OCTOBER 1, 2026 FATHER PETER TURRONE
“The kingdom of God has come near.”
Today, we celebrate the memorial of one of the Church’s most beloved saints, Saint Therese of Lisieux – loved by Catholics and many non-Catholic Christians, as well.
Oftentimes, when we see an image of St. Therese, she has many roses around her. Some of the images can be quite saccharine, so we can just kind of walk past them without recognizing what a remarkable woman she was. She died at 24 years of age in a tiny convent in Lisieux.
Yet this woman was a woman who was deeply in love with God. And she loved the Lord so much, she was moved by the Holy Spirit to give her life completely to him. And her desire was that all people come to know who Jesus Christ is, to know the love that God has for them – the Lord that laid down his life for them – and she wanted them desperately to know this love and to receive the free gift of salvation that he offers us.
But all of this in the context and hidden away in this tiny convent. So, when she would read the scriptures, like today’s Gospel, as well, the need to go out; she had this deep desire to be a missionary, and this desire only grew with greater intensity, especially when she recognized, again, the movement of the Holy Spirit and that God wants all people to be saved.
So, Saint Therese, in her famous diary called The Diary of a Soul, which I would highly recommend, in this beautiful diary, she reveals what God is doing in her soul. There are many other works, as well, if you read the letters that she wrote towards the end of her life, and a lot of what is in there, surprisingly, echoes a lot of what Job himself experiences, and King David, at a very difficult moment of his life, as was sung in the responsorial psalm.
So, St. Therese, this young woman, was declared, she was one of the patronesses of the missions, and it’s fitting because October is the month dedicated to the missions. And so, St. Therese is a co-patroness, and some people find it very strange. They say, “But she was a cloistered nun. “How could she be a co-patroness for the missions?”
Well, we can understand St. Francis Xavier being one because he travelled all over, but for St. Therese, she realized, again, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, that to be a missionary is not only to go far away to another place where people do not yet know Jesus Christ and to proclaim the arrival of the kingdom and to prepare for his coming, but she did this, this desire came from her baptism, and the Second Vatican Council describes this very beautifully, and reminding all of us and says, “Hold on a second. “Missionaries are not only those who leave their house and home “to go to another country, but everyone who has been baptized is now a missionary.”
The Church herself is a mission. The Father sent the Son. The Father returns to the Father. The Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit sends the Church continually to go out into the world and to move throughout the world being guided by the Spirit and Jesus in the will of the Father, going place to place, to announce the arrival of the kingdom, inviting people to enter.
And so, St. Therese understood this. The Second Vatican Council elaborated on this, reminding all of us.
St. Therese, again, she’s in a convent. So, she’s there, and she’s praying and she’s also supporting those who are outside, doing this work, this very difficult work. She had a relationship through prayer with her spiritual brothers. They were priests or seminarians, and they would write to each other.
They would go out in the fields, and then she would be in the convent, offering up her joys, her sufferings, and her sacrifices for them, because within the mystical body of Christ, all of us have this great gift, again, to be able to contribute. So, she did it through prayer and through sacrifice.
So, when you look at St. Therese and then you see her life, again, it was immersed in prayer. But there was this other dimension, as I touched upon earlier with the first reading.
St. Therese, towards the end of her life, she became very sick. She was in the convent, and as she was dying and offering up her sufferings, she was tempted. She was tempted. She did not give in to these temptations, but nevertheless, she was tempted towards issues regarding the faith.
So, this is something that many of the saints go through. So, she was tempted with sins against faith, hope, and charity. Again, she never gave in to these temptations, but they were strong.
So, for her, she lost the sense, the physical or the tangible presence of God in her life. But she offered all of this to the Lord because she was offering it knowing that this is what atheists feel like, this is this existential dread that they experience. She knew that God was allowing her to participate in this so she can offer it up, so that people can be saved, so that they could also enter into the kingdom of heaven. So, it’s remarkable.
I know some people at home right now, whoever’s watching this, maybe you have that experience. So, you’re going through a difficult period of your life. Maybe you’re at home and you can’t go anywhere. It’s very challenging.
Well, inwardly, even if, physically, you cannot go somewhere, even outside of your house, let alone to another country, we still have that inner freedom inside of us to accept what God is allowing in our lives and to offer up this suffering, offer up our prayers, the Rosary, spiritual communions, offering this so that other people can come to know Jesus, to give strength to the missionaries that are in difficult countries.
Just think about all the people that are being persecuted for their faith and the missionaries, as well, the challenges they face, the actual risks to their lives to be there. By offering this up, you can do so much good.
And we know that because we see the fruits of Therese’s apostolate. Even though the mother at the time, the superior, she said that, “We don’t know what to say about her when she dies “because she hasn’t done anything. “She seems so insignificant,” we know that the opposite is true – that through her prayers, millions of people have received graces, and it’s always associated with the presentation of flowers.
I encourage you to do so. I’ve received many graces through St. Therese’s prayers.
There was one particular situation where somebody wanted to enter the kingdom of God, wanted to be baptized, but there were issues that we had to resolve beforehand, and they seemed almost impossible, and Easter was getting closer and closer.
So, I was praying to St. Therese and asking her for help, and lo and behold, when everything seemed like it was at the point of no return and nothing was going to happen, it was Palm Sunday Mass, this woman who had just come off the streets, she had come into the Mass, she came up to me and she gave me a bunch of red roses, and she gave them to me in front of the couple who I was trying to help, so that the man can get baptized.
A few days later, we receive a call from the Archdiocese, saying, “You’re not going to believe this, “but we received all of the documentation, “so you can go ahead and baptize this man.”
So, they were stunned, I was stunned, and again, and I was very grateful to God, and especially thanks to the Lord for answering this prayer through this humble saint, Saint Therese.
So, whatever you’re going through in your life, I encourage you to pray to God through her intercession. She’s our beloved sister, and she wants everyone to enter the kingdom, so that they, too, can be saved.
