The Little Flower
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
7 Apr 2002
In many ways these relics of a French Carmelite nun represent some of the strangest aspects of Catholic life. Why give reverence to a box of bones, even if it is a beautiful container? What is the relevance to Australians today of a young middle class woman, who locked herself away from the world in a convent at the age of 15 and died in 1897 at the age of 24?
What is beyond dispute is her continuing popularity. These relics have been taken around the world since 1997. Fifteen million came to pray before them in Mexico alone and more than 2/3rds of the entire population of Ireland.
Many of us too have mementoes of our loved ones. We care for their graves. Venerating relics is an ancient pagan practice taken over by the Church, which provides a tangible link with the deceased and points beyond the materialism of everyday life to the sacred and the spiritual, to life beyond death. Sacred sites can perform a similar function.
Those who come to the Cathedral only to gawk will be disappointed, because there is no magic. But they will be impressed by the numbers praying. Relics are only useful if they deepen our faith and stimulate our prayer.
Two years after her death Therese's autobiography "The Story of a Soul" was published. Now translated into many languages it has never been out of print.
This small classic records her searching for love as a teenager and then a young woman. Unusually this love is centred on Christ as the Son of God, although her struggle for perfection is based on overcoming the small everyday imperfections and anxieties which surround each one of us. Few writings have equalled her vivid appreciation of God.
Unusually Therese is grieved not so much by the suffering around her as by that suffering caused by human sin i.e. the conscious human opting for evil. She recognised too that people can turn explicitly against the light. Some are unable to believe in the good God, but some choose not to believe. It brings too many constraints!
Like Mother Teresa of Calcutta she made her own the words of Christ dying on the cross, "I thirst". She saw her task as pouring the dew from Christ's suffering onto human souls; not from on high, but as a fellow human being who shares with compassion the suffering of sinners and unbelievers.
The Little Flower's memory has suffered through romanticising, although this sentimentality also appeals to many. A remember playing tennis with a friend, who claimed that as a child he had been taught to pray silently "Little Flower, in this hour show your power", when he risked serving a double fault!
But this is only a part of the story. Dying from tuberculosis Therese lost all the consolation of religion; she could no longer feel God's presence or love, only a black hole, dark night. Without her faith, which she retained through this trial, she claimed she would have suicided "without hesitating a moment".
Therese was one of us, a modern woman who knew the void of unbelief and triumphed through expressing her love in small successes and failures.
