TABUK CITY, Kalinga – The Relics of the Catholic Saint, St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus or St. Thérèse of Lisieux, is now open for viewing at the St. Joseph Parish Church, St. Theresita’s School Compound, Dagupan Centro, Tabuk City.
The Relics will remain at the Church till 3:30PM today and will be brought later to the St. Williams Parish Church where devotees and parishioners will have the chance to view the same and join in the short vigil in Bulanao.
Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin, who was later known as St. Thérèse was born on January 2, 1873 at Alençon, France and later died on September 30, 1897.
She is a Carmelite nun whose service to her Roman Catholic order, while initially inconspicuous, was subsequently honored for its exceptional spiritual accomplishments.
Thérèse underwent an intense encounter with God that she afterwards referred to as a “full conversion.”
In her memoirs, she said that despite being a nun in a serene French cloister, she had always dreamed of being a missionary, an Apostle, or a martyr.
“Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that the Church had a Heart and that this Heart was burning with love. I knew that one love drove the members of the Church to action, that if this love were extinguished, the apostles would have proclaimed the Gospel no longer, the martyrs would have shed their blood no more. I understood that Love comprised all vocations, that Love was everything, that it embraced all times and places…in a word, that it was eternal! Then in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love…my vocation, at last I have found it…My vocation is Love!”
Since her passing, her “small method” of loving God and neighbor has motivated millions of others. Her intercession has been said to have caused numerous miracles. “My Heaven will be spent doing good on Earth,” she had said throughout her time on earth.
In 1997, 100 years after Saint Thérèse’s untimely death at the age of 24, Pope John Paul II named her a Doctor of the Church. After Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Catherine of Siena, she is the third woman to receive such a proclamation.
St. Thérèse once wrote, “You know well enough that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.”
