SAINT THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX
Doctor of the Universal Church

On World Mission Sunday, October 19, 1997, Pope John Paul II declared St. Thérèse of Lisieux a “Doctor of the Universal Church.” This event marked not only the culmination of an unprecedented series of honors bestowed on “the greatest saint of modern times,” as St. Pius X called her, but it also represented a watershed in the evolution of the understanding of this ecclesiastical title bestowed on only thirty-three saints in the history of the Church. Certainly, at the time of her death in 1897, no one would have guessed that this 24-year-old Carmelite nun, with such a limited education and imperfect literary style, who never wrote a treatise or published an article and who died virtually unknown in an obscure French Carmel, would one day come to be ranked alongside such eminent personalities as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas as a doctor ecclesiae. Her selection did not come about in a vacuum, nor did it happen easily. The story behind the title and her reception of it as documented in these pages makes for truly fascinating and thought-provoking reading.

About the Author: Steven Payne, OCD, is a priest of the Washington Province of Discalced Carmelite friars. He is past editor of Spiritual Life magazine and ICS Publications and the author of numerous works in philosophy of religion, theology, and Carmelite spirituality. He has taught at the Weston School of Theology in Boston, at the De Sales School of Theology and Washington Theological Union in Washington, DC, and most recently at Tangaza College and the Catholic University of Eastern Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. He is the current president of the Carmelite Institute in Washington, DC.