Thérèse of Lisieux

Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin felt the call early and pushed past obstacles to enter the Carmelite convent at Lisieux at 15, joining two older sisters behind cloister walls. For nine years she lived the hidden routines — sacristan, assistant to the novice mistress — until tuberculosis and a crisis of faith arrived together in her final eighteen months, a darkness in which she felt Jesus absent and God's existence in doubt. She died in 1897, but The Story of a Soul, her spiritual memoir explaining the "Little Way" — sanctity through simple, faithful acts rather than grand gestures — spread acr…