The remains of St Therese of Lisieux, also known as "the Little Flower", are to be brought on a tour of Ireland in May and June 2001.
Contained in an elaborately decorated coffin, her bones will be brought to every cathedral in Ireland's 26 Roman Catholic dioceses over the two-month period, as well as to all churches and chapels of the Carmelite sisters and brothers. ese The saint was a Carmelite nun.
A steering committee has been set up by Ireland's Catholic bishops to oversee preparations for the tour. It will be chaired by Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Ferns, who leads the Irish national pilgrimage to Lisieux each year.
St Therese died of tuberculosis in the convent at Lisieux in 1897 at the age of 24. In 1907 Pope Pius X, since also canonised, described her as "the greatest saint of our time". She was beatified in 1923 and canonised in 1925 by Pope Pius XI, less than 28 years after her death. In October 1997 Pope John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church, just the 33rd such personage in a list which includes St Thomas Aquinas.
She was the third woman to be so declared, following Catherine of Sienna and Teresa of Avila.
Therse's extraordinary passage from death to such esteem is attributed primarily to the one book she wrote, Histoire d'une Ame (The Story of a Soul). In it she taught that holiness is for all and that it is lived through the ups and downs of life rather than by extraordinary methods and measures.
She affirmed the place of the body and of sentiment in spiritual life, a liberalising antidote to the over-intellectualised Jansenism dominant at the time. As one of her leading proponents in Ireland, Father Linus Ryan O. Carm, has said: "She felt more than she reasoned", and she pioneered a return to a simple and wholesome living of the gospel.
Father Ryan said veneration of her remains would involve no indulgences, but he hoped it would help people to concentrate on her spirituality. Normally the canonisation of a saint involved three exhumations, he explained. The first is to verify the existence of the remains, while subsequent removals were to allow access for public veneration. The coffin containing St Therese's remains was brought to Rome in October 1997 for the ceremony declaring her a Doctor of the Church. Before they arrive in Ireland they will have been to Russia, Siberia, Kazakhstan, the US, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Holland and Argentina.
Theologian Father Christopher O'Donnell O Carm, warned against the danger of superstition or magic where relics are concerned. Relics, he said, had no virtue in themselves, but through them we could "feel close to a holy person".
