On the Laudem Gloriae blog there’s an intriguing little essay on Thérèse. It’s an excellent antidote to some of the more syrupy portraits of the saint, focusing on her general toughness, her use of battlefield imagery (inspired in large part by Joan of Arc), and what Pope Pius XI described as her “manly soul”.
Friday, 2 October 2009
Thérèse's toughness
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3 comments:
You know, I didn't realise she was supposed to be syrupy. I read the Story of a Soul, and I was struck by how "hardcore" she was. That was the overriding impression. Perhaps I never noticed the cheesiness so much when I began to encounter holy cards etc, because I already had a very strong and quite different image of her.
I guess a lot of novenas, and the like, focus on the "please send down a bouquet of roses" kind of imagery which is certainly present in Story of a Soul, and which was a perfectly normal way of talking for a young woman of her age and background in those days, but which sounds overly sentimental to modern ears if is extracted from its original context - i.e. the context of living in a Carmelite convent while almost permanently ill and while undergoing the dark night of the soul...
That is true. I met the novenas and things only a couple of years later, and they were always being promoted by cheesily wholesome American females, so I suppose I assumed that was Just Them :-)
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