prayer. My contact with representatives of the non-Christian spiritual traditions, particularly those of Asia, has confirmed me in the view that the future of mission depends to a great extent on contemplation. Unless the missionary is a contemplative he cannot proclaim Christ in a credible way.”[14]
Moreover John Paul II adds that the steps of evangelization of the Church can be summarized in these points: 1) the simple presence and witness to Christian life; 2) human development; 3) liturgy and prayer; 4) interreligious dialogue; 5) the explicit announcement of the Gospel and of the catechism.[15]
With this awareness Thérèse was missionary by her life. Her being declared a patroness equal to St. Francis Xavier was not just an ecclesiastical coincidence. It is frequent in the history of the Church, in order to better express between two, a voice and an echo, a situation, a reality, a principle. We have the example of St. Peter and of St. Paul; the first one embodies the authority in the Church, while the Apostle of the nations reveals its charismatic dimension. In the case of St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzen, bishops and doctors of the Church, the first one commands respect for his qualities of leadership and organization, winding up as being the legislator of the monks for the Eastern Church, while the second was a contemplative and a poet. We know the case of saints Cyril and Methodius.
For other examples of complementarity we can mention St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, St. Francis and St. Clare, and St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross.
From all that has been said, the richness of her charism, and her incarnating the principle of a life of prayer for the workers of the evangelical harvest, St. Thérèse of the Infant Jesus merited to become the Patroness of the Missions.
2.Vocation and charism
In Thérèse’s homeland, France had a flourishing missionary spirit.[16] Starting from 1850 we can see the appearance of an important number of missionary Institutes. In 1890, two out of three missionaries in the world were French. In France, the Papal Missionary Works of the Propagation of the Faith and of the Holy Childhood originated. The area of the Normandy was particularly known for its link with the East.[17] The Carmelite proto–martyr B. Dionysus of the Nativity (1600-1638) was a native of Honfleur.[18] Mons. Lambert de la Motte, co–founder of the Society of the Foreign Missionaries of Paris, was born in Lisieux in 1624. We know the linking of St. Thérèse of the Infant Jesus to Théophane Vénard, a young martyred in Tonkin (+ 1861). In 1861, the Carmel of Lisieux establish its first missionary foundation with the monastery of Saigon at the initiative of Normandy’s Apostolic Vicar.[19] The two spiritual brothers of the Lisieux Carmel, Adolphe Roulland and Maurice Bellière, were also Norman.
The “Annals of the Propagation of the Faith”, with the weekly supplement which reported “on the setbacks and victories of the Catholic” apostolate was diffused throughout the Diocese. We know that the Martin family subscribed to it and that Thérèse herself was inscribed since January 12 1885 in the Work of the Holy Childhood.
The young Martin's missionary awareness was revealed in her Christmas 1886 “conversion”. Describing this grace, she writes: “Like His apostles: 'Master, I have fished all night and caught nothing'… He made of me a fisher of souls. I experienced a great desire to work for the conversion of sinners, a desire I hadn’t experienced so intensely before.”[20] Months later, in July of 1887, she will be confirmed in her vocation. It happened in the Cathedral of Lisieux. “One Sunday, looking at a picture of Our Lord on the Cross, I was struck by the blood flowing from one of the divine hands. I felt a great pang of sorrow when thinking this blood was falling to the ground without anyone’s hastening to gather it up. I was resolved to remain in spirit at the foot of the Cross and to receive the divine dew. I understood I was then to pour it out upon souls… I wanted to give my Beloved to drink and I felt myself consumed with a thirst for souls. As yet, it was not the souls of priests that attracted me, but those of great sinners.”[21]
A concrete case presented itself with the condemnation to death of the homicidal Pranzini, her “first son.”[22] Her comment shows the maturity she acquired with this “unique grace”, because starting from here “my desire to save souls grew day by day.”[23] Pranzini will be her first “son” of the multitude that followed afterwards in the world and in history. With this charged up atmosphere she undertook her trip to Italy. And of that moment her sister Celine recounts the following memory. After having read some pages of the Annals of the Missionary Sisters, Thérèse said: “I don't want to continue reading. I already have such a vehement desire to be a missionary!... I want to be a Carmelite.” Celine still adds the comment that her holy sister aspired to Carmel “to suffer more and for this means to save more souls.”[24]
Once in Carmel, she understood her missionary vocation from a contemplative point of view. “I had declared at the feet of Jesus–Victim, in the examination preceding my Profession, what I had come to Carmel for: I came to save souls and especially to pray for priests. When one wishes to attain a goal, one must use the means; Jesus made me understand that it was through suffering that he wanted to give me souls, and my attraction for suffering grew in proportion to its increase.”[25] In the note she composed for, September 8, 1890, she petitioned Jesus: “That I save many souls . . .”[26] Toward the end of her life (19.03.1897) she will add that she wants to “even save souls after my death.”[27] The principle of her Carmelite life was constant: It is “for prayer and sacrifice that one can help the missionaries.”[28]
The admirable thing in this case is that the missionary attraction doesn't appear in her like a personal preferential disposition, but as the motive of her Carmelite vocation. “I want to be a daughter of the Church.” like our Mother St. Teresa, and pray for the intentions of Holy Father the Pope, knowing that his intentions embrace the universe. This is the general purpose of my life.”[29] This was a clear reference to the ideas of Mother Teresa, manifested with such vehemence in her Writings, as V 32, 6; F 1, 7; C 3, 10. Even unto the preference of being able to save a single soul to remain in the purgatory, she shows herself to be in cordial sympathy with Teresa of Jesus (cf. C 3, 6).[30] Celine will remember in her “Counsels and Memories” that Thérèse wanted to be photographed in June of 1897 with the text of St. Teresa of Jesus in her hands: “To liberate only one [soul] I would gladly die many times over.” (V 32, 6; cfr. also 6M 6, 4).[31]
On behalf of St. Teresa of Avila, on behalf of her best tradition, Teresa of Lisieux feels herself to be a missionary as a Carmelite nun. The expression appears more than once from her pen: “A Carmelite that was not an apostle would move away from the purpose of her vocation and she would cease being a daughter of the Seraphic St. Teresa that wanted to give a thousand lives to save a single soul.”[32] Such a statement is the echo or the resonance of the spirit that the Founder inculcated in Carmel. Thérèse concludes it this way in her thought: “Not being able to be missionary in action, I have wanted to be one by love and the penance, like St. Teresa.”[33] In perfect Teresian harmony, the young Lisieux Carmelite adheres to the priority of contemplative prayer for the Missions: “How great it is the power of prayer! It could be said that she is a queen that has free access before the king in all moments, being able to obtain as much as she requests.”[34]