John Beevers - St. Therese The Little Flower

Cum Permissu Superiorum

Copyright 1976 by TAN Books, an Imprint of Saint Benedict Press.

ISBN: 978-0-89555-035-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-80147

Other Books by John Beevers

Saint Joan of Arc

The Storm of Glory

Saint Teresa of Avila

Virgin of the Poor

etc.

Books Translated by John Beevers

The Autobiography of St. Thrse

of LisieuxThe Story of a Soul

Abandonment to Divine Providence

The cover photo was taken June 7, 1897 in the sacristy courtyard three months before Saint Thrse died.

PRINTED AND BOUND IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TAN Books

An Imprint of Saint Benedict Press, LLC

Charlotte, North Carolina

2012

John Beevers was born in 1912 in Yorkshire, England. He attended Cambridge University, starting in 1929, where he took a double first in the English Tripos. In the early 30s he began a journalist career with the Manchester Daily Dispatch . In 1934 he was appointed literary editor of the Sunday Referee . Just before World War II he joined the Daily Express as an assistant lead writer, and shortly thereafter became editorial assistant in the Ministry of Information.

Bad health excluded him from military service during the War, so he joined the B.B.C. in 1941, where he remained until 1969, rising to executive status. He preferred, however, to remain in the journalistic area rather than enter the administrative.

In the 1950s he started writing books in his spare time, eventually having published fifteenmostly saintly biographies, but also some translations of spiritual works from the French. His Storm of Glory (1950) cast a new light on St. Thrse of Lisieux. A few years later he rendered a new translation of her autobiography, The Story of a Soul , which is still in print and selling well.

Recently, Mr. Beevers translated and had published Father de Caussades Abandonment to Divine Providence . The present book was finished in 1972 and was originally to have appeared in 1973, during the centenary (1873-1973) of St. Thrses birth.

Mr. Beevers passed away September 13, 1975, leaving a widow, a daughter (in Seattle), and two grandchildren. The Psalms tell us Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. (115). Precious to the Lord also must be the life and death of one who has made better known the lives and achievements of His heroes. Requiescat in pace .

A saint is not a freak. He is, as we all are, a being born with a normal share of human frailties and burdened with hereditary flaws and powers such as afflict and strengthen all the sons and daughters of Adam. He has not escaped the stain of Original Sin. And as he passes from infancy, through adolescence, to maturity, he, too, is subject to the multitude of influences that press upon us all, and he has our own same freedom to accept or reject them.

Therefore, when we study a saint, we cannot know him fully unless we know what these influences were, how he was tugged this way and that, who his parents and teachers were, the effect on him of his brothers and sisters, his friends and his acquaintances. We know, of course, that it is the grace of God which makes a saint. But we are left free to co-operate with that grace or to turn aside from it. The choice is ours. In this matter, God waives His omnipotence. He persuades. He does not compel. And often, as the stories of the saints repeatedly show, He does not always choose to act directly upon the soul. He sometimes prefers to use agents, to allow His creatures to act for Him in the work of making a saint.

So it was with the great saint of modern times, St. Thrse of the Child Jesus. Sanctity has its mysteries which we shall never understand in this life, and it is foolish presumption to pretend we can fully explain it, either its genesis, its development, or its full flowering. We can describe, but we cannot penetrate into its fiery depths. Even the great mystical saints stammer or fail when they try to tell what they know. Yet it is only the very core of saintliness which resists all our probings, but there is much that we can understand and profitably discuss.

I have already written about St. Thrse, but since then much new material about her family has appeared, and we have, for the first time, the complete text of her autobiography as she wrote it. With every fresh disclosure it becomes more and more apparent that God used her family and later the community of nuns she entered as His instruments in fashioning her into a saint. She was not born with the halo of sanctity already in position. As a saint she wasalways under God, it must be understoodcreated by her family and her fellow nuns. Today the family is no longer the key unit of civilization. Over too much of the world, the state is supreme and overrides both the natural and the supernatural rights of the family. In her person and in her teaching, St. Thrse offers us both an example and a body of precepts which are invaluable. A knowledge and understanding of her environment, which, given her total response to grace, made her sanctity inevitable, are of equal value. That is what I attempt to offer here.

Storm of Glory (New York: Sheed and Ward). 1950.

The roll of saints includes kings and beggars, men and women of all degrees, some with a lineage as long as their arm, others unable to name their grandparents. The family of St. Thrseher immediate ancestorswere not distinguished by rank, wealth or intellect, nor were they anonymous peasants, living from hand to mouth without a penny to call their own. They were people who had a small, but honorable and well-defined position in the state. Her paternal grandfather, Pierre Franois Martin, was born in 1777 in Normandy. When he was twenty-two, he joined the army and made soldiering his profession for the next thirty-one years. He followed Napoleons eagles through Prussia and Poland and fought for him in France when the Emperors days of power were numbered. He won promotion and, after the restoration of the Bourbons, reached the rank of captain.

At the age of forty-one, he married the eighteen-year old daughter of another army captain, also a veteran of the Grande Arme. They had five children. The third was Louis Joseph Aloys Stanislas Martin, who was to be the father of St. Thrse. He was born in Bordeaux on August 22, 1823, and until he was seven and his father retired, the family moved from one garrison town to another, finally ending up in Strasbourg. On his retirement, Captain Pierre decided to spend the rest of his life in his native Normandy and chose Alenon for his home, a quiet little grey-stone town with the river Sarthe meandering through it.

There he became a well-known figure as, tall and straight as a ramrod, he walked through the streets in his long overcoat of military cut, wearing in his lapel the rare scarlet ribbon of a Chevalier of the Royal and Military Order of St. Louis. Through all the many rough years he had spent as a campaigning soldier he practiced his religion zealously. The chaplain of his regiment once told him that his men were astonished when, at Mass, they saw how long he continued kneeling after the Consecration. His reply was: Tell them its because I really believe.

In retirement he lived a fully Christian life, a pillar of his parish church, generous in his charity and a responsible and affectionate head of his family. One gets only a few glimpses of him, but they give the impression of a simple, straightforward man of action who had served his Emperor and his King with instant, unquestioning obedience and who delighted in giving an even more uncompromising service to the Lord of Hosts. Such was the grandfather of St. Thrse.