If your only Catholic association for the date of July 12 was hitherto the painful one of the Battle of the Boyne, a new and beautiful one can be added to it, for it is now the feast day of Ss Louis and Zélie Martin, the parents of Thérèse Martin, “The Little Flower”.
There are so many aspects to their lives worth pondering. We have more contemporary evidence for the life of this family than for many saints and so we have a responsibility to delve deeper. Too often we have a view of sainthood which is no more mature than the theory that storks bring babies, and similarly seeks to avoid the grittier parts of reality. The life of this saintly couple was marked by suffering of the kind which makes most of us recoil when it comes to being asked to practise heroic virtue. How they kept faith through this and stopped it hardening their hearts is what should cause us to love and imitate them.
