Writing this, I’m home just a few days from a truly life-giving pilgrimage offered through Bayard Pilgrimages. We spent seven days in France, visiting many sacred sites. There were so many highlights. For now, I’ll just share a surprise highlight: getting to know more about Louis Martin and Azélie-Marie ” Zélie ” Guérin Martin, the parents of Thérèse of the Child Jesus.
I knew of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, who is one of only four women recognized as a doctor of the Church. But it was a great joy to discover her parents, who were canonized together, as a married couple, in 2015. Their feast day is July 12.
They met on a bridge in Alençon, a city famous for its lace, and it was love at first sight, although I did read that Louis’ mother was keen to match him up with a nice Catholic girl. They dated only three months, then were married in the local church (now the Basilica of Notre Dame) on July 13, 1858.
In many ways, their life together was filled with the ordinary joys and sorrows of married life. The couple were both entrepreneurs: Louis was a watchmaker. Zélie trained professionally to produce Point d’Alençon, known as the “queen of lace” in the mid-19 century. She won awards, and her business was so successful that Louis quit making watches and clocks to help her. They were known for treating their employees with dignity and paying just wages. Socially committed Catholics, they joined a new movement founded by Frederic Ozanam, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
Of their nine children, only five, all girls, survived childhood. While those five eventually all became religious sisters (four Carmelites and one Visitation Sister), it seems their home was filled with the usual busyness of a full house. One museum post described the middle daughter, Marie Léonie (who is now being considered for canonization), as causing her mother “great tribulation.” Louis declared the attic was his, a sort of monastic cell: His daughters could only interrupt his quiet time there if they wanted a “spiritual conversation” with their father.
Zélie died of breast cancer when she was only 45 and Thérèse, her youngest, was not yet 5. Louis sold the family business and moved to Lisieux, where Zélie’s brother lived, to raise the girls. Later in life, he suffered two paralyzing strokes which most likely resulted in brain damage; he died in his home, cared for by the two daughters who had not yet professed religious vows.
Their faith was a living faith, one with tremendous joy and excruciating sorrow, that created a domestic church, now recognized by the universal church as holy. In 2008, Cardinal Jose Saraiva preached that Sts. Louis and Zélie “were not simple instruments that conveyed the faith, like an aqueduct carries water, but the depositum fidei, the deposit of faith, [which] they have transmitted and enriched by their own personal experience of faith, hope and charity. They did not pass on the faith as something traditional, fragmentary and notional, but as something living.”
In that same discourse, the cardinal quoted from their daughter Céline Martin’s testimony. “They were always giving, either food or money; and often it was little Thérèse who carried the alms,” Céline said. “Another day my father had met an old man [who he brought to the Martins’ home]…he was given food and everything he needed. As he was about to leave, my father asked him to bless us, Thérèse and me. We were already great young women and we knelt before him, and he blessed us.”
Sts. Louis and Zélie, pray for us!
In gratitude,
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