Archbishop Fulton Sheen's Saint Therese

A Treasured Love Story

Fulton Sheen

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781505112054
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Biografías religiosas

This is not so much the story of a soul, but the story of a love, the treasured love the Servant of God Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen had for his dear St. Therese of Lisieux, his "Little Flower".

Because of this intimacy and the unfathomable admiration he had for her, what lies between these pages is nothing short of remarkable, not to mention utterly captivating. Readers will find themselves moved in various ways, many of them unexpected. They will cry penitential tears, quake with happy laughter, shake their heads in disbelief, and experience an unquenchable yearning to imitate and experience the sort of closeness that both Sheen and Therese had with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The archbishop helps us realize just why St. Therese really is the "greatest saint of modern times, " and is among the greatest theologians the Church has ever produced. Using her example, he also explains the power of intercessory prayer, the necessity of virtue, how to put our suffering to good use, how to fight Satan's influence, and how to grow in our relationship with God and our love for one another.

In short, by reading this book, you will learn how to be a saint from a saint. Dive into this story of a love and see for yourself how it will develop the story of a soul…your own.

CHAPTER 1

St. Thérèse the Little Flower:
The saint for troubled times

I am sure you will agree with me that we are living in troubled times. Ever since we Americans split the atom, the whole world has been split. Disturbances occur all over the world. As one Irish poet put it:

“The good lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”¹

How are we going to live in these troubled times? There is really only one answer: We have to become saints.

When we hear that word, “saints,” we generally think of canonized saints and to think of becoming like them seems almost impossible. Now some saints indeed did give us impossible things to do. We can’t be like Simon Stylites^A and live on the top of a column for 20 years and have food brought up to us. We can’t be like St. Bernard who had 12 steps to perfect humility (I am sure that just as soon as you reach the twelfth step of humility, you will be very proud you are humble). Nor can we go through all of those palaces St. Teresa the Great recommended. So here we have the dilemma that we have to become saints to be happy, and yet how do we become one?

The Church has given us a saint for our times, and that is this young nun, St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She gave us a way to become saints that, first of all, is very simple.

Once, in a conversation with Pope John XXIII, he said to me, “You know, I always try to avoid the complicated things of life. I want everything to be simple.” And St. Thérèse wanted everything to be simple. So she really had two rules. One was never to seek the satisfaction of the self, and secondly, to do everything, to bear everything out of love for our Lord.

Now you, for example, have a certain station in life. It may be on a farm, it may be in a sick bed, it may be in an office, it may be in a home. It makes no difference how humble the work is. The method of the Little Flower was to integrate sanctity with what we were doing so that there is really no one form of life that is higher than another.

For example, you may think that just simply because I appear before the public so often and talk about holy things that, therefore, I must be more holy than you! Now that is not true. There may be some old lady reading this who does not understand some big word I use but is a thousand times closer to the Good Lord than I am simply because she followed this rule of relating every single detail of life to our Blessed Lord. She integrated her life to our Lord.

That’s just exactly, for example, like pouring a drop of water into wine:^B The two become whole. Or it’s like dipping an iron into fire. The iron becomes fused.

And so St. Thérèse recommended we take any action – study, work, rest, leisure (it makes no difference which) – and relate it to our Blessed Lord.

Now let me give you an example out of her life.

One of the nuns in the convent was old Sr. Peter. She was in her eighties. She was arthritic. She was cross. Nuns can be cross. So can priests be cross, God forbid! But Sr. Peter was cross, and she was in great pain, and she always had to go to the refectory about 10 minutes before the other Sisters because it took her so long to walk on account of her arthritis. Then she had to be aided as she walked, had to sit down in a chair in a special way, and had to have the bread broken for her in the bowl, always in a special way, for she had done it that way for 50 years.

Well, every other Sister found it very hard to take care of Sr. Peter, but St. Thérèse said, “I am going to do this.” One day Sr. Peter said to her, “You’re too young! You’re a young novice. You don’t know how to do anything! I think maybe you want to kill me, the way you are treating me!” And St. Thérèse would just smile back at her.

One day while she was going into the refectory with Sr. Peter, Thérèse heard music, and before her eyes, she saw a great ballroom. Sweet music was being played, dancing was on the floor, and she heard small talk that went with that kind of entertainment. For the moment, she said she was transported to the joy of this scene. Then she looked down at Sr. Peter, and she said, “For all the happiness and joyful music of the world, I would never give up Sr. Peter.” And then Sr. Peter began to love her, and, of course, she always loved Sr. Peter.

Think of how many circumstances we all have in life where we have to take care of people, who perhaps are like Sr. Peter. And Thérèse made herself a saint just simply by taking care of someone who was a little cross.

Secondly, we are to see that in every sickness there is a chance to offer our sufferings up in union with our Blessed Lord. Sickness detaches us from the world. After all, I think the hand of Christ is in the “glove” of every sick person, and all we ever see is the glove. But inside is the Hand of Christ Who gave us that suffering.

So coming back now to the point, I say to live in these troubled days, we have to become saints. A saint is one who makes Christ lovable. That’s the definition of a saint.

I have a friend who spent 14 years in a communist prison undergoing all kinds of torture.

When he got out of prison, he saw a little boy in the street and said to him, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

The little boy said, “No, I don’t.”

“Well, why don’t you?”

“Well,” he said to my friend, “you believe Christ is God, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” said the little boy, “God can do many things. God made elephants, and big elephants made little elephants. God made roses, and big roses made little roses. God made monkeys. Big monkeys made little monkeys. And I think that if Jesus is God, He ought to be able to make other Jesuses. And I’ve never seen another Jesus. My father is an alcoholic. My mother takes in washing. She has no time for me. Nobody’s ever done a good thing to me in my life. So I don’t believe Jesus is God because I’ve never met another Jesus.”

Now maybe this is what we are all supposed to be and what the Little Flower intended we should be: Little Jesuses, undergoing our passions, spreading good will and kindness just as He did. Never think you are too old. Remember, St. Thérèse died at 24. Just think of it. When many of our young people today have hardly reached the state of maturity, she was already a saint.

I just want to give you the simple lesson, and it is this: It does not require much time to make us saints, it requires only much love.

Notes

A. Syrian saint, 390-459, feast day January 5.

B. At the offertory during the Mass, a drop of water is poured into the chalice of wine.

_____________________

1 William Butler Yeats.

CHAPTER 2

St. Thérèse and real saints
(and how you can be one, too)

Let me begin with a big word that you will have to remember even if you forget everything else in this chapter. It is “hagiography.” Isn’t that interesting? Now you’ve never known a sermon on hagiography, have you?

For those of you who have forgotten your Greek, I am going to tell you what that means. Hagios means “holy” in Greek. Graphein means “to write.” So, hagiography is the story of the lives of saints. Now you are asking why didn’t I say that at the beginning? But no, it is necessary to talk about that because I am telling you about the Little Flower. So let me put her life in relationship to the lives of other saints.

Now there are two ways of writing the lives of saints. One is to write the life of the saint in such a way that there is nothing bad, nothing imperfect in the life, and that is a very common way of writing the lives of saints.

Take, for example, St. Aloysius. Do you know what the hagiographers say about St. Aloysius? They say that he never looked into the face of his mother. And do you think that makes him a saint? But they thought they should say that to make him sound holy.

Take, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most learned men that ever lived. St. Thomas Aquinas loved herring, and when he went into a new monastery, one of the first things that he would ask for was herring. Do you think you can find a life of St. Thomas Aquinas in which any hagiographer says he loved herring? Saints aren’t supposed to love herring.

Then St. Bernard. They said St. Bernard was so prayerful that he did not know the color of the ceiling in the monastery chapel. Now does that prove he prayed so much that he never looked up at the ceiling? You see the exaggerations there are in the lives of saints?

One of the stories of St. Bernard I like is that he was out horseback riding with a friend of his, and the friend said to him, “I never have a distraction during prayer.”

St. Bernard said, “I have many.”

And St. Bernard then said, “Very well, you get off your horse, and if you can say the Our Father without a single distraction, I will give you my horse.”

So this friend of his got off his horse, started the Our Father, got up to the words, “Give us this day our…,” and he said to Bernard, “Can I have the saddle, too?”

Now you see, doesn’t that make St. Bernard much more interesting than to say he didn’t know the color of the ceiling of his chapel? So there is one kind of lives of saints which make them so perfect (though their lives were not that perfect, but they are written that way). They are written to be so perfect that we cannot imitate them, we ordinary people.

There is another way of writing the lives of saints, which is the modern way. And if they could never find anything bad in the first group of hagiographers, in the second group you can’t find anything good in the saints! They psychologically analyze them and if, for example, the saints practiced many mortifications, they were thought to be abnormal. If they were too prayerful, they were thought to be unconcerned with the world. So some lives have been written, even of our Little Flower, in which there is a demeaning of her sanctity. Now she can escape both of these charges because she wrote her own life.

That’s the way to tell the truth. So if any of you ever intend to be saints, start writing your own life now. That’s what she did. There are not many saints who did. St. Augustine did. Of course he had a lot to tell because he was the “hippie” of his day and a very wild young man. So his story is indeed an interesting one, though do you know that when you read the life of St. Augustine, you would think that the only bad thing he ever did in his life was to steal pears? He tells about that in the first chapter, and he makes the stealing of pears stand for all the wicked things that he did during his life.

Few saints have written their lives. I don’t think we could say that St. Teresa wrote her life (I do not mean the Little Flower. I mean St. Teresa of Avila, Spain), though she wrote volumes about sanctity. And also St. John of the Cross. Wouldn’t you think that there would be some pride in writing your life if you were a saint? Now I am going to prove you are all saints, though you haven’t written your life. But you are saints.

St. Thérèse wrote her life in obedience because she was a good religious. In a conversation one night in the convent someone suggested that it would be interesting to have Sr. Thérèse write the story of her girlhood. She didn’t think it was very interesting, but the Mother Superior ordered her to write her life.

Now this is the beginning of her life which I am going to share with you. She is addressing it, you see, to the Mother Superior of the convent. So when you write your life, you must address it to somebody else, otherwise you would be very proud and vain if you said, “I want to tell everybody how holy I am.”

Dearest Mother, it is to you, who are my mother twice ov...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Foreword
• The Life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux
• The Life of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
• Chapter 1: St. Thérèse the Little Flower: The saint for troubled times
• Chapter 2: St. Thérèse and real saints (and how you can be one, too)
• Chapter 3: St. Thérèse and the virtues of faith, hope, and perseverance
• Chapter 4: St. Thérèse and the power of intercession
• Chapter 5: St. Thérèse and the value of suffering
• Chapter 6: St. Thérèse and the sword
• Chapter 7: St. Thérèse, God, and our relationship with Him
• Chapter 8: St. Thérèse and fighting Satan
• Chapter 9: St. Thérèse and suffering for the sake of Love
• Chapter 10: St. Thérèse and humility, the way of the child
• Chapter 11: St. Thérèse, sin, and mercy
• Prayer for the Canonization of the Servant of God Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
• Archbishop Fulton John Sheen Foundation