
This youngest Doctor of the Church has been honoured not only with some title but the Church has entrusted he with significant “responsibilities.”
When in 1914, at the outset of WW1 Pope Pius X introduced her canonisation cause he already called her “the greatest Saint of the modern times.” Pope Pius XI who beatified her in 1923 and canonised her in 1925 he called her “the greatest star of his pontificate.” Then the responsibilities started being given to the young Saint. Two years after she was canonised, St Thérèse of Lisieux was declared patroness of all Catholic missions together with St Francis Xavier. St Francis was a great missionary who spent his life in foreign lands preaching the Gospel, St Thérèse spent her life for evangelisation in her Carmelite monastery where she lived, prayed and suffered for missions. When badly exhausted by tubercularises she was in constant pain she was seen taking walks in the monastery. When asked what she was doing she answered: “I am walking for the missions.” She took upon herself an additional sacrifice to support those who were toiling for salvation of souls.
St Thérèse of Lisieux learnt this profound science in the heart of the Church as she wrote one day:
"To become, through my union with you, a mother of souls - surely that ought to be enough for anybody? But somehow, not for me; I seem to have so many other vocations as well! I feel as if I were called to be a fighter, a priest, an apostle, a doctor, a martyr... Dear Jesus, how am I to reconcile these conflicting ambitions, how am I to give substance to the dreams of one insignificant soul? I decided to consult St. Paul's epistles, in the hopes of getting an answer....
St. Paul explains in I Corinthians 13 that all the gifts of heaven, even the most perfect of them, without love, are absolutely nothing: charity is the best way of all, because it leads straight to God. Now I was at peace. Charity - that was the key to my vocation. If the Church was a body compos-ed of different members, it couldn't lack the noblest of all; it must have a heart, and a heart BURNING WITH LOVE. And I realised that this love was the true motive force which enabled the other members of the Church to act; if it ceased to function the Apostles would forget to preach the Gospel, the Martyrs would refuse to shed their blood. LOVE, IN FACT, IS THE VOCAT-ION WHICH INCLUDES ALL OTHERS; IT'S A UNIVERSE OF ITS OWN, COMPRISING ALL TIME AND ALL SPACE - IT'S ETERNAL! Beside myself with joy, I cried out: 'Jesus my Love! I've found my vocation, and my vocation is love'. I had discovered where it is that I belong in the Church, the niche God has appointed for me. To be nothing else than love, deep down in the heart of Mother Church: that's to be everything at once - my dream wasn't a dream after all."
Probably she didn’t expect that her passionate search for her place in the Church, which is contained in the above passage, a hundred years later will be “utilised” by the same Catholic Church she loved so much in the Catechism n. 826, where it is quoted to to explain the Churches’ nature and meaning.