Learning from St. Therese: Prayer in the Missionary Dimension of Christian Life, National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica, Royal Oak, MI, October 1, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica
Royal Oak Michigan
Vespers on the Feast of St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face
October 1, 2019

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s talk, please click below: 

The following outline guided tonight’s talk: 

• Introduction
  • Bishops, Priests, Religious, Fellow Devotees of St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face:
  • It is a real honor and joy to be with you tonight to thank and praise God for her, to laud and express our gratitude to her for her continued and ever inspiring yes to her vocation to be love in the heart of the Church and for all the ways she continues to spend her heaven doing good for us on earth, and to ask God through her intercession for the many petitions we bring before her tonight.
• Vespers
  • Her life is a commentary of what we’ve been praying tonight.
    • Her life is a service to the Gospel, God has indeed given her this grace.
    • She has proven herself faithful, one of the wise virgins constantly alert for the Bridegroom, and the Lord has entrusted to her his Church to guide us all on the little way of total confidence and love.
    • She is a good sheep of the Good Shepherd who hears his voice and helps us to hear him more clearly and to follow him as he leads us with his rod and staff through dark valleys to verdant pastures and makes our cup overflow.
    • She has shown us what St. James says in the passage we’ve just heard, that “wisdom from above is first of all innocent.”
    • And as we’ll joyfully chant before and after the Magnificat later, she is a light of God’s holy Church and a lover of God’s law.
  • While we could ponder any of these truths, what I’d like to consider is something we prayed as we sang in the Canticle from Revelation, “All nations shall come and worship in your presence.”
  • Perhaps more surprising than John Paul II’s naming a girl who never attended high school a doctor of the Church in 1997 was Pope Pius XI’s naming a cloistered Carmelite who never left her monastery in Lisieux the co-patroness of the Missions with St. Francis Xavier in 1927, at the request of missionary bishops throughout the world. But God’s ways are not our ways. And how much do we need to learn from her in 2019 God’s ways.
  • We are living at a time in which we need a rebirth of missionary zeal. St. John Paul II, Pope-emeritus Benedict, Pope Francis have all been calling the Church to a new evangelization worldwide. Archbishop Vigneron called an Archdiocesan Synod and wrote an extraordinary pastoral letter in order to unleash the Gospel. We know the context.
    • In our country, 30 million people define themselves as ex-Catholics, one out of every 11, the second largest religious group. There’s the almost viral rise of the nones, n-o-n-e-s, those who don’t identify with any religious, who believe they have no need for God and no desire to find out whether he exists or what he asks of them. There’s the shuttering of Churches, schools, convents and seminaries. There are dioceses even in our country in which priests are on circuits of several hundred miles every Sunday to try to bring Christ to people. And all of us have family members we love who have wandered from the practice of the faith.…
    • Most of the countries in Europe, however, would love to have our problems, because theirs are infinitely worse. There’s a widespread collapse of faith in Europe. The institutional structure is there in many places as a vestige: the beautiful Cathedrals, the impressive patrimony; but practice in most places is in the single digits.
    • We have the situation in places where the Church is persecuted.
    • Then we have the situation on the Amazon, about which Pope Francis is going to be convening an extraordinary Synod of the Bishops of the Region next week in the Vatican. The Amazon is an enormous tropical forest covering 2.1 million square miles — four times the size of Alaska — and nine countries, embracing 2.8 million indigenous people, 390 indigenous tribes, 240 spoken languages and as yet 137 uncontacted peoples. And many of these people are able to be visited only once or twice a year by priests, leading some to ask whether the Church should ordain elderly married men in the villages to celebrate the Sacraments. This call is happening only 12 years after all of the Bishops in Latin America met in Aparecida Brazil and produced a great document calling on a continent wide Mission to reevangelize. The whole question about ordaining married men is a sign of a lack of confidence that the type of missionary zeal that inspired St. Francis Xavier and St. Therese is gone. Since there’s no hope for missionaries, not even the proposal to ask for them, let’s just do the best we can with what we have is the attitude.
    • This is why we need the Saint Therese. We need to learn the missionary dimension of our faith anew.
  • Therese’s missionary spirituality is the spirituality of the Church
    • She ardently desired to be a missionary and she was one, to the extent that she would be proclaimed patroness of the Missions.
    • Pope Francis wrote in his exhortation on the Joy of the Gospel said that each of us must get to the point where we are able to say, “I am a missionon this earth; that is the reason why I am here in this world.”
    • That Mission begins with love. The essence of her spirituality was “to love Jesus and make him loved.” She discovered her vocation to be beating heart of the Mystical Body, to be love in the heart of the Church her mother, precisely by loving Jesus and extending his love, helping people to make personal Jesus’ words during the Last Supper, “Just as the Father loves me, I love you. … Remain in my love. … Love one another just as I have loved you.”
    • That love is not just a general willing the good of others for their sake, but was always personal, for each one. She would say, “I have no other treasures than the souls it has pleased You, [Jesus,] to unite to mine; it is You who entrusted these treasures to me.” We see that in the way she prayed for Henri Pranzini on death row until he embraced God’s mercy by kissing a crucifix right before he was guillotined. We see it in the way she adopted Father Maurice Bellière and Father Adolphe Rulland, missionaries respectively in Africa and China, and helped them to fulfill their priestly and missionary vocations. We see it in the way she treated the older and younger sisters in the convent, trying to love them with everything she had. Most of us have also seen it in the particular care she has given us.
    • What’s essential in being a missionary, we learn from her, are not the legs but the heart. It’s not the physical act of traversing land and sea, but begins with a yearning to respond to the love of God by seeking to share it, a hunger to go, teach all nations, and share with them the depth of Jesus’ redeeming love.
    • That deep craving began when she was very young. Her family used to read the “Annals of the Propagation of the Faith” on the “setback and victories of the Catholic Mission.” Her sister Celine recounts that after having read some pages of the Annals of the Missionary Sisters, young Thérèse said: “I don’t want to continue reading. I already have such a vehement desire to be a missionary!… I want to be a Carmelite.” Celine said that her sister aspired to Carmel “to suffer more and for this means to save more souls.” Therese herself would say, “It was not the souls of priests that attracted me, but those of great sinners,” and she became a Carmelite to act on that deep craving.
    • She wrote about a grace she received at 14: “Like His apostles: ‘Master, I have fished all night and caught nothing’… He made of me a fisher of souls. I experienced a great desire to work for the conversion of sinners, a desire I hadn’t experienced so intensely before.”
    • Much later she would write, “I would spread the Gospel in all parts of the earth, even to the farthest isles. I would be a missionary, but not for a few years only. Were it possible, I should wish to have been one from the world’s creation and to remain one till the end of time. Give to us souls, dear Lord. … We thirst for souls, above all, for the souls of apostles and martyrs … so that through them we may inflame all poor sinners with love of you.”
    • This gave meaning to all her suffering. She said, “The end cannot be reached without adopting the means, and since Our Lord had made me understand that it was through the cross He would give me souls, the more crosses I encountered the stronger became my attraction to suffering. I am convinced that no remedies have the power to cure me, but I have made a covenant with God that they may be for the benefit of poor missionaries who have neither time nor means to take care of themselves.”
    • She was photographed three months before she tied holding a text of St. Teresa of Jesus in her hands: “To liberate only one [soul] I would gladly die many times over.”
    • “In spite of my littleness, I would like to enlighten souls as did the Prophets and the Doctors. I have the vocation of the Apostles. I would like to travel over the whole earth to preach your Name and to plant your glorious cross on infidel soil. But…one mission alone would not be sufficient for me, I would want to preach the Gospel on all the five continents simultaneously and even to the most remote isles. I would be a missionary, not for a few years only, but from the beginning of creation until the consummation of the ages.”
    • 11 days before she died, she added that she wanted to “even save souls after my death.”
  • Prayer in the Missionary Dimension of the Christian Life
    • She became a Carmelite precisely to be a missionary through her prayer of soul and bodily suffering. It is “for prayer and sacrifice,” she entered the Carmel, “that one can help the missionaries.”
    • Prayer for the Mission of the Church is something that we have to rediscover.
    • Back in 2000, the future Pope Benedict XVI gave an address to catechists from all over the world on the New Evangelization. He considered what the evangelists said about Jesus, “Jesus preached by day, he prayed by night.” Then he commented: “Jesus had to acquire the disciples from God. The same is always true. We ourselves cannot gather men. We must acquire them by God for God. All methods are empty without the foundation of prayer. The word of the announcement must always be drenched in an intense life of prayer.”
    • In his missionary encyclical “Redemptoris missio” John Paul II describes missionary service in this way: “The missionary must be a “contemplative in action.” He finds answers to problems in the light of God’s word and in personal and community prayer. … Unless the missionary is a contemplative he cannot proclaim Christ in a credible way.”
    • Very often we can try to solve problems with worldly means. Rather than lifting up our hearts to God and place our faith, hope and love in him, we lower them to place our faith, hope and love in worldly means. I think this is what is happening with the proposed solution in the Amazon, something that St. Therese with her burning zeal never suggested for Africa or China, something that St. Francis Xavier never asked for in the East.
    • She was once asked by one of her adopted Missionary priest brothers what was the reason why, more that 1800 years after Christ had come, there were still so many people who had never heard his saving name. Her response was because of the laziness of Christians. Many Christians don’t lose sleep over that fact. They don’t drop to their knees until their calloused. They don’t sacrifice for Missionaries. They don’t become Missionaries.
    • Saint Therese, rather, prayed, sacrified, lived and breathed for vocations for the Mission. She prayed for a generous response to the Lord’s full outpouring. Therese is praying for us that we will learn to pray like she does.
    • “I was thinking one day what could be done to save souls; a passage of the Gospel gave me a clear light. On one occasion Jesus said to his disciples, showing them the fields of mature crops: ‘Lift up your eyes and see how the fields are quite white, ready as to be harvested” (Jn 4, 35). A little later she adds: “Truly, the harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few; pray, then, the owner of the harvest that he send workers’. What mystery! Is not Jesus omnipotent? Did he not make all creatures? Why does Jesus say: Pray the Harvest Master that he send laborers? Why? Ah! It is because Jesus feels for us such an incomprehensible love that he wants us to have part with him in the salvation of the souls, redeemed, like her, at the price of all his blood.” Thus, she reached the conclusion: “Our vocation is not go to reap in the fields of the mature crops; Jesus doesn’t tell us: ‘Lower your eyes, look at the fields and go and reap’. Our mission is more sublime still. Here are Jesus’ words: ‘Lift your eyes and see. See how in heaven there are empty places, he asks you to fill them. You are my praying Moses on the mountain; request workers of me, and I will send them. I only wait for a prayer, a sigh of your heart! The apostolate of prayer, is it not so to say, higher than that of preaching? Our mission, as Carmelites, is one of forming evangelical workers that will save millions of souls whose mothers we will be.”
    • She rejoiced in her vocation: “How beautiful is the vocation that has for its purpose to conserve the salt of the earth! …  The only purpose of our prayers and sacrifices is the one of being the apostles’ apostle, praying for them while they evangelize souls with by word and, mainly, by their example.” But we don’t have to become Carmelites to pray like this. We can do so tonight. Right here. And tomorrow.
    • She was a firm believer in the power of prayer: “How great it is the power of prayer!,” she exclaimed, reflecting on Queen Esther. “It could be said that she is a queen that has free access before the king in all moments, being able to obtain as much as she requests.”
  • Conclusion
    • So if we are going to learn from St. Therese how to be become missionaries in this world, we need to imitate her in:
      • Stoking our love for others such that we cannot wait to share Christ with them. As Pope Francis describes in the Joy of the Gospel:
        • “What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?”
        • “We have a treasure of life and love that cannot deceive, and a message that cannot mislead or disappoint.” It ennobles us and is never out of date. This infinite love cures our infinite sadness.
        • We know, he says, from personal experience, just as she did, that “it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. …We know well that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything. This is why we evangelize.”
        • It starts with that love of God that we want to share: to love Jesus and to make him loved.
      • Next it comes from having a missionary spirituality. The spirituality of Jesus in his incarnation. The spirituality of the Holy Spirit, who comes down on the Church as tongues of fire so that we might proclaim the faith with ardor.
      • Third it comes from prayer. We need to pray to the Harvest Master.
      • A true missionary doesn’t evangelize alone, but with Jesus. This helps us not to lose enthusiasm, passion and vigor. “The word of the announcement must always be drenched in an intense life of prayer,” as Pope Benedict said.
      • Then we actually need to share it with those we can, in person, with letters, with our messaging apps, with social media, every way we can. This is not just words but witness. We preach not merely with lips but with lives transformed by Christ and enriched.
    • Therese’s help
      • We finish by turning back to the Little Flower.
        • During her last illness, she affirmed: “I feel that I am going to enter into rest. But I mainly feel that my mission is about to begin, my mission of making God loved as I love him … My heaven will be spent on earth until the end of the world. Yes, I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth … I cannot be happy rejoicing, I cannot rest until all souls are saved.” Her mission in heaven is to continue the mission she fulfilled on earth, of making Jesus loved as she loves him.
        • She said 11 days before her God came for her that she wanted “even save souls after my death.”
        • She was excited about that mission andwrote with joy, “There will be no longer any cloister and grilles and my soul will be able to fly with you into distant lands.”
        • She continues her work in us helping us to love Jesus as she did and to receive his gift of salvation. She continues praying for us. And that’s why we should have such confidence. If we have her praying on our side that we have every confidence we can live the missionary dimension of the Christian life and bear great fruit, so that others will come to experience Christ’s love for them and become, with Therese, love in the heart of the Church helping others to come to so that same mercy.
  • St. Therese of the Child Jesus, pray for us.