When Thérèse Martin died at the Carmel of Lisieux in September 1897, almost nobody outside her family, convent and a small circle of correspondents knew who she was. She had spent nine years inside the enclosure and had accomplished none of the things normally associated with a public religious life. She had founded nothing, preached nowhere and travelled almost nowhere. Yet the writings she left behind reveal a young woman with enormous ambitions for what her life might mean.

After Thérèse’s death, her sisters and the Carmel arranged her writings for publication. In 1898 they appeared as Story of a Soul, in which Thérèse described her childhood, vocation and spiritual life. The effect was extraordinary. Readers discovered not the life of a famous mystic or missionary, but the thoughts of a young woman who admitted her weaknesses and believed that ordinary people could become holy precisely within ordinary life. Editions multiplied, translations appeared and correspondence began arriving at the Carmel from readers who had recognized something of themselves in her story. By 1910, only thirteen years after her death, newspapers were recording the phenomenon, with headlines describing growing devotion to Thérèse and visitors travelling to Lisieux, though she had not yet been beatified. That same year, however, the formal investigation of her life and reputation for holiness began. By 1914, Catholic newspapers were devoting substantial space to the “Little Flower,” her writings and reports associated with her intercession. The cloistered nun who had scarcely been known while alive was beginning to travel through her words.

Within Story of a Soul, readers encountered a deeply sensitive child, readily reduced to tears, who at fifteen entered the Carmel of Lisieux on April 9, 1888. The life she found there was far less dramatic than the struggle to enter it at such a young age. Her days were filled with prayer, work, illness, personality clashes and the small irritations of communal life. Thérèse wrote candidly about sisters who annoyed her, being blamed unfairly, falling asleep during prayer and having to fight the desire to defend herself or receive recognition. Gradually, these ordinary frustrations became the place in which her Little Way developed. She became convinced that weakness did not disqualify someone from holiness. The important thing was to trust God and to turn even the smallest act into an act of love.

“Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, as at the love with which we do them.”

— St. Thérèse of Lisieux, letter to Céline, October 20, 1888

So where did the name “Little Flower” come from? When Thérèse asked her father for permission to enter Carmel, he plucked a small white flower and gave it to her. She later saw herself in that flower — small, ordinary and transplanted by God into another soil. Flower imagery returned throughout her writing, where she compared souls to different flowers in a garden, each loved without needing to become something else. After her death, readers increasingly attached the image to Thérèse herself, and the young Carmelite became known around the world as the Little Flower.

Her spiritual ambitions, however, were anything but small. Thérèse wanted to be an apostle, missionary and martyr, and imagined carrying the Gospel to distant countries. Eventually she concluded that she could not literally become all of those things from behind cloistered walls, but that her love could still be present in all of them. Her vocation, as she came to understand it, was to love at the heart of the Church.

The final years of her own life make the popularity of her Little Way even more striking. Thérèse did not die surrounded by uninterrupted spiritual consolation. As tuberculosis weakened her, she wrote of a severe trial of faith in which the certainty and comfort she had once associated with Heaven seemed to disappear. Her response was not to pretend that the darkness was absent, but to continue choosing faith and trust without the feelings that had once supported them. The Little Way was therefore not simply a cheerful idea about doing small things. By the end of her life, it had become a way of continuing to trust when trust itself had become difficult.

“After my death I will let fall a shower of roses.”

— St. Thérèse of Lisieux, as recorded by the Carmel of Lisieux

Thérèse was beatified by Pope Pius XI on April 29, 1923. A month earlier, her remains were transferred from the cemetery at Lisieux to the Carmelite chapel. A reported 30,000 people followed the procession, while further celebrations later that year drew crowds estimated at as many as 100,000. The young woman who had once lived almost invisibly inside the convent was now drawing crowds several times larger than the population of Lisieux itself.

Two years later, on May 17, 1925, Pope Pius XI canonized Thérèse in Rome. Less than twenty-eight years had passed since her death. Newspapers struggled to explain the speed and scale of her popularity, while pilgrims sought out the Carmel, her childhood home and the places connected with her short life.

In 1927, Pope Pius XI named Thérèse patroness of the missions alongside St. Francis Xavier. The contrast could hardly have been greater. Xavier’s missionary work had carried him across India, Southeast Asia and Japan before he died while trying to reach China. Thérèse had entered one convent at fifteen and never travelled to a mission field at all. Yet both came to represent the missionary life — one through travel and preaching, the other through prayer and love offered from behind convent walls.

By the end of the 1920s, Lisieux could no longer easily accommodate the crowds. In 1930, it was reported that over half a million pilgrims had visited the Carmel during the previous year. Construction had already begun on the enormous Basilica of St. Thérèse, overlooking the town, with work being hastened to accommodate the growing pilgrimage. The Second World War interrupted its completion, but the Basilica survived the destruction of much of Lisieux. Construction continued after the war, and in July 1954 it was finally consecrated. The Basilica still stands today and remains an active place of pilgrimage.