St. Thérèse of Lisieux Statue

She died at twenty-four, in a provincial Carmel, having done nothing the world would count. No missions. No founded orders. No visions worth the name. She had spent nine years behind an enclosure wall doing laundry and sweeping floors, and she was quite sure she had been ordinary about it.

What she left behind was a manuscript her prioress had ordered her to write. It went out to other Carmels as a routine death notice. Within a year it was a book, and within thirty years she was a saint — canonized in 1925, twenty-eight years after her death, in front of a crowd that had to be moved to the piazza because no church could hold it.

Her idea was almost embarrassingly small. She could not be a great ascetic or a martyr, so she would be nothing at all, and let herself be carried. She called it the Little Way: not doing extraordinary things, but doing entirely ordinary things with a love disproportionate to their size. Picking up a dropped pin. Not flinching at the sister whose habit rattled during prayer. It sounds like nothing. It has undone a great many people who assumed sanctity required a temperament they did not have.

In 1997 John Paul II named her a Doctor of the Church — the youngest ever, and one of only four women. A cloistered girl who never finished a formal education, ranked with Augustine and Aquinas as a teacher of the faith.

She promised she would spend her heaven doing good on earth, and that she would let fall a shower of roses. She is shown here holding one.

Our approach

We sculpt from the historical record rather than from imagination. Thérèse is among the first saints we can actually see — her sister Céline photographed her repeatedly inside the Lisieux Carmel — and the face here is worked from those photographs rather than from the softened, idealized type that spread after her canonization.

Details

• 22 inches tall, resin
• Available in white, or finished by hand in full color
• Carmelite habit and choir mantle, with rose
• Feast day: 1 October