St. Therese, Blessed Fulton Sheen & Joe W!

Little Flower, in this hour, show your power!!!
As I write, a friend is dying - or in the words of our patroness, St. Therese, on this her feast, "entering eternal life" - so please before we go on, let's say a prayer for beautiful soul T.L., and all those whose needs fit this lovely petition:

Father of all, we pray to You for those we love, but see no longer. Grant them Your peace; let perpetual light shine upon them. And in Your loving wisdom and almighty power, work in them the good purpose of Your perfect will. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, and through the intercession of our little sister St. Therese. Amen.

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Last night I had the absolute joy, pleasure, and distinct delight (an annual delight, but each year distinct) of talking to about 80 girls, all at once. It was crazy fun, and it was all in honor of St. Therese. I spoke this year (in St. Therese dorm at Thomas Aquinas College) on "St. Therese, Blessed Fulton Sheen, and Joe W." and I realized that since this year we weren't recorded, I'd like to share with you the words I shared with the girls. This is it, more or less, and I ask St. Therese to use my voice to whisper peace, confidence, and utter ravishing love of God into your heart as you read. May she who is famous for her roses send you many today and in the days to come!

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Let’s start with a prayer. This is a prayer that St. Thérèse asked her spiritual brother, the missionary priest Fr. Roulland, to pray for her every day while she was on earth, and then she asked him to continue praying it every day for her even if she had left this exile and gone to Heaven. It’s a wonderful prayer for it asks God to give her the graces she desires to share with us, to help her fulfill her mission in Heaven of making us love God as she loves Him. I’m going to tack on to it a novena prayer to St. Therese that I’ve been saying for you girls since Padre Pio’s feast last week, and the novena will end tomorrow, so this is what we call a pre-paid novena. You get the rose now, and I’ll finish tomorrow, and since today is the day St. Therese actually died, or as she would say, entered eternal life, and tomorrow is her feast, October 1, on the new calendar, and Saturday is her feast too, on the old calendar, any of these days is a great day to start a novena to her yourself. But even if you don’t, I’ve got you covered! Then we’ll add a Hail Mary and an angel of God prayer so we can remind ourselves of Our Lady’s great love for us and ask our angels to help me to say the things you need to hear!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Merciful Father, in the name of our sweet Jesus, of the Virgin Mary and the Saints, I ask You to inflame my sister Therese with Your Spirit of Love, and grant her the grace to make You greatly loved.

O Little Therese of the Child Jesus, please pick a rose for us from the Heavenly gardens.

O Little Flower of Jesus, Ask God to grant the favors we now place with confidence in your hands.

St. Therese, help us to always believe as you did,
in God’s great love for us,
so that we may imitate your “Little Way” each day.
Amen.

Hail Mary . . .
Angel of God . . .
Our Lady of Good Counsel, pray for us!
St. Joseph, pray for us!
St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!
St. Thérèse, pray for us!
Blessed Fulton Sheen, pray for us!
St. Jerome, pray for us!
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Well, this is amazing. I can’t believe I’m here again on my favorite night of the year with my favorite people! First I have to introduce myself. I’m Mrs. Andres, tutor wife. You know the tutors: they’re those demi-gods who are so smart and good and holy that we wonder if they’re angels. I met mine when we were both students here from 1983 to 1987.

We started dating Junior year – which I think was a big surprise to both of us, as well as to the rest of the campus including all the students and the faculty and staff. Miraculously, we both got accepted to grad school at Notre Dame, and when we got there in 1987, 2 years after we had started dating, we got engaged, and now we’ve been married 38 years. We hoped to have a big family, and in a way we did! We have two sons, 12 years apart, which was another surprise to everyone. After my husband got his Ph.D we moved to Virginia where he taught at Christendom College for 14 years, and then we moved out here for him to teach at TAC. Both our sons are now graduates; the older one, Joseph, got married in January of 2025 and he and his amazing wife Mia had their first child last December. Our younger son, Dom, graduated 2 years ago and now writes, edits, and publishes a wonderful monthly print magazine for boys. It’s called Roughhouse, and although each issue costs about 7 or 8 dollars to print, he let me bring a handful for you girls, in case any of you have brothers you think would love it! Please take one and share with them – and you can read it too. It’s really terrific.

So first off, that’s me and my family.

Each year, now that it’s become an annual thing for me to come give you a talk on St. Thérèse in her dorm near her feast day, each year I ask her what she wants me to tell you. I should add to my bio that I’ve never heard the saints talk to me, which has its advantages – I mean NOT hearing them, because I don’t have to have super serious spiritual direction with one of the priests helping me decide if the voices were truly from Heaven! No, what I experience is more like what St. Thérèse explained in Story of a Soul. She wrote:

"Jesus has no need of books or teachers to instruct souls; He teaches without the noise of words. Never have I heard Him speak, but I feel that He is within me at each moment; He is guiding and inspiring me with what I must say and do. I find just when I need them certain lights that I had not seen until then, and it isn’t most frequently during my hours of prayer that these are most abundant but rather in the midst of my daily occupations."
 
So each year I wonder what St. Therese wants me to tell you about her. I’ve been reading and studying her and good friends with her, you might say, for 40 years, and I keep learning new things about her and especially from her about God, so there are seemingly endless possibilities.

In 1997, Pope St. John Paul II named Therese a Doctor of the Church. He was an astonishing pope – we’ve got some of his books on the table for you - and he beatified and canonized so many people that there was talk that perhaps it was cheapening the process. In fact, the act of canonization is an infallible act, so he wasn’t cutting any corners, but I find it wonderful that he only named one Doctor of the Church, and that was little St. Thérèse! She lived on earth just 24 years from 1873 to 1897, so it was exactly 100 years after her entering eternal life that she was named Doctor. This is fast, and it was also surprising to many because not only was Therese just about as old as you when she took off for Heaven, but she had very little formal schooling.

To give you some points of comparison, last year we saw something similar with St. John Henry Cardinal Newman. He was named a Doctor only 136 years after his lifetime on earth, but a more typical example would be Therese’s holy father in Carmel, not her dad, St. Louis Martin, but her spiritual father St. John of the Cross who helped the big St. Teresa of Avila in Spain to reform the Carmelite order in the 1500s. He was named a Doctor of the Church exactly 100 years ago this year, so in 1926, but that was 335 years after he went to Heaven!

A Doctor of the Church is someone who is not only beatified (meaning we know they are in Heaven), not only canonized (we know God wants them honored throughout the whole Church and world), but also someone who has a special doctrine to teach us, a doctrine that adds to the Church’s treasury and which she, Holy Mother Church, wants to offer to all of her children. When St. Thérèse was made a Doctor of the Church, she was the 33rd Doctor and joined an elite group of saints that include St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome (whose feast we celebrate today), St. John Chrysostom, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Alphonsus Ligouri, and St. Francis de Sales. Wow! Wouldn’t it be neat to start a grad school where we just study the Doctors of the Church?

Last night Jackie O, and I were talking on the way home from our Costco run, and she asked me a question she loves to ask: who’s on your saint panel. A friend of mine in Ohio and I often talk about this, but we call it our team. Who’s on your team of saints, the ones fighting for you, the ones you call on regularly, the ones who help you and keep you going?

Well I have to say that while I love, love, love so many of the Doctors, and St. Anthony of Padua and St. Thomas Aquinas were life changers for me, and then St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross are my holy parents in Carmel too because my husband and I are third order Discalced Carmelites, still I think I’d have to say that St. Therese is easily my favorite Doctor of the Church, and the reason is that she is so doggone accessible. Not only is she easy to read and easy to call on, but she has so much to teach us, and her ways of teaching can be so funny and down to earth. To top it off, she has a mission she was very clear and articulate about, a doctrine every one of the popes since her time has presented to the whole Church to follow, and finally she has a continuous yearning, a burning desire, a passion and commitment to teach us this doctrine, what’s called her Little Way, every day until the end of time.

This last part is striking. She said it first in her memoir, Story of a Soul, and she repeated it often in her last months on earth when her sisters were writing down everything she said (everything!) and later printed it up in a book called Her Last Conversations.
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So now we need to get to the heart of the matter. I’m going to speak in particular tonight about St. Thérèse and Blessed Fulton Sheen and a friend of many of you, one who wants to be friends with all of you, someone who just took off for heaven a little over eight months ago: namely, Joe Weinkopf.

I was getting anxious a few days ago because although I knew I wanted to speak on St. Thérèse and Blessed Fulton and plain old Joe W., I didn’t know quite what I was supposed to say. So I prayed to St. Philomena, a very young virgin martyr whose bones were found in the catacombs in 1802, and who immediately became known as a wonder worker (because of all the miracles that happened around her relics and when people asked for her help), and was especially made known through the love of the Cure of Ars, St. John Vianney, who called her “his little saint,” and to whom he attributed all his miracles. I had tried her out in 2017, nearly 10 years ago, and she came through with a huge miracle. But then, life is so full and the saints and their kindness are so plentiful, that I kind of forgot about her. This past summer, I mentioned her to my husband, “We ought to pray for So-and-so to St. Philomena again.” I didn’t even actually pray, I just thought of praying, and next thing I knew, So-and-so was thriving!

So I decided to ask St. Philomena for a little miracle of letting me go to the East Coast over Thanksgiving. I have two reasons to go, but I’d be going without my family – which is a sacrifice for all of us -  so I asked St. Philomena to work it out if it’s supposed to happen, and she did! You can see why, then, I decided to ask her to help me with this talk, and you can guess what happened! She did! But along with her, Joe Weinkopf helped, because he has this tendency to wake me up really, really early when he wants me to write something about him or from him. Again, not like I’m hearing his voice, luckily not, but just an inspiration that’s so clear and true.

So here we are, and I want to talk to you tonight about St. Thérèse, Blessed Fulton Sheen, and plain old Joe. What do these three have in common? Tons! But since we have a limited amount of time, always much to short in my opinion, I’m going to talk to you mainly about their intercession and their missions.

To start with, who are they?

St. Thérèse was a French girl who lived in a small village in Normandy from 1873 to 1897. She was the youngest of nine, only five of whom survived childhood, and all five were girls, and all became nuns. Four of them (including Thérèse) entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery in their small town of Lisieux, France, while their sister Leonie entered the Visitation Order (which had been started a couple hundred years before by St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane Francis de Chantal). Thérèse’s parents, Louis and Zelie Martin, are now Sts. Louis and Zelie, not the first married couple to both be named saints, but the first married couple to be canonized together in one cause for sainthood. Her sister Leonie is a Servant of God, meaning that she has a cause for sainthood in process. But St. Thérèse and her family were, besides their beautiful sanctity, entirely ordinary people. There were no huge miracles in their lifetimes, no fame or impressive worldly achievements, I mean not even big Catholic achievements like many saints have accomplished by God’s grace.

St. Thérèse entered the Carmel when she was only 15, and it wasn’t because she lived in some long ago time when that was normal. Her last sister lived to just a few years before I was born, and that sister (Celine) was handy with a camera and left us many pictures of Thérèse. In other words, Therese was almost our contemporary – if she had lived, she’d have been 92 when I was born - and it was extremely strange even in her time that she became a nun at 15, but God had a plan because she only lived to 24, so this let her have 9 years in religious life. The thing is, she was always young, and she remains always young, and I think this is important to her mission.

You may not realize this, but all of you are extremely beautiful. In fact, I’m fairly certain none of you realize it. I’m absolutely certain, come to think of it, that none of you knows how much God loves you, how irresistible He finds you, and moreover, how actually stunningly beautiful each of you are – in your physical appearance and in your soul.

I once got to meet Mother Teresa, now St. Mother Teresa. It’s a hilarious story, but this is why I have to write my talk out, so I don’t get sidetracked and just tell you lots of fun stories! You can ask me later, but the point for now is that when I met her she was very old and wrinkled and hunched over, but I looked into her eyes, and her eyes were SO YOUNG! And so beautiful, just like you are. She was this way by grace, but you’re this way by nature, because the young simply are beautiful.

I’m sure many of you woke up this morning and looked in the mirror and inwardly groaned. There was your same nose! There was a blemish cropping up! There was your hair, and it wasn’t looking the way you hoped.

Let me tell you about hair! I got to lose mine a couple years ago and start over because I had breast cancer. It’s all gone now (the cancer) which is kind of a bummer because everyone in our amazing community brought me dinners and I didn’t have to cook for months! But alas, all good things on this earth come to an end, and now my cancer is gone and my hair is back. It came back TOTALLY different than when it left! It had been long and straight and brown. It came back curly (which I love) and short and salt and pepper (which was funny because I also became a grandma about the time my hair was coming back somewhat gray, just in time). Well now it’s different every day! If you need something to pray for, please pray for my hair! No, I’m just kidding, but you can pray for me to become a saint, and I’ll pray the same for you . . .

My point is simply this: you’re young and beautiful and sometimes (don’t feel any pressure) because you’re young, you’re also (sometimes) energetic and excited about life and what God wants from you. There’s a zeal that comes at your age – it’s one of God’s most beautiful gifts! You want to know (and I’m praying that you find out) what God wants you to do in this life! Will you be a nun or religious sister? Will you get married? Will you have a fascinating job or career? Will you be a mom?
When I first came to TAC, that was the first time I learned about the vocation to be a stay home, full time, Catholic wife and mother. My writing tutor (which was what we called our freshmen advisor back then) was Mr. DeSilva, who was Mr. Finley’s dad (another great story you can ask me about later!). I went in to talk to Mr. DeSilva and I found out he was married and I asked what work his wife did, meaning what was her career, and he told me – I hope I never forget – “My wife does the most important job in the world. She’s raising little souls to Heaven!”

Well, St. Thérèse teaches us that the most important job for each of us is just simply what God wants from us. He has in mind a vocation and mission for each of us, and the way we become saints is simply by being what He wants us to be and doing what He has in mind, from all eternity, for us to do. But I’m praying that you don’t worry about it – I promise that He’ll show you! But if you’re frustrated because He hasn’t shown you yet, I want to tell you that when He does it will be easy – like He says in the gospel, His yoke is easy and His burden is light, because what He wants you to do is what He has made you for. That doesn’t mean it won’t take work or there won’t be suffering sometimes, but if you turn to Him, He’ll help with everything, and He’s given us the saints and angels to help us too.

The first thing, for now, is to be a student at Thomas Aquinas College. That can be hard or easy. We’re all slow learners (spiritually speaking, I think) so it can be hard, but I want, with the help of St. Thérèse and Blessed Fulton Sheen and Joe W, to make it easier tonight.

To finish with Thérèse’s life story, she lived in her small Carmelite monastery in her small town in France, and then died seemingly of tuberculosis when she was only 24, and still young and beautiful and eager like you! Only she was really dying of love because she was just crazy in love with Jesus and couldn’t wait any longer than she had to on this earth, and He was kind and merciful and snatched her up to Heaven. But before that she wrote some things and said a bunch, and it turned out that what she wrote became one of the greatest bestsellers of all times, and in the 100 years after she left earth for Heaven, 900 books (or so) were written about her doctrine. When I say “her doctrine” and when the Church talks about her doctrine, we mean her Little Way.

She wanted an easy way to become a Saint because she knew she couldn’t do the great things that great saints do. So she searched the Scriptures and found that God invites us to be little with Him and to abandon ourselves to Him like a little child sleeping in its father’s arms. So that was it, she followed that plan and just stayed as little as possible, and she trusted God for everything. And then, when she was dying, she started making crazy promises about how she would come down after she died. She knew she would be more alive than ever, alive in Heaven seeing the Face of God, and she asked Him to grant her desire to be like the angels, and even though she would be seeing Him Face to face, she wanted to still be allowed to come back to earth and help us.

She promised to shower roses after she died, and she was sure God would let her do good in Heaven until the end of time. And so far, He has let her. She’s famous for sending roses, which is why we have blessed roses for you here, and why I brought books for you – some about her, some I’ve written about her, and other books to inspire you with what she most wants you to know: which is how much God loves you! Actually I guess you can’t really know how much God loves you or you’d just die on the spot, die of love like Thérèse eventually did, but she wants – and these are her words about her mission – to make Him loved as she loves Him, and the first part of that is making us know how much He loves us so we can then love Him back.

That is St. Thérèse, often called The Little Flower because she called herself that, comparing herself to a little flower while the great saints are big trees.

What about Blessed Fulton Sheen? Well, as you may know, he was only Fulton Sheen, or Venerable Fulton Sheen, until about a week ago! He was just beatified, which means the Church proclaimed that he is certainly in Heaven and we can now publicly honor him and ask for his intercession. Who was he?

He was born in El Paso, Illinois in 1895, just two years before Thérèse went to Heaven, and he died, or entered eternal life as St. Thérèse liked to call it, when he was 80 and praying before the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel in his home in the Upper East Side, New York, on December 9, 1979. I was 14. I don’t think I’d heard of him, but he was super famous. He had a radio show for 20 years, and then he had the most watched TV show ever for five years, from 1952 to 1957. He was a priest and later a bishop, and the head of the US branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith which promotes the missions. He raised more money for the missions than anyone else ever!

My good friend Miss Marcel East has a wonderful story about how her parents were watching Fulton Sheen’s show when they were first married, and he was talking about the missions and how important it is to give to the poor and support priests, and you should sell your jewelry and send the money to the missions so priests could preach the gospel and baptize babies, and they were so inspired, Miss Marcel East's parents, that they did! They went out the next day and sold all the jewelry (except their wedding rings) they had. And MME, when she told me the story, said, “I was so mad when I found out later. They had no family heirlooms to give me because they’d sold it all for the pagan babies!” So you can see what an effect Fulton Sheen had on people!

One more cool fact about Blessed Fulton Sheen: he gave the keynote talk at the opening fundraising dinner in San Francisco for a crazy dream of a school that 4 laymen wanted to start called Thomas Aquinas College!
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And how about Joe Weinkopf? Who is he? Well, if you’re a sophomore on up, you hopefully remember Joe! He was a student here at TAC, the son of Mr. Weinkopf who works here, and Mrs. Weinkopf who is the sweetest lady ever, and the brother of Monica, who graduated in 2025 and is now a FOCUS missionary, and Kolbe, his older brother who just graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy. Joe is also the older brother of Sebastian, who’s a freshmen, and of John Bosco and Elisa who are homeschooled, and of the awesome Dominic Savio Weinkopf who has Downs Syndrome. Joe dated Victoria, who’s a junior now, and was good friends with a ton of great guys who are mostly juniors too, because they were all sophomores last year when, in January, one morning in Serra’s dorm, Joe didn’t wake up. What a goof! Joe had epilepsy and so was susceptible to seizures since he was a kid, and he knew every night when he went to bed that he might not wake up. So he carved on the underside of the top bunk above his head at home the word LIVE, and that’s what’s on my wrist right now. Joe loved God so much, and reading St. Augustine sophomore year, he was thrilled that God was ineffable, and he was just a wonderful example of a normal, happy, enthusiastic, and sometimes kind of quiet guy.

When I was at TAC as a student, I had three best friends: my roommate for all four years, Jackie, and our two best friends: Angela and her best friend, Jon Syren, whom she married the summer after graduation. We were all very beautiful, just like you! And we loved God so much, and we all wanted to be saints.

Angela and I are still trying to become saints, but Jackie went to Heaven just before she was 40, and Jon – who had been head prefect like Luke is now, and who had been just the funniest, kindest, and most down to earth normal guy – after he and Angela married, he went to med school and they had two kids, and then God scooped him up. His excuse was cancer, but it was pretty fast. He promised to take care of Angela and the kids, and he has kept his promise. They agreed that sunflowers would be the sign of his being near. Do you know how sunflowers are everywhere and on everything? I mean there are sunflowers on kitchen towels and in pictures and just everywhere. That wasn’t the case when Jon left for Heaven. It’s as if they had agreed that tumbleweeds would be his sign. Sure, you might see a tumbleweed if you drive out on the prairie, but not everywhere! And now sunflowers are everywhere, and this brings us to the intercession of the saints, the message St. Thérèse and Blessed Fulton Sheen and Joe W and Jon Syren and Jackie Lemmon want you to know about.

I’ll start with Blessed Fulton Sheen. Not too long before he entered eternal life, in the early1970’s he went to Ireland and preached a retreat on St. Thérèse. She had predicted that the whole world would love her, and it came true, so Blessed Fulton Sheen, along with almost every saint and absolutely every pope who has lived after her lifetime, loved her, and he preached a retreat on her that became the book, “Fulton Sheen’s St. Thérèse,” and he said this in a conference on “St. Thérèse and the power of intercession” (which is Chapter 4 in the book):
 
He says: “Do not ever think the Judgment—for those of you who have the faith and are trying to love the Good Lord—do not think that it is going to be fearful, that it is only the God of justice and not the God of mercy Who is going to judge you.

I will tell you what it’s like and why the Little Flower didn’t feel she ever had to go to purgatory. Just suppose I owed you some money, say $50, and I’d owed it to you for a long time. And I saw you coming down the street, and I didn’t have $50. What would I do? I’d cross the street, wouldn’t I, to get away from you because you’d remind me of a debt.

Now when we go before the sight of God, remember, on the one hand, we will be very conscious of our failings and our sins and our debts, and we will pull back from the presence of Christ in shame. But on the other hand. What have we lived for all our lives? We’ve lived for Him. That’s why you come to church. That why you go to Communion. That’s why you pray, why you are patient in suffering. Your whole life is Christ-dedicated.

So, you see, you will be squeezed in between two movements. On the one hand a deep sense of unworthiness which will pull you away from the Lord, and on the other, a tremendous sense of attraction because you want Him and He wants you. And when you get caught between those two feelings, that’s going to be a deep, burning sensation. That’s purgatory.

How long it will last we do not know. It may be very quick. But the Little Flower, you see, never had a moment as she perfected herself whenever she would want to draw back from Christ. Hers was only attraction, and that’s why she said, “I will go straight to Heaven.”

I hope none of you considers that as pride. I understand it solely in terms of someone who loves deeply.

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Those were Blessed Fulton Sheen’s words, and he is about to talk now about intercession, but first I want to add this and correct him slightly. It wasn’t his fault, he was a busy guy, but I’ve had not much to do except read and re-read St. Thérèse who, since Fulton’s day in the sun, has been named a Doctor of the Church. And here is what he made a mistake about: St. Thérèse would be the first to say – in fact, this is a funny mistake because it gets to the heart of the matter – she would be the first to say she didn’t perfect herself. She wanted to be a saint, just like we do, but she looked at what she called the steep stairway of perfection and she knew that she couldn’t climb it. It’s like me on hikes. I cannot hike uphill. I’m a fine walker, I’ve been doing it for maybe 60 years, but give me a hill and I’m toast! Thérèse considered herself a baby in the spiritual life, and she said just look at a little child trying to climb the stairs. Mama’s at the top of the stairs, and the toddler is trying to get up there. She raises her foot to the first step but can’t even reach it, so she keeps raising it and yelling at the top of her lungs, “Mama! Mama! Mama!” And that’s us!

She said, “I can’t climb the stairway, and elevators have just been invented.” She made one trip out of her little area of France, and she was with her father and sister Celine in Paris and she saw one of the first elevators in a fancy hotel. So she said, “I want an elevator to lift me to Heaven.” She searched the Scriptures – and this is a great sidenote on the feast of St. Jerome, the Doctor of the Church who gave us the Latin Vulgate, the translation of the whole Bible into Latin.

This is how Therese read the Scriptures. Sometimes she opened them at random, especially the gospels, and read something that perfectly fit her life, her day, her moment, her heart.

Other times she would start reading and just keep reading until she found the word God meant for her. She would read and read and go over pages and pages, and instead of stopping sometimes like we do when we read something that might scare us or intimidate us, she just kept on reading until she found the word of love that God had written for her from all eternity, or at least from the time the human writer had written it.

So knowing she didn’t have the strength or ability to climb the steep stairway of perfection like the saints before her did, she searched the Scripture to find her elevator, and she found these words:

“Let anyone who is a little one come to me.” That’ s Proverbs 9:4. Then she read “For to him that is little, mercy will be shown.” That’s Wisdom 6:7. Then (and you’ll find all this in Story of a Soul – and though I’ve been reading it for 40 years, only this past year did I realize that she gives this sequence of Scripture passages in two different places in Story of a Soul – that’s how important and crucial this discovery of her Little Way is) she says,

“The Prophet Isaiah reveals in His name that on the last day: ‘God shall feed His flock as a shepherd; He shall gather together the lambs with His arm and shall take them up in His bosom.’” (That’s Isaiah 40:11.) She continues, “As though these promises were not sufficient, this same prophet whose gaze was already plunged into the eternal depths cried out in the Lord’s name: ‘As one whom a mother caresses, so will I comfort you; you shall be carried at the breasts and upon the knees they will caress you.’” (That’s toward the end of Isaiah in chapter 66.)

Thérèse concludes, “After having listened to words such as these, there is nothing to do but to be silent and to weep with gratitude and love. Ah! If all weak and imperfect souls felt what the least of souls feels, that is, the soul of your little Thérèse, not one would despair of reaching the summit of the mount of love.” (And here is perhaps my favorite line in all of St. Thérèse, in all of the Doctors of the Church, in all of the history of words!!!) She tells us: “Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude.”

So Blessed Fulton Sheen is not a Doctor of the Church, and he got this wrong, so let me help him (with his help now that he can use me as an editor, which is one of my favorite parts of writing and life) – Thérèse did not fear death because death was the beginning of real life. Once when Thérèse was dying, and Sister Marie of the Trinity, whom she’d been guiding in the spiritual life in Carmel, was devastated and said to her, “Life is so sad!” Thérèse responded, “Life isn’t sad!” And then she realized what Marie meant and she said, “Oh! You mean exile? Yes, exile is very sad, but LIFE, real life is very happy!” meaning Heaven! I should add that Thérèse made life very joyful, and one of her main messages, and Blessed Fulton Sheen’s, and Joe W’s, is that (in the words of Fulton), “Life is worth living!” and (in the word of plain old Joe, who could say it even shorter), “LIVE!” But they also realized that this life on earth is not the main life but just the waiting room, and when you get to go in – Wow! Heaven is awesome!

So, Thérèse didn’t fear death because she didn’t fear entering eternal life, and she didn’t fear eternal life NOT because she had perfected herself, not even because God had perfected her, but because she was wise as a serpent and simple as a dove, so she said to God (and you can say it too in her Act of Oblation, which you’ll find in the back of my book Something New with St. Thérèse: Her Eucharistic Miracle and in the back of the booklet Stations of the Cross with St. Therese) that since God gives us Jesus as the Spouse of our souls – and this is true for everyone, whether single, married, or in religious life or priesthood – all that He has is ours! Spouses share everything, and Jesus is our Spouse, so what is His is ours, therefore, St. Thérèse reminds God that all Jesus’ merits are hers, and so she says that when she dies she’ll go before God with empty hands and expect everything from Jesus!

She also says that for those who love, there is no purgatory, and what she means and explains is that the fire of Jesus’ love is so much stronger than the flames of purgatory that He can make us clean and ready to appear before Him in an instant, so she asks for this!

So now that I’ve corrected Blessed Fulton Sheen, let’s get back to what he was saying. He’s about to explain the intercession of the saints for us, and this is huge. This is why I’m here and probably why God made me: so I could tell you tonight about the intercession of the saints, and how much more powerful it is than you can imagine. And I must say, how handy that the Church beatified Fulton Sheen last week so that it would be all the more impressible when I tell you. I made up that word while writing this talk: Impressible, a combo of impressive and believable! So Blessed Fulton goes on very impressibly:

“Now we come to her intercessory power in Heaven. And this is a point where I believe we need deep instruction: intercession. We do not mention it enough, perhaps, in our sermons and in our teaching, but intercession means pleading for others. Now let me read you some of the last words of the Little Flower about her intercession.

         Confidently I count upon not remaining inactive in Heaven. My desire is to still work for the Church and for souls.

You see, she didn’t think that Heaven was a place of total repose. She says, “I’m going to work in Heaven.”

Blessed Fulton continues: “In other words, she said “When I go to Heaven, I do not lose my interest in this world, I keep it.” Therefore, she became very confident that she would be our advocate and our attorney in the Kingdom of Heaven. She wrote:

“Just now a few notes of distant music fall upon my ear and set me thinking that very soon I shall hear melodies beyond compare. Yet this thought cannot give me but a moment’s gladness. Only one expectation makes my heart throb. It is the love that I shall receive and the love that I shall be able to give. I feel that my mission is now about to begin. My mission is to make others love the good God as I love Him, to give to souls my Little Way. I will spend my Heaven in doing good upon the earth.”

Blessed Fulton explains: “She says she will spend her Heaven in doing good on the earth….And she continues:

         This is not impossible that I should spend my time in Heaven doing good upon earth since the angels in the full enjoyment of the beatific vision keep watch over us, I shall never rest till the end of the world. But when the angel shall have said time is no more, then I shall rest. [same for Padre Pio, by the way!] Then I shall rejoice because the number of the elect will be complete.

And here is Blessed Fulton Sheen’s commentary, which just knocked my socks off! He says:

Do you know that I think perhaps we spend too much time—there must be some—praying for the departed souls and not enough time praying to them? Take for example parents, grandparents, husband that are dead, wives, children, siblings, friends. They are our intercessors. And perhaps we limit their influence in Heaven simply because we do not sufficiently invoke them. So the Little Flower always wishes very much to be remembered in this way…In the Old Testament, in the Book of Jeremiah, God said, “Give Me no rest. Plead with Me night and day!” And that is what our Little Flower is saying. Don’t let her sleep! Keep her at work. And may she be mindful of each and every one of your petitions and particularly inspire you not to fear death but to love it. You are going to meet Your True Love. You do not realize what a great advantage you have over other people because you have the Faith.

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I think that sums up Joe W, by the way. He didn’t fear because life was good, and waiting on the other side of the veil, Real Life with God would be even better.

So that’s Blessed Fulton Sheen on intercession and the saints. What does St. Therese say about it?

She wrote in a letter to her spiritual brother Maurice Belliere shortly before she died:

“I have to tell you, we don’t understand Heaven in the same way. You think that, once I share in the justice and holiness of God, I won’t be able to excuse your faults as I did when I was on earth. Are you then forgetting that I shall also share in the infinite mercy of the Lord? I believe that the Blessed in Heaven have great compassion for our miseries. They remember that when they were weak and mortal like us, they committed the same faults themselves and went through the same struggles, and their fraternal tenderness becomes still greater than it ever was on earth. It’s on account of this that they never stop watching over us and praying for us.”

You can see she not only agrees with Blessed Fulton, but goes further, which is why she’s a Doctor of the Church! The saints take Jesus and the Church literally, and they live like they believe it! The Doctors have a special charism to show the truth to us in even more beautiful and extreme ways.

So Thérèse says that the Blessed in Heaven have great compassion for our miseries because they remember that when they were weak like we are, they committed the same faults we do, and they went through the same struggles we go through. This makes their tenderness for us still greater than it ever was on earth, so that they never stop watching over us – like angels – and praying for us.

This is why it’s a huge grace and miracle that Joe Weinkopf, not a canonized saint, not a blessed, not a venerable, not a servant of God, just plain old Joe who ditched us less than a year ago, lived among us. It’s a huge cross, especially for his family, and for his friends too, to have lost him on earth, but what a grace and miracle that some of us – or maybe I should say some of you – knew him. I’ll tell you about my relationship with Joe. It can be told fairly briefly, at least the part when we both lived in Santa Paula and spent time on campus.

The Christmas vacation before Joe entered eternal life, maybe a couple weeks before he went to Jesus and broke his family’s hearts, I saw them all after daily Mass at St. Sebastian’s, our parish in Santa Paula. And I was excited because I realized that for the first time, I could name all the Weinkopf kids and could even tell Joe apart from Kolbe his older brother just above him and Sebastian his younger brother just under him. That was the first and maybe only time I was even sure who Joe was, though I knew and loved his family.

Then he died, or rather entered eternal life, and I went to Mass on campus for him that day and I walked up the side aisle until I found a spot in the packed church. Some sweet students I knew scooched over and I sat in about the fourth pew from the front on the right. There was an empty space in the pew in front of me, and as I settled down and started praying, I noticed I was right behind the family. Joe’s parents weren’t there yet because they were with him, or rather with his body in his dorm room. And as I realized this, I was hot with shame that I had somehow wriggled my way up to an important place, but it was honestly just the first place I could find to sit, so I did what I do when people I know die.

Since I know from long experience that they haven’t died, they’ve just started really living, and since usually I didn’t have a chance to know them or talk to them as much as I wanted to when they were in exile beside me or perhaps across the country from me, once they die, I take advantage of the fact that everyone else is shocked, and I just start talking to them as soon as I can. I now have full access to this person everyone is thinking of as dead but who is not only alive, because as you know our souls are immortal and don’t die, but also able to hear me in a way that wasn’t necessarily possible a few hours before, even if we lived down the street from each other! You know, girls aren’t allowed in boys dorms, and even if I went into Serra’s saying “Girl in the dorm” sometime the night before or that morning, you can imagine this would jeopardize my husband’s job and people would know I was a nutcase, so that when Joe seemingly died, but was really just entering eternal life, suddenly I could talk to him.

And the first thing I wanted to say, probably the first thing I’d ever said to him besides, “Oh, and
you’re Joe!” that day at the parish, or on campus, “Okay, let’s see, I know you’re a Weinkopf,” and he would say kindly, “I’m Joe!” and I’d say, “Oh yeah, I’m so sorry, I knew that!” – the first thing I actually knowingly and intelligently said, or maybe the second, was, “Joe, you know now. You know everything. You know that I didn’t try to sit here behind where your family is!”

And then, soon, there were his beautiful parents, his mom whom I adore and his dad whom I admire, coming in the side door and then sitting, wrapped in shock and grief, right in front of me, and I said very quietly, maybe silently but my heart was yelling, “Joe! You’ve got to help me! I didn’t mean to sit right here, but now I’m right behind your parents. Help me know what you want to tell them. Help me know what you want them to know!” And he did.

Ever since then, I’ve been his very lame secretary. No one else offered, and I did, so sometimes he wakes me up in the middle of the night to write a note to his parents. Remember, I don’t hear his voice or anything, but I can imagine, and I get the idea and pass it along. My handwriting is terrible, and I can’t see very well without glasses, but my husband is a good sleeper, so I get up and find a light and some paper and take pretend dictation.

But when this started, the day we were all in church when Joe had just left, I asked him stuff for me too. I said, “Joe, you’re there! I’m offering a plenary indulgence for you now.” This is hugely important – plenary indulgences. You see, even though Thérèse knew that for those who love there is no purgatory, she still loved to pray for the deceased and gain all the indulgences she could for them and have Masses offered when she could. She didn’t take for granted the infinite love of God, and therefore of the Church, for souls, and she did take for granted that her prayers would be heard, and that God, and therefore the Church, keeps promises. So ask me about this, and in November maybe I can come again in a smaller way and talk about indulgences sometime. You can gain a plenary indulgence for a holy soul (or yourself, but how much better to gain one for a holy soul since they’re the ones who need them now) every single day, and it isn’t hard, and many of you are already doing what it takes without even knowing it. I have a few books on indulgences over on the table.

But back to Joe. I told him I’d offer a plenary indulgence for him, and then I asked for some very specific HUGE miracles. And I have kept asking. And although these aren’t Lourdes proof, which means they weren’t medical miracles of instantaneous cures, they’ve been even better. He has answered my prayers, and so I can tell you that he’s a great intercessor.

One prayer was for a friend who needed help badly and I’d been trying to help her for years. I asked Joe for something specific for her, and five days later he gave it to her and she started getting better. Then I prayed for a friend to become, against all odds, the principal of a huge Catholic high school in the D.C. area, and he got the job. And it went on like that. So I want to encourage you to ask Joe, as well as asking St. Thérèse, and though Fulton Sheen is very popular now in the midst of his new status as a Blessed, I recommend you ask Fulton Sheen too. Ask them all for miracles! Remember what Blessed Fulton Sheen just told us. He said he thinks we don’t get miracles from the intercession of the saints merely because we don’t ask for them! So let’s ask!

St. Thérèse followed her holy mother St. Teresa of Avila in saying that when we ask big things from God, we pay Him the compliment of recognizing and acknowledging His omnipotence and His infinite love for us. Let’s start treating God as if we believed in His love, and let’s get the saints and Joe to help us believe it more and more. When those who have entered eternal life answer our prayers, it helps our faith and our hope and our love, so let’s ask for a lot.

I wish I could talk longer, but my husband quotes the Russian Solzhenitzyn who says, “Self limitation is the key to happiness!” 

​We can end with my favorite easy prayer to St. Thérèse. It goes like this, Little Flower in this hour show your power.
Ready?
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Little Flower, in this hour, show your power!
God bless you!

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Draw me; we will run!!!