Saint Therese of Lisieux: A Gateway

Icon of "The Communion of Saints," by Brother Mickey McGrath, O.S.F.S.

Background

About the Jubilee of Mercy, Pope Francis has not been in jest.  By many concrete actions he is showing his commitment to all people experiencing mercy.  He is broadly expanding the indulgences traditionally available to Catholics, extending them to those in prison and to anyone who performs one of the spiritual or corporal works of mercy.  The indulgence will continue to be granted to able-bodied Catholics who fulfill certain conditions and to the sick, and the faithful can obtain indulgences for the dead.  The Pope is also granting to all priests around the world authority to absolve women who confess to having received an abortion and is permitting priests of the Society of St. Pius X, which is separated from the Catholic Church, to grant absolution to those who confess to these priests.  Read a story about the announcement, and see details about the various ways to fulfill the conditions for the Jubilee indulgence. 

Indulgences

“Indulgences” are one of the most misunderstood practices of the Catholic Church.  Some people have commented that the Church’s granting of indulgences takes away from the complete expiation of our sins by Jesus Christ.  I understand that indulgences are a dispensing in space and time of this treasure to individual souls through the ministry of the Church.  When I was a child, partial indulgences were presented as “time off in Purgatory.”  As an adult, as I go more deeply into the teaching of St. Therese on life after death, and as I discover that God’s mercy cannot be restrained from pouring itself out on everyone, whether or not they have fulfilled the conditions for indulgences, I have not found it easy to relate personally to the concept of indulgences.  Without fully understanding them, I was grateful to seek to fulfill the conditions for the plenary indulgence offered to those who attended the canonization of Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin, and I had the joy of receiving the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the Basilica of St. Mary Major while the relics of St. Therese and of Sts. Louis and Zelie were exposed so that we might pray in their presence for the Synod on the Family.  I still did not understand exactly what an indulgence might mean to the future of the individual penitent.  Since my return, Pope Francis’s words in Misericordiae Vultus have helped me immeasurably to see that seeking a plenary indulgence does not conflict with Therese’s bold confidence in God’s mercy.

St. Therese’s Attitude toward Purgatory

St. Therese adhered to the teaching of the Church about purification after death and often prayed and obtained indulgences for “the souls in purgatory.”  Indeed, she is reported to have said “After my death, if you want to please me, offer up the Stations of the Cross for my intentions.  If I don’t need them, I’ll be delighted to make a present of them to the souls in Purgatory.”  But, deep as was her love for those already undergoing this painful purgation, in the matter of “going to purgatory,” Therese believed that, if we trust enough in God’s mercy, God will receive us at the moment we die.  She was wholeheartedly concerned for the fate of others, but she kept no merits for herself, asking that they all be applied to others and that she might appear before God “with empty hands.”  She believed that a single glance from God could purify her.  She writes the seminarian Maurice Belliere:

“I dare to hope ‘my exile will be short,’ but this is not because I am prepared.  I feel that I shall never be prepared if the Lord does not see fit to transform me Himself.  He can do so in one instant.  After all the graces He has showered upon me, I still await this one from His infinite mercy.” 

in her “Offering of myself as a victim of Holocaust to God’s Merciful Love” she boldly says

“If through weakness I sometimes fall, may Your divine glance cleanse my soul immediately, consuming all my imperfections like the fire that transforms everything into itself.” 

She ends “May my soul take its flight without any delay into the eternal embrace of Your Merciful Love.”  To Fr. Roulland:  “How would He purify in the flames of purgatory souls consumed in the fire of divine love?”  

[Read more in the considerable excerpt from Hubert van Dijk’s article “The Teaching of St. Therese on Purgatory” presented in “For Heaven’s Sake,” the newsletter of the Holy Souls Sodality, Vol. 3, No. 12, September 2012. In the story of Sister Febronie, we see how ardently Therese believed that an individual soul can avoid purgatory by trusting in God's mercy].

Pope Francis’s reflection on the Jubilee Indulgence

In paragraph 22 of Misericordiae Vultus, Pope Francis reflects on the indulgences available in the Jubilee Year.  He states bluntly:  “God’s forgiveness knows no bounds," and adds:

In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God makes even more evident his love and its power to destroy all human sin. . . . yet sin leaves a negative effect on the way we think and act. But the mercy of God is stronger even than this. It becomes indulgence on the part of the Father who, through the Bride of Christ, his Church, reaches the pardoned sinner and frees him from every residue left by the consequences of sin, enabling him to act with charity, to grow in love rather than to fall back into sin.

Thus, the effect of the Jubilee indulgence is not to shorten some postponed punishment but to free us, while we are still living on earth, from the consequences of sin: from how our past sins affect our souls and personalities, and to strengthen us “to grow in love:”  to fulfill the work of Christ the Redeemer.  What a liberating reality! 

The Pope goes on to say that the receiving of an indulgence is not a private matter:

The Church lives within the communion of the saints. In the Eucharist, this communion, which is a gift from God, becomes a spiritual union binding us to the saints and blessed ones whose number is beyond counting (cf. Rev 7:4). Their holiness comes to the aid of our weakness in a way that enables the Church, with her maternal prayers and her way of life, to fortify the weakness of some with the strength of others. Hence, to live the indulgence of the Holy Year means to approach the Father’s mercy with the certainty that his forgiveness extends to the entire life of the believer. To gain an indulgence is to experience the holiness of the Church, who bestows upon all the fruits of Christ’s redemption, so that God’s love and forgiveness may extend everywhere. Let us live this Jubilee intensely, begging the Father to forgive our sins and to bathe us in his merciful “indulgence.” [my emphasis]

St. Therese and the Communion of Saints

As her writings show, Therese lived intensely in the presence of the Communion of Saints.  When Maurice Belliere was worried that she would no longer love him after she died, she wrote lines that echo the Pope’s words about holiness coming to the aid of weakness: 

I have to tell you, little brother, that we don’t understand Heaven in the same way. You think that, once I share in the justice and holiness of God, I won’t be able to excuse your faults as I did when I was on earth. Are you then forgetting that I shall also share in the infinite mercy of the Lord? I believe that the Blessed in Heaven have great compassion for our miseries. They remember that when they were weak and mortal like us, they committed the same faults themselves and went through the same struggles, and their fraternal tenderness becomes still greater than it ever was on earth. It’s on account of this that they never stop watching over us and praying for us.

Maurice and Therese: The Story of a Love, by Bishop Patrick Ahern.  (Garden City, New York; Doubleday Image Books, 2001).  

Time of Personal Prayer

Pray as the Holy Spirit leads you.  Choose one of  the paragraphs quoted from St. Therese or from Pope Francis and pray over it, pausing whenever your heart feels moved.

The Prayer of Pope Francis for the Jubilee 

Click here to read the Prayer of Pope Francis.