Saint Therese of Lisieux - popular Catholic Saint

Saint Therese of Lisieux said these words towards the end of her life, "If God grants my desires, my Heaven will be spent on earth until the end of time. Yes, I will spend my Heaven doing good on earth....I will return! I will come down!"

St. Therese of Lisieux is one of the most powerful Saints of the Twentieth Century as well as possibly the most popular Catholic Saint.

We have never prayed for the intercession of another Saint who lived so close to our time.

She died in 1897 at the age of twenty four, and was canonized in 1925.

When she died, she was virtually unknown, even in her own Community.

Within two years of her death, the power of her intercession began to be felt all over Europe.

Prayers and novenas were made to her for favors, which were answered in abundance, usually preceded by the reception of a flower.

She called herself the Little Flower of Jesus,a name which has remained with her until today.

The swiftness of time in which devotion to Therese of Lisieux grew, would be called in secular terms, a phenomena. We call it a Miracle.

This statement, made ten years after her death, from a man who would himself be raised to the Communion of Saints, is a great tribute to the little Carmelite that no one had known at the time of her death.

A year later in the Vatican, the Prefect of the Congregation of Rites, Cardinal Vico, stated, "We must lose no time in crowning the little Saint with glory, if we do not want the voice of the people to anticipate us." He was about eight years too late. People began calling Therese a Saint as early as two years after her death.

The power of intercession given to Therese  was undeniable. Truly, her prophecy made towards the end of her life, "God will have to do my will in Heaven, because I have never done my own will on earth,"was coming about. Within a short twenty eight years after her death, in 1925, the little cloistered Carmelite was proclaimed St. Therese.