On Tuesday this week it will be one hundred years since the death of St Therese of Lisieux. Of all modern saints she has seemed the most misunderstood. In Paris last month the Pope announced his intention of declaring her a 'doctor of the Church'. I had wondered if such an accolade might inculcate further misunderstanding but have been discovering recently that there's more to this woman than first meets the eye.

There is even a photograph of St Therese. Taken two years before her death at twenty-four from tuberculosis this photo had I confess always rather frightened me. A large copy of it had hung in one of the chapels at the seminary where I trained to be a priest. I always found it hard to see how the woman in that photo with her hard steely stare could be equated with the saint popularly nicknamed "Little Flower." In taking a fresh look at her writings though I have begun to recognise what the late Pope John-Paul I called "the story of a piece of steel." And in that recognition she ceases to be what Thomas Merton called the "pious little doll". It now seems to me to be very, appropriate if a little belated that she should join the eight men and two woman whose teachings are so highly regarded by the Church that they are accorded the title 'doctor.' What there is it about her that will have me pleased to celebrate her feast day; held the day after her death on 1st October?

It is her extraordinary simplicity and honesty. I have discovered that she had a horror of anything phoney or false. A frequently heard prayer of hers was "Make me see things as they really are." It certainly seems that she tried in her short life to allow that prayer to be put into action. Hers was a courageous bid to overcome the white-knuckled struggle for perfection that so dominated Catholic life in the last century. Therese seemed to rejoice at her inability to manufacture her own righteousness ; "I don’t always succeed" she wrote in her autobiography. What a relief that is to know: a saint who didn't always succeed. Tell that to our culture with its intolerable weight of continuous appraisal and performance targets!

On prayer she is at her best and one final quotation on how to do it may perhaps have you joining me this week in thanking God for her life and in asking her to pray for us: "I say very simply to God what I wish to say, without composing beautiful sentences, and He always understands me. Amen to that! DG