St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s relics in Oakland Oct. 22

by Jay Sorgi
One hundred years after the canonization of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, her “story of a soul” is coming to Oakland in powerful form.
Pilgrims can encounter her relics, including some of her bones, at the Cathedral of Christ the Light on Wednesday, Oct. 22, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The visit comes as part of a national tour making 40 stops in 11 states from October until early December, including stops at 10 dioceses in California. St. Thérèse’s relics last came to America in 1999 and 2000, when more than one million people experienced them. Tour organizers say that the opportunity to venerate her relics those years led to miracles, conversions and calls to the priesthood and religious life.
“In the heart of Thérèse, the grace of baptism became this impetuous torrent flowing into the ocean of Christ’s love and dragging in its wake a multitude of brothers and sisters,” said Pope Francis.     He canonized both her parents, Louis and Zélie Martin, in 2015.
Born in January 1873 in Alençon, France, St. Thérèse endured the loss of her mother at four years old, along with her own numerous ailments which led to a fragile childhood.
She entered the Carmelite order at an unusually young age of 15 years old, after both her father and church leaders acquiesced to her request. 
Taking the name "Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face," she focused her life on small, humble, loving actions, all as ways of overcoming obstacles like the ones she physically faced — including tuberculosis.
She spent her short life of 24 years offering her pain to God, writing often about the need to trust in the Lord despite her challenges, even using her pain to draw closer to God. Those writings became a major part of her autobiography, Story of a Soul.
“When something painful or disagreeable happens to me, instead of a melancholy look, I answer by a smile,” she said. “At first I did not always succeed, but now it has become a habit which I am glad to have acquired.”
Thérèse died in September 1897. Twenty-eight years later, Pope Pius XI canonized her.
“Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face is the youngest of all the ‘doctors of the Church,’ but her ardent spiritual journey shows such maturity,” said Pope St. John Paul II, who declared her a doctor of the Church in 1997.
“The insights of faith expressed in her writings are so vast and profound that they deserve a place among the great spiritual masters.”
The tour offers pilgrims the chance to venerate her relics, visible links to a saint and the grace that directly moved through her life and still moves through her example. Catholics have often honored relics in a way that doesn’t worship the saint – worship belongs to God alone – but to honor the saint and all that God has done through them.
Her relics remind pilgrims of the grace God has brought the world through the story of St. Thérèse, the universal call to simply love one another that was the hallmark of her short but incredibly inspiring life.