McGrath Institute Blog

St. Thérèse is affectionately known the world over as “The Little Flower,” and her autobiography, Story of a Soul, has taught “millions of souls” (Pius XII) what has become known as her “Little Way.” This Little Way has been admired and embraced by so many because it allows the ordinary things of daily life to become the extraordinary deeds of love that can lead to sainthood.

In celebration of her feast day, we contemplate her Little Way from three different angles.

“The dazzling genius of Augustine, the luminous wisdom of Thomas Aquinas, have shed forth upon souls the rays of an imperishable splendor; through them, Christ and his doctrine have become better known. The divine poem lived out by Francis of Assisi has given to the world an imitation, as yet unequaled, of the life of God made man. Through him legions of men and women have learned to love God more perfectly. But a little Carmelite who had hardly reached adult age has conquered in less than half a century innumerable hosts of disciples. Doctors of the law have become children at her school; the Supreme Shepherd has exalted her and prays to her with humble and assiduous supplications; and even at this moment from one end of the earth to the other, there are millions of souls whose interior life has received the beneficent influence of [her] little book [The Story of a Soul].”

Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
⁠Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger once reported that “the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” In this month marked by the feast of All Saints, I wish to take up examples of the truth of Ratzinger’s statement, one from the literary arts and one from the visual arts, both related to the saints. 

History is full of hope. This is what the saints tell us and why their stories should be told and celebrated in every day and age. The holy men and women who have gone before us direct our attention toward the final unfolding of history, when God will be all and in all. However, this is not always obvious, at least it wasn’t to me. As a young school girl, and even as a graduate student, history was a subject for study. I learned about the past, and often that past that didn’t seem to have much to do with me, at least not here and now, nor in the future.