The patroness of the National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica, known during her brief lifetime as St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, was a French Discalced Carmelite nun who became known later as the “Little Flower of Jesus” for her simplicity and child-like approach to faith.

Though she spent most of her life in a Carmelite cloister in Lisieux, France, and preferred to remain unknown, the great impact of her spiritual autobiography, “The Story of a Soul,” propelled her rapid rise in popularity after her death at the age of 24 of tuberculosis, so much so that Pope St. Pius X once called her “the greatest saint of modern times.”

Her “little way” has inspired millions, and she was canonized May 17, 1925, a year before Royal Oak Catholics would build the first shrine in the country dedicated to her memory. Pope St. John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church in 1997.

“I will seek out a means of getting to heaven by a little way — very short and very straight, a little way that is wholly new,” St. Thérèse wrote. “We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have lifts instead. Well, I mean to try and find a lift by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection. ... Thine Arms, then, O Jesus, are the lift which must raise me up even unto Heaven. To get there I need not grow; on the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less.”