When she was 9 years old her sisters Marie and Pauline embraced the contemplative life in Carmel of Lisieux. Therese wished to join the congregation but was prevented from the attempt by her young age. She was often sick. On a visit to Italy, during an audience granted by Pope Leo XIII to the Pilgrims of Lisueux on November 1887, she asked the Holy Father, to be able to enter the Carmel Convent at the age of fifteen. It was granted on the feast of annunciation in 1888. She became postulant and re-united with Marie and Pauline. There Therese lived a life of humility, simplicity and child like trust in God. She returned over and over to the theme of littleness, referring to herself as a grain of sand - Always littler, lighter in order to be lifted more easily by the breeze of love.
She entered the order and received the name Therese of Child Jesus. She understood that she had to pray and give herself for sinners like Pranzini. She multiplied the small acts of charity and care for others by doing small services, without making a show of them.
Her desire, “May creatures be nothing for me and may I be nothing for them, but may you Jesus be everything, let nobody be occupied with me, let me be looked upon as one to be trampled underfoot…….may your will be done in me perfectly……. Jesus allow me to save very many souls, let no soul be lost today; let all the souls in purgatory be saved”. Throughout her life she prayed fervently for priest. She wrote to her sister “our mission as Carmelites is to form evangelical workers who will save thousands of souls whose mothers we shall be”.
On the night between Holy Thursday and Good Friday in 1896 at the age of 23 Therese experienced her first haemoptysis (spitting up of blood) due to Tuberculosis. On August 19, 1897 Therese received last communion. She died on the September 30, 1897 at the young age of 24. Her last words were” My God I Love You”.
She was canonized by Pope Pius XI on May 17, 1925. The same Pope proclaimed her universal patron of the missions on 14th December 1925. On 24th August Pope John Paul II announced his intension on a World Mission Sunday to proclaim Therese of Child Jesus a Doctor of the Universal Church.
