St. Therese of the Child Jesus

Dear friends,

Another wonderful week has passed. We have begun to have Mass at St. Andrew every day and folks are getting used to it. It was great to once again have Mass on Wed. evening before the Faith Formation classes with all the little ones and their families. I pray that that Mass will continue to grow and that our families will benefit from this evening Mass in the middle of the week.

While on pilgrimage in France, after we visited Paris, we visited Lisieux. Lisieux is a little town in Normandy where St. Therese of the Child Jesus grew up. She lived in a beautiful home with her parents and her four sisters. She was the youngest in the family and as such was quite sensitive. This was partly due to the death of her mother at the young age of 4, yet she always had a sensitive soul and from an early age Thérèse wanted to give herself to God; she wrote that “from the age of three, I began to refuse nothing of what God asked of me.” In the house at Lisieux she grew in this grace encouraged by her family. At the age of 14 little Therese had heard of an unrepentant murderer, Henri Pranzini, as his story was published in the papers. She took to praying ceaselessly for his conversion and trusted that God would hear her prayer. He showed no signs of repentance during the trial and it wasn’t until his head was placed in the guillotine that he then he asked for the crucifix and kissed it three times. St. Therese took this as her sign that God had heard her prayer for the conversion of this hardened criminal and she continued to pray for his soul after he died.

With great confidence St. Therese trusted that God heard her prayer. This was fostered in her home by her family first of all and then fostered in her personal relationship with Christ in His Church as she grew. Of her sisters, all entered religious life. She and three of her sisters entered the Carmelite convent of Lisieux. Her parents were Beatified together in 2008 (the last step before Canonization as Saints) as a witness to their holiness as a married couple who raised such beautiful children in the Catholic Faith. They are a wonderful example for our families and great patrons for parents trying to grow in their vocation and raise holy children. In the current Synod on the family in Rome, as the bishops are gathered to discuss the centrality of the family to society, the relics of Blessed Louis and Zelie Martin are present with them, helping the bishops with their prayers to illuminate their discussions.

This all comes to me in light of the current headline that you may have seen about the young woman who has chosen to take her own life on Nov. 1^st because she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctors have told her what to expect and she has chosen to decide when and how she is going to die. After the diagnosis, she and her family moved to Oregon as physician assisted suicide is legal there (as it is here in Washington). This may be the first case to receive so much publicity since the law has taken affect. She is advocating for more states to pass similar laws that would make it possible for people to choose physician assisted suicide or death with dignity as they might call it. I was intrigued by the responses to the headline that are trending on Facebook. Many sympathize with her. Others callously say that she has no faith. She may have faith, but it has not been informed by Christ who chose to suffer the most horrible death for our salvation. As He was in that agonizing prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, He asked His Father if the cup might pass Him by and said, “not my will, but thy will be done.” With St. Therese I beg you to pray for the conversion of this young woman. She herself said, “There is not a cell in my body that is suicidal or that wants to die.” There is great incongruity with this statement and what she is proposing to do. Pray that she might realize what it is she is preparing to do. Pray also that through this experience many people will come to realize how precious life is. I will share more with you in the week to come and will organize a Holy Hour to pray for her and for the conversion of our culture. Until then I leave you with this beautiful prayer composed by St. Ignatius of Loyola which I pray every day after communion.

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will,
All I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.

Give me only your love and your grace, and that will be enough, I ask for nothing more.
Amen