Saints Louis and Zélie,
after having had the desire for religious life,
you heard the Lord's call to the vocation of marriage. 
You are the "incomparable parents" 
of whom your daughter St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus speaks.

You love us as your own children, with the heart of a father and the heart of a mother, because you are the friends of God, and the parents of our sister, St. Therese. 
Listen to our prayer and our requests...
and intercede for us with God our Heavenly Father,
through Little Jesus,
in the grace of the Holy Spirit who is Love!

Somehow I find myself short on words, but with the assurance that a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm counting the four pictures above as the main content of this feast day treasure trove!

The top picture is of little Pietro Schiliro, whose miraculous cure at six months old paved the way for the beatification of Sts. Louis and Zelie. Isn't he one of the cutest babies ever? His story begins well before he was even a twinkle in his mama Adele's eye, when she read  Story of a Soul  and it made her furious! She didn't understand how God could allow such terrible suffering to afflict one who'd give up all for Him (in this case, St. Therese).

A good Father Antonio later helped Adele understand and enter the Little Way, but I love that she was so honest with God and demanded Love from Him - which she later understood to be present in suffering, but like the rest of us normal folk she didn't immediately see there.

Fast forward and Adele and her husband Valter welcomed their sixth child, Pietro, in May 2002. Pietro was born unable to breathe due to a pulmonary malformation, so he was put on all sorts of artificial respiration, but even this was not fully effective. 

Valter and Adele explain:

     "The trial of Pietro's mortal illness was a grace to us. What we had lived only in words we were now asked to prove in the flesh. Let us never doubt the benevolent presence of the Lord in our suffering, but we wanted to understand the feeling of this trial.

     The key was given to us by little Therese. My [Adele's] sister, who could not help us, had asked St. Therese to help us. Opening the book of the letters of Therese, she found it fell open at letters 194 and 195, which speak of the missionary vocation of a very small child.

     So we understood that Pietro, lying on his bed, motionless, his arms crossed, supported by eighteen tubes (drains, perfusions, catheters, etc.) participated in the great saving mission of Jesus and that "when the Lamb will open the book of life, what a surprise for the Heavenly Court to hear proclaimed with the names of missionaries and martyrs those of poor little children who never performed dazzling actions." 

     Father Antonio talked to us about Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Therese, and we decided to make a novena asking their intercession for the cure of Pietro and to hasten their beatification. We distributed more than 500 pictures to our family, our friends, our parish, and our co-workers; we made several novenas with the conviction that we would be answered, without any merit on our part, by the pure goodness of the Lord. And the improvement came abruptly: on the 26th and 27th of June, Pietro had such crises of insufficient breathing that, on arriving at the hospital in the morning, we wondered if we would find him still alive. The nurse reassured us at once and talked of a miracle. The improvement continued, so much that on July 3 Pietro was taken off artificial respiration.

     When we left the hospital definitively, after returning home, we took a bouquet of flowers to the altar of the church. But our way of giving thanks is especially to witness to make known the parents of Therese Martin."

Their witness was carefully reviewed and scrutinized by the Church and led to the beatification of Louis and Zelie on World Mission Sunday, October 19, 2008 - exactly 11 years after their most famous daughter was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Saint John Paul II.

I'm sure I've mentioned before in this blog the wonderful way that God sped up the canonization of St. Therese.  In order for a Blessed to be named a Saint, the Church requires a miracle (or in Therese's day two miracles) after the beatification, in order to show that the holy one is not only in Heaven, but that God wants the whole world to know it! The miracle for beatification shows that this person has God's ear in Heaven - hence the miracle in response to the clear request for this person's intercession for a cure . . . And then the miracle for canonization further shows God's desire to use this saint to help everyone know more of His awesome love and mercy. Only after canonization, an infallible act, is the entire Church (not just those with some special connection to the saintly one) encouraged to venerate, imitate, and ask for help from the new saint.

In St. Therese's case, on the day of her beatification thirty miracles occurred and were reported to her Lisieux Carmel for investigation! God was in a hurry to make Therese even more known and loved, though it can be argued that He was bowing to her hurry to fulfill her mission to make Him even more known and loved!

Well the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as they say, and our incomparable St. Therese merely foreshadowed her incomparable parents! Our proof is in that second photo above, a picture of four year old Carmen Perez Pons, the little girl whose miraculous healing through the intercession of Louis and Zelie Martin eventually led to their canonization on October 18, 2015. 

We know that Louis and Zelie were beatified on October 19, 2008, so we might ask what took so long!? Okay, granted the stage between beatification and canonization can take centuries in the case of normal saints and normal eras, still, we're living in an age of instant gratification, so are getting used to speedy causes and processes. Moreover, we're not talking about any normal saints, but the parents of St. Therese, who is always in a hurry to make Love loved, and I'm claiming she resembles her parents in that . . . 

I'm happy to assure you that the delay was simply a matter of red-tape - or simply the need for the passage of some time while doctors and theologians do that reviewing and scrutinizing thing. This is how we know the process is real and the Church authentic! Reason must aid faith, and it surely does in these cases . . . But here's the very fun part: Little Carmen was born on the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, October 15, 2008 - and if you've been paying close attention (haha, no worries - I'm going to explain it all!) you may realize that her birth was just four days before Louis and Zelie were beatified...

Which means that when Carmen was born very prematurely at just 28 weeks, and when consequently it looked like there was no way she could survive (the mid-wife's first words were, "Expect the worst"), her parents went to a nearby Carmelite monastery of nuns to ask for prayers. 

From an article by Maureen O'Riordan (to whom I am indebted for the info on Pietro as well), we can read the rest:

Although there was no human hope, Carmen’s mother and father did not lose hope in God.  Because his daughter was born on the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, her father decided to ask St. Teresa to intercede for her.  On the Internet he found a nearby monastery of Discalced Carmelite nuns (the order St. Teresa reformed) and went to visit them.  “I arrived at night. It was closed and I could only talk to the nuns by the intercom. But the next Sunday we went there to Mass,” says the father. That Sunday was probably October 26, the first Sunday after the beatification of Louis and Zélie.   The parents came to trust the nuns, and “some days later, when things turned very bad for the baby, the nuns encouraged the family to seek the intercession of Louis and Zélie Martin,” said Sister Monique-Marie.  Zélie and Louis had already obtained  from God the cure of the newborn Pietro Schiliro near Milan in Italy, the miracle that led to their beatification.  The Carmelites gave Carmen’s parents a card with a prayer to Louis and Zélie and promised to pray with them for the child’s cure.
     "Because it was a crucial moment, we prayed with much faith” to the new blesseds, who had lost three of their own children as infants and one at the age of five.  After several critical weeks, Carmen suddenly experienced a radical change.  She was completely and inexplicably cured.  Her physicians were stunned.  Although they warned that Carmen would experience complications from her illness, she has not.

* * * 

What can we conclude?

God loves us so much! He is constantly pouring love out upon us and frequently in the form of miracles - often enough even verifiable, instantaneous, saint-making miracles! 

Therese's sister Celine (later Sister Genevieve of the Holy Face in the Carmel of Lisieux) wrote biographies of their parents, now Saints Louis and Zelie. Here is a lovely passage from The Mother of the Little Flower, in which we see Zelie's commentary on God's love and miracles. The quote within this passage is from a letter Zelie wrote to her daughter Pauline, Therese's older sister who later became Mother Agnes of Jesus in the Lisieux Carmel.

"Referring to excellent friends of hers, who were very charitable, but who considered God as being too mighty and distant to take a particular interest in our little lives, she wrote:

'It makes me sad that such good people should have such thoughts. I believe that the good Lord takes an active interest in us. I have experienced it many times in my life, and how many proofs I have of His watchfulness, which I can never forget.'"

As for their wonderful father, Celine wrote in The Father of the Little Flower:

"Everything which referred to Our Lord touched him deeply. One Christmas Day towards the end of his life he said to Sister Agnes at the Carmel parlor: 'A little Child! A Babe! Ah! How can a person not be drawn to love the good God who so annihilated Himself! A babe is so lovely!'"

We can see the appreciation, or really the exultation that Louis and Zelie had in children. They knew the worth of an immortal soul and were eternally - even while on this earth! - grateful for those nine which had been given to them, although four were taken away far too quickly. They never ceased praising God for these children, and it is no surprise, and yet a delightful and magnificent gift, that they are exceedingly interested in us and our children. So let's turn to them for all our needs - for those children big and small among us and our dear ones - and ask for their intercession especially on this their feast.

I know of a mom having brain surgery today - she could use their intercession for herself and her husband and children! And I know you know so many more who need our prayers! Let's join together with this glorious Communion of Saints, our family of Saints, and pray for them all:

O God,
who gave to Saint Louis and Marie Zelie
the grace to lead a life of holiness
as Christian spouses and parents,
grant that, through their intercession and example,
we may be able to love and serve you faithfully,,
living worthily our own vocation.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.

And dear Saints Louis and Zelie, please hear our particular prayers and obtain from the good God all that we and those we pray for need! Amen!

Draw me, we will run!

P.S. For more photos and words about Saints Louis and Zelie, visit the magnificent website created for them by the above-mentioned (and also incomparable) Maureen Riordan HERE...

And for the liturgical texts of the feast of Saints Louis and Zelie, you can go HERE...
Blessed be God in His angels and in His saints!

Once again we are joyful to announce that we have arrived at last at our little brother's feast, the feast of Jesus' first real kiss to him! But before we get caught up in kisses, let's finish our novena! We're saying the prayer that St. Therese asked her missionary spiritual brother Maurice Belliere to say for her every day of her life remaining on earth, and that she also requested him to say for her once she left this earth for eternal life. Since Marcel always wants to be like Therese in everything possible, we've added him to the prayer and voila! Here we go:

Merciful Father, in the name of our gentle Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Saints, we beg You to enkindle our sister and brother with Your Spirit of Love and to grant them the favor of making You loved very much!

I don't know if you noticed, but by saying this prayer, we've been praying pretty powerfully for all of our intentions. I figure when asking the Holy Spirit of Love to grant Therese and Marcel the favor of making God loved very much, we're asking that they help us to love God very much, and this goes too for all those for whom we are praying! So we here at Miss Marcel's Musings have been asking for healings, and conversions, and reconciliations, and a hundred other kinds of help for so very many dear ones (including you and your dear ones!) - and rest assured that the icing on the cake, as well as the cake itself, is this love of God that provides every good thing, even if sometimes He seems to take His sweet time to grant even the most fervent of our petitions. No worries! He will answer, and His timing is always perfect!

It's like those kisses He was always giving to Marcel, and which, if we are attentive, we will notice Him giving daily to us. They are delightful kisses, but they are missing something, and Jesus explains why in His Conversations with our dear little brother. He says on October 31, 1945 (and thank you, St. Anthony, for letting me find the passage I was looking for so hopelessly!):

"My little child, when I wish to give you a kiss, I must, first of all, contain My love before daring to give it to you. Because, if I give you a kiss putting into it all My love, in the wink of an eye your love for Me would lose itself entirely in the depths of My love so that you would no longer be able to sit here to write the words that I am addressing to souls. When I do give you this kiss it will be the last. And this will happen only on the day when it will please Me to unite your love to Mine forever in a single love. The last kiss will, in truth, be the first kiss given to My spouse when I come to look for her . . . Still a little longer and this kiss will be given to you, my little child." (41)

I have to laugh at Jesus' conclusion: "Still a little longer and this kiss will be given to you, my little child." This reminds me of Our Lady's words to Sister Lucia (of Fatima) - Sister Lucia whose heroic virtues were adorably recently recognized, and I say "adorably" because could we have been in any doubt? And yet these formalities to bring her to the "Venerable" status, formalities which require great rigor and precision and time, are gifts that we appreciate and hope will eventually bring the same to Marcel. Meanwhile, I laugh because Lucia's "little longer" was somewhere near 90 years longer! And laughing is safe now, because the little long wait is finally over for her and her joy is FULL!  Our brother Marcel, on the other hand, had merely 14 years to wait after this conversation with Jesus - although seeing how long a day can be sometimes (why don't we feel more Godlike when a day feels like a thousand years?!), I'm not sneezing at 14 years of his ardent waiting!

I don't talk often - in fact, hardly ever - about that last and first kiss of Jesus to Marcel. There was, I hate to say, suffering that preceded it. But lest we be in any doubt about the glory of the Cross, I found out today that it was on September 14, 1954, the Feast of the Holy Cross, that Marcel took the last plane "to the north" from Da-Lat to Hanoi, that is, from the Redemptorist House where he had made his perpetual vows just two years before (in the relative safety of the south of Vietnam) to the Redemptorist House where he had entered and made his first vows, but which was now in communist territory. Jesus wanted Marcel to love Him amidst the communists . . .

Sure enough, as expected, Marcel was arrested in Hanoi a few months later on a trumped up charge, and another year later tried and sentenced to 15 years in a "re-education camp." There he exercised, by the grace of God and the sweet love of Jesus, his own heroic virtue in generosity to the other prisoners and faithfulness to Our Lord. He wrote some details of his suffering to his sister Anne-Marie Te, a Redemptorist nun in Canada to this day (!), but concluded in words he addresses to us too:

"I will tell you the rest in heaven. Pray a lot for me, so that I may have the courage to fight in earnest right to the end. The enemy is evil, dishonest and very clever. He can destroy my body, but he cannot shake my will. Besides, Jesus tells us not to be afraid. Little sister, I give you a kiss, and I wish you to go ever forward. Your brother, J.M.T. Marcel Van, C.SS.R."

I love that we have been able to fulfill Marcel's request by praying this novena and asking:

Merciful Father, in the name of our gentle Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Saints, we beg You to enkindle our sister and brother with Your Spirit of Love and to grant them the favor of making You loved very much!

Our prayer has been answered and Marcel did have the courage to fight in earnest right to the end, which came with Jesus' first real kiss as noon on June 10, 1959. Thank You, Jesus, for Your faithfulness to Marcel which provided him with faithfulness to You!

And now, he is safe, our little brother. He is eternally happy, and - most delightful for us - he is as concerned over our welfare as his spiritual sister St. Therese was for his (and as she is for ours, so we get double the love!)! I mentioned already that Marcel wants to be like Therese in everything, and that means lots of roses and his coming down to us to deliver them.

One of the things that brought Marcel great joy when he, like us, was receiving very restrained kisses from Jesus, was the poetry St. Therese would recite to him. But his sister was not the only one to give him poems . . . Jesus Himself gave Marcel a song to sing when the novices were asked to perform for St. Stanislaus' feast. And so, in honor of Marcel's own feast, here is the song that Jesus wrote for him. Let it be a word of encouragement sung to us by our dear brother and sister who are showering us with roses like you can see in the picture at the top of this post, the very first roses that started this novena as pre-paid, but definitely not the last!

In the Footsteps of Jesus on the Way to Perfection

The path which leads to perfection,
Is the path of perfect love . . . 
And of confidence in the God of Love.
Dear Jesus!
On the road You formerly trod,
Lead me gently in the scent of Your fragrance.
Draw me to the summit of Love.

With one heart we shall walk side by side,
Ascending towards the God of Love.
May a fervent prayer accompany us,
Which will draw men in our wake.
Without respite we shall advance along the path of love,
While gathering and offering roses;
And later, in heaven, we will see the Beloved.

+  +  +
Happy Feast!

Draw me, we will run!

P.S. One of God's beautiful chronological gifts is that the feast of Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin, St. Therese's parents, follows soon after Marcel's day. Since he is her spiritual brother, they must be his spiritual parents (and the same goes for their relationship to us!), and their feast is in two days, on July 12th. We have time, then, for the littlest of novenas, a three day one if we start now . . . just in case you have an intention or two that haven't yet been perfectly, visibly answered!

Saints Louis and Zélie,
after having had the desire for religious life,
you heard the Lord's call to the vocation of marriage. 
You are the "incomparable parents" 
of whom your daughter St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus speaks...

You love us as your own children, with the heart of a father and the heart of a mother, because you are the friends of God, and the parents of our sister, St. Therese and her and our spiritual brother, Marcel. 
Listen to our prayer and our requests
and intercede for us with God our Heavenly Father,
through Little Jesus,
in the grace of the Holy Spirit who is Love!

Would you like to join me in a novena as we approach our little brother Marcel's special day?

Just as with his older sister Little Therese, Marcel has many special days of grace, but on July 10, Jesus gave him that first kiss that took him out of this life and into the next! And so, just as we might want to prepare for the greatest feasts of the Church with big and fancy novenas, so we can prepare for this little feast with a little novena, not too big, not too fancy, but said from the heart in gratitude and petition.

When Therese was on earth, she wrote to her missionary (spiritual) brother Maurice Belliere:

"I would be very happy if each day you would consent to offer this prayer for me which contains all my desires:

'Merciful Father, in the name of our gentle Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Saints, I beg You to enkindle my sister with Your Spirit of Love and to grant her the favor of making You loved very much.'

"If the Lord takes me soon with Him, I ask you to continue each day the same prayer, for I shall desire in heaven the same thing as I do on earth: To love Jesus and to make Him loved."

Since our dear brother Servant of God Marcel Van loves to associate himself with our dear sister St. Therese, making all of her thoughts, intentions, and prayers his own, I could think of no better novena prayer than this one Therese asked another brother to say for her. Let's say it for her and Marcel, that he, too, may participate in their beautiful apostolate of loving Jesus and making Him loved!

Here, then, is our novena prayer. And as usual, if you only have this one chance to read it and then, like a little Marcel yourself, if you forget to say it again, or do a truly "little" novena and say it only some of these nine days leading up to Marcel's birthday into Heaven on July 10, well, take a page from his book and Don't worry about anything! We've got you covered! I'll do my best to say this prayer for nine days straight, and I know my guardian angel and yours can manage that even if I too fail! Here's to confidence and nothing but confidence leading us to Love! And now, that prayer:

Merciful Father, in the name of our gentle Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Saints, we beg You to enkindle our sister and brother with Your Spirit of Love and to grant them the favor of making You loved very much!

What's next? To make this a truly effective novena, let's gather some roses! The roses are a promise from Therese (and Marcel) that our prayers are heard. Our sister and brother are sitting on Jesus' lap even as we speak, yet they think nothing of hopping off for a moment to shower us with roses, or even hand deliver them to let us know Jesus is talking to them about . . . us! Yes, He loves us so much and is busy at this moment instructing many saints in heaven about how to come help us in this valley of tears. Thank You, Jesus!

In fact, rest assured your petitions in this novena are going to be not only heard, but answered. This is what I call a Pre-Paid Novena, and I'll tell you why. I had the joy of attending a glorious Catholic wedding yesterday, and at the end of the reception was bid by the mother of the bride to take home not only one, but two of the gorgeous rose-featuring floral centerpieces. Then this morning, before (and still remaining after) Sunday Mass there was another centerpiece left before our car! There were five white roses amid the other heavenly flowers and greenery in each arrangement, so that makes 15 roses in all that came home with me! And since I am clearly meant to share them with you, that makes 15 petitions you can count on being heard and answered in our novena! Oh, except that is surely not enough petitions! You see, I also handed another centerpiece to a dear friend and told her about the Pre-Paid novena, so that makes 20 petitions we can toss up to Heaven in confidence and love and joy! 

So now we have a prayer, lots of roses, a pile of petitions (don't worry if you haven't formulated them yet - your angel has them at the ready and is no doubt presenting them to Jesus for you, and then at the end of reading here, you can offer your own list too) - all we need is a word of invitation and encouragement from the guest of honor, in this case also the one inviting us to his party! Marcel, little brother, tell us what we need to know to have some of that peace in which you so beatifically reside!

The words he has for us today are from his letters, and in particular a letter he wrote on 9 July, 1947. He encourages us:

"I see the route that you are now following, full of obstacles and difficulties; but I know that if God wishes, you will triumph over all very easily. For that, it is necessary that you deliver yourself over to God with total confidence, that you place everything in His hands. It is on this condition that His will can be fulfilled in you. Little sister (and little brother), do not be discouraged, do not preoccupy yourself too much with the goods of this world. It is necessary for you to know that belonging already to Jesus, all that is yours belongs to Him as well. Put everything into His hands with a total confidence and leave to Him the care of busying Himself in your place with all material goods. All you have to do is to love Him. To love Jesus is the first duty of souls which belong to Jesus. Yes, the first duty of the beloved spouses of Jesus is to love Him; and He must occupy Himself with all the rest in our place because His duty is to love us as His children, to love us as one loves a very dear spouse, to instruct as one does for very young pupils, etc. And our duty is summed up in these two words: 'Confidence and Love.' Everything else is Jesus' business. Consequently, dear little sister (and little brother), when you are preoccupied with your affairs, have recourse to Jesus in order to offer to Him all your preoccupations, so that He takes charge of them for you, and remain in peace . . . That is how Therese of the Child Jesus used to act and she avowed: 'that always worked for me!'"

Little Therese, we are pitifully small, and our confidence is often much less than total, so be sure to give us a share in your total confidence (which you don't even need now that you are seeing Love face to Face!), so that we may obey Marcel's orders!

Draw me, we will run!
​