The core truth of the Christian faith is that God loves us first. It is not just that God's love for us is prior in time to any effort of ours, but that God's love for us is totally gratuitous, totally unearned.
It is sheer gift. It follows that the greatest heresy is the belief that God loves us when - or because - we are good. The exact opposite is the truth: we are good because God loves us.
The greatest Christian heresy, according to the philosopher Kierkegaard, is to believe that the opposite of sin is virtue. No, the opposite of sin is grace.
The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. Until we experience the truth of this, principally in prayer, we will remain burdened, imprisoned even, by our own ultimately unsuccessful efforts to become virtuous.
Love comes from God not only as from a source; it is itself the very essence of God. God is love. We are talking here not of our love for God, but of God's love for us. This is the heart of the Gospel. It is also the core message of St Therese of Lisieux: "[God's] love penetrates and surrounds me."
There is the very real danger that the primacy as well as the centrality of God's love in the saint's life and writings will be overlooked or even neglected. If that happens, we will be edified by wonderful stories of roses and miracles. Sadly, we will not be liberated.
St Therese was a child prodigy. People have no difficulty in acknowledging that Mozart was a child prodigy in the area of music. Why then do some find it so hard to accept that St Therese was a prodigy of the spirit? Her area of specialisation was love, primarily God's love for her, but also her love for God.
"I want to love God," Therese wrote, "as He has never been loved before." She "majored in" what Pope John Paul calls "the science of divine love" and was made a Doctor of the Church on October 19th, 1997. Only 32 other people have achieved this distinction in the 2000-year history of the church, and only two of these were women.
Therese's impact on the 20th century has been quite remarkable. Pope Pius X called her "the greatest saint of modern times". Pope John Paul II has publicly acknowledged her influence on the Second Vatican Council. She is the most quoted woman saint in the new catechism of the Catholic Church.
In his book, Maurice and Therese: The Story of a Love, Patrick Ahern writes in consider able detail of her impact on the lives of several great writers and thinkers. Dorothy Day, one of the greatest social activists of the 20th century, whose own cause for canonisation has been introduced by Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, converted from atheism to Catholicism after reading Therese's Story of a Soul.
A significant portion of the dialogue in George Bernanos's The Diary of a Country Priest is taken almost verbatim from St Therese's Her Last Conversations.
The great Jewish philosopher, Henri Bergson, spent years studying her writings and judged her to be a greater mystic than her namesake, Teresa of Avila.
Teilhard de Chardin testified to her influence on his life. Hans Urs von Balthasar, arguably the greatest Catholic theologian of modern times, compared her to St Paul. Jean Guitton, one of France's leading intellectuals and a member of the French Academy, the only lay Catholic to be invited to the first session of the Second Vatican Council, ranks her with St Paul, St Augustine and St Francis of Assisi.
Mother Teresa took her name in religion and had an unbounded admiration for her. Jack Kerouac was intrigued by her heroism, her holiness and the power of her prayers. Edith Piaf kept her picture on her night table. Therese is the only Western saint besides St Francis of Assisi to be revered in Russia. She has been the subject of more than 900 biographies.
Thomas Merton in his younger days judged her to be of minor importance. Towards the end of his life, when he had studied her mysticism in depth, he declared himself appalled by his misjudgment. "I owe her a profound public apology," he wrote.
A cautionary tale to end with. A man and his wife stood before the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. A member of staff overheard the man's quite dismissive judgment of the great painting and offered him this advice. "Sir, when you stand before the Mona Lisa, it is you who are on trial, not the painting!"
So it is with Therese. As she once said of herself, "I am a lot stronger than I look. Don't let appearances deceive you!"
Brendan Comiskey is Roman Catholic Bishop of Ferns and chairman of the Relics Organising Committee which has made arrangements for the St Therese visit