St Therese of Lisieux shall be the patroness of the institute

 

 

John Paul II pointed this out clearly in his homily to mark the occasion. In choosing as a Doctor of the Church this young woman--who died at twenty-four and was unable to attend any university or engage in strict systematic study--the Church was departing from tradition and breaking new ground.

 

We do not find in Thérèse any learned discourses or a deep scholarly presentation of the things of God. What we do find, in her school copybook, is something much more vital and valuable: a way of truth illumined by love. We find a new form of wisdom, unique in clarity and conviction. It is a wisdom in full conformity with the sources of revelation but it excels in its simplicity, depth and discernment. It touches the chords of the soul. Paul says, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, 'We teach spiritual things spiritually' (2:13). So, too, does Thérèse.

 

On World Mission Sunday, October 19, 1997, Pope John Paul II declared St. Thérèse of Lisieux a "Doctor of the Universal Church."

 

This event marked not only the culmination of an unprecedented series of honors bestowed on "the greatest saint of modern times," as St. Pius X called her, but it also represented a watershed in the evolution of the understanding of this ecclesiastical title bestowed on only 33 saints in the history of the Church. Certainly, at the time of her death in 1897, no one would have guessed that this 24-year-old Carmelite nun, with such a limited education and imperfect literary style, who never wrote a treatise or published an article and who died virtually unknown in an obscure French Carmel, would one day come to be ranked alongside such eminent personalities as St. Augustine and St. Thomas