The Journey ...

Sister Lucia's Beatification Process to Begin
Pope Waves 5-Year Waiting Period

VATICAN CITY, FEB. 13, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI announced he will dispense with the five-year waiting period established by Canon Law to open the cause of beatification of Sister Lucia, one of the three Fatima visionaries.

The news was announced today in the cathedral of Coimbra, Portugal, by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for Saints' Causes, on the third anniversary of the Carmelite's death.
The Holy Father dispensed with the established waiting period once before for the cause of Pope John Paul II. Benedict XVI made the announcement on May 13, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, some 42 days after the Pontiff's death in 2005.

John Paul II waived the waiting period in the case of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. The blessed died Sept. 5, 1997, and was beatified by John Paul II on Oct. 19, 2003.

A communiqué of the Vatican press office states: "Benedict XVI, taking into account the petition presented by Bishop Albino Mamede Cleto of Coimbra, and supported by numerous bishops and faithful from all parts of the world, has revoked the five-year waiting period established by the canonical norms (cf. Article 9 of the 'Normae Servandae'), and he has allowed for the diocesan phase of the Carmelite's cause of beatification to begin three years after her death."

Apparitions

Lucia de Jesus dos Santos was 10 years old when she said she saw for the first time, on May 13, 1917, a lady whom she later identified as the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the Cova de Iria.

She saw the vision with her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, who were beatified by John Paul II in Fatima, in 2000.

In a pastoral letter dated Oct. 13, 1930, the bishop of Leiria-Fatima, José Alves Correia da Silva, declared the apparitions of Fatima worthy of faith and allowed public devotion. Since then, the shrine has become a center of spirituality and pilgrimage of international scope.

Born in Aljustrel in 1907, Lucia moved to Oporto in 1921, and at 14 was admitted as a boarder in the School of the Sisters of St. Dorothy in Vilar, on the city's outskirts.

On Oct. 24, 1925, she entered the Institute of the Sisters of St. Dorothy and at the same time was admitted as a postulant in the congregation's convent in Tuy, Spain, near the Portuguese border. She made her first vows on Oct. 3, 1928, and her perpetual vows on Oct. 3, 1934, receiving the name Sister Mary of the Sorrowful Mother.

She returned to Portugal in 1946 and two years later entered the Carmelite convent of St. Teresa in Coimbra, where she made her profession as a Discalced Carmelite on May 31, 1949, taking the name Sister Maria Lucia of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart.

She wrote two volumes, one entitled "Memories" and the other "Appeals of the Fatima Message." In her writings, she recounts how the Virgin Mary and Child Jesus appeared to her on other occasions, years after the initial apparitions.

The mortal remains of the Carmelite were moved in 2006 to the Shrine of Fatima. The body of the nun, who died at age 97, is buried next to Jacinta. Francisco is buried in the same basilica.

Thanks

Thérèse of Lisieux dressed as Joan of Arc. Lisieux, France, 1894.

Zélie and Joseph Martin were a pious couple; both had applied to, but been rejected by, religious orders. They married at relatively late ages (he thirty-five, she twenty-six) with the intention of having a "white marriage", that is, one with no sexual intercourse. Nevertheless, a year later Zélie was pregnant with the first of their nine children, of whom five daughters survived early childhood. If Zélie was to have children she was determined they should give their lives to religion, and all five became nuns.

Zélie ran a small business making point d'Alençon lace; Louis sold his clock-making shop and went into semi-retirement. They had inherited some money and were comfortably well-off.

In 1872, their youngest child, Marie-Françoise-Thérèse, was born. By this time Zélie had breast cancer, and the doctor advised her that her milk would poison the baby; so Thérèse was given to a wet-nurse in the country. She returned to the Martin home when she was fifteen months old.

When Thérèse was four and a half years old, her mother died.

"I saw a lot they wanted to hide from me. I saw the lid of the coffin and stood looking at it for a long time. I knew what it was, although I hadn't seen one before. I was so small that, although Mommy was short, I had to lift my head to see it all. It seemed huge and grim."

Thérèse's older sister Pauline, then seventeen, took on the role of mother, dressing her, hearing her prayers, and teaching her reading and catechism.

"For the rest of the day I played in the garden with Daddy, for I wasn't interested in dolls. I got most fun out of soaking seeds and bits of bark in water and then offering the liquid to Daddy in a pretty little cup. He'd take it and smile and pretend to drink it."

When Thérèse was nine she learned that Pauline was going to leave her, to enter the Carmelite Convent at Lisieux.

"How can I express the agony I suffered? In a flash I understood what life was. Until then I had not seen it as too sad a business, but now I saw it as it really was -- a thing of suffering and continual partings."

"You explained what life in Carmel was like and it seemed wonderful. When I was thinking about what you had told me, I felt that Carmel was the desert where God wanted me to hide myself too. This feeling was so strong that I had not the least doubt about it."

Sure enough, Thérèse followed Pauline into Carmel seven years later, aged sixteen. In a way she hadn't really left home. Eventually, four Martin sisters and one cousin would belong to this convent of only twenty-five nuns. "I found that a nun's life was just what I imagined it would be."

"Our Lord allowed the prioress to treat me with great severity, though she didn't always realise it. I never met her without being reprimanded for something." This prioress was Mother Marie de Gonzague, who would alternate with Pauline in that office throughout Thérèse's short life. Her treatment of Thérèse was harsh to the point of cruelty.

Although Thérèse lived in a shrunken, constricted world, she longed for greatness. She wrote a verse play about the Venerable Joan of Arc, and took the title role herself. "I want to offer my neck to the sword of the executioner and, like Joan of Arc, murmur the name of Jesus at the stake." She even dreamed of being a priest: "How lovingly I'd carry you in my hands when you came down from heaven at my call; how lovingly I'd bestow you upon men's souls."

In the end she learned to play the meager hand that life had dealt her. "I was delighted when a pretty little jug in my cell was replaced by a big chipped one. I also tried hard not to make excuses ... Above all, I tried to do my small good deeds in secret. I loved folding up the mantles forgotten by the sisters and seized every possible oppurtunity of helping them." Thus Thérèse developed her "Little Way" of holiness, using the limited means at her disposal.

"I was made to understand that the glory I was to win would never be seen during my lifetime. My glory would consist in becoming a great saint!"

In 1894, Pauline, in her capacity as Prioress, ordered Thérèse to write the story of her life. After her death this would be published as L'Histoire d'une Ame ("The Story of a Soul.")

But Mother Marie de Gonzague was prioress in the spring of 1896:

"I went to my cell at midnight ... I had scarcely put my head on the pillow when a warm gush of something filled my mouth. I thought I was dying and my heart almost burst with joy. But as I had just put out my lamp, I restrained my curiosity until morning and went peacefully to sleep. When the bell for getting up rang at five o'clock, I remembered at once that I had some good news to check. I went to the window and saw the good news was true -- my handkerchief was sodden with blood. What hope I had, Mother!"

This was the tuberculosis which caused her death at the age of twenty-four. The medical treatment Thérèse received was inadequate even by the standards of the time; this was the responsibility of Mother Marie de Gonzague, who allowed Thérèse to continue the exhausting round of her duties far too long.

"But you must not believe, Mother, that your child wishes to leave you, Mother, because she considers it a greater grace to die in the morning of life rather than at the close of day."

Thérèse died on Sept. 30, 1898. A year later the convent published L'Histoire d'une Ame, which became a runaway bestseller. In Portugal bishops granted indulgences to readers of the book. French soldiers carried her picture into the trenches of World War I. Her immense popularity caused her to be canonised immediately, only twenty-seven years after her death.

copyright © 1996 Beth Randall [used with permission]

The Spotlight this month is on:
Saint Therese of Lisieux
Feastday: October 1
Patron of the Missions

Generations of Catholics have admired this young saint, called her the "Little Flower", and found in her short life more inspiration for own lives than in volumes by theologians.

Yet Therese died when she was 24, after having lived as cloistered Carmelite for less than ten years. She never went on missions, never founded a religious order, never performed great works. The only book of hers, published after her death, was an brief edited version of her journal called "Story of a Soul." (Collections of her letters and restored versions of her journals have been published recently.) But within 28 years of her death, the public demand was so great that she was canonized.

" We live in an age of inventions. We need no longer climb laboriously up flights of stairs; in well-to-do houses there are lifts. And I was determined to find a lift to carry me to Jesus, for I was far too small to climb the steep stairs of perfection. So I sought in holy Scripture some idea of what this life I wanted would be, and I read these words: "Whosoever is a little one, come to me." It is your arms, Jesus, that are the lift to carry me to heaven. And so there is no need for me to grow up: I must stay little and become less and less."

She worried about her vocation: " I feel in me the vocation of the Priest. I have the vocation of the Apostle. Martyrdom was the dream of my youth and this dream has grown with me. Considering the mystical body of the Church, I desired to see myself in them all. Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that the Church had a Heart and that this Heart was burning with love. I understood that Love comprised all vocations, that Love was everything, that it embraced all times and places...in a word, that it was eternal! Then in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love...my vocation, at last I have found it...My vocation is Love!"

When an antagonist was elected prioress, new political suspicions and plottings sprang up. The concern over the Martin sisters perhaps was not exaggerated. In this small convent they now made up one-fifth of the population. Despite this and the fact that Therese was a permanent novice they put her in charge of the other novices.

Then in 1896, she coughed up blood. She kept working without telling anyone until she became so sick a year later everyone knew it. Worst of all she had lost her joy and confidence and felt she would die young without leaving anything behind. Pauline had already had her writing down her memories for journal and now she wanted her to continue -- so they would have something to circulate on her life after her death.

Her pain was so great that she said that if she had not had faith she would have taken her own life without hesitation. But she tried to remain smiling and cheerful -- and succeeded so well that some thought she was only pretending to be ill. Her one dream as the work she would do after her death, helping those on earth. "I will return," she said. "My heaven will be spent on earth." She died on September 30, 1897 at the age of 24 years old.

After she died, everything at the convent went back to normal. One nun commented that there was nothing to say about Therese. But Pauline put together Therese's writings (and heavily edited them, unfortunately) and sent 2000 copies to other convents. But Therese's "little way" of trusting in Jesus to make her holy and relying on small daily sacrifices instead of great deeds appealed to the thousands of Catholics and others who were trying to find holiness in ordinary lives. Within two years, the Martin family had to move because her notoriety was so great and by 1925 she had been canonized.

Therese of Lisieux is one of the patron saints of the missions, not because she ever went anywhere, but because of her special love of the missions, and the prayers and letters she gave in support of missionaries. This is reminder to all of us who feel we can do nothing, that it is the little things that keep God's kingdom growing.
http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=105

She believed. She loved. She shed her blood for Christ.

This us from seminarian Josh McCarty:
"To really meet Jesus causes change."