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Thérèse and Non-Violence Everything is Grace —The Life and Way of Thérèse of Lisieux by Joseph F. Schmidt is an excellent book. Joe is a Christian Brother, native Philadelphian, residing these past eighteen years in New Mexico at a retreat center. Never a devotee of Thérèse, Dorothy Day’s favorite, or of any Saint, for that matter, hearing Joe speak of Thérèse at the Mercy Retreat Center, Cranaleith, I was touched. Hearing the good news, as St. Paul suggests, is different from reading it. Brother Joe’s reflections were a revelation on the intimate connection between love and nonviolence permeating Thérese’s writing, an evident insight that had escaped me. The late 19th century church in France was permeated by Jansenism, even though its tenets had been condemned by the Pope. Human depravity profoundly entrenched in this spirituality fostered an image of a vindictive God whose Justice lacked the quality of Mercy —a Calvinistic bent that envisioned a predestined few worthy of the eternal kingdom of heaven. St John’s “God is Love” disappeared in a piety of expiation and reparation to placate a punishing God. That a young, cloistered, modestly-educated woman immersed in a Catholic culture of mind-numbing introspection could in her writings and witness turn this theology upside down is breathtaking. “Her image of God was the image of one who thirsted and begged for love.” (Schmidt) Thérèse: “To me He has granted His infinite Mercy, and through it to contemplate and adore other divine perfections. All of these perfections appear to be resplendent with love; even His Justice (and perhaps this even more so than the others) seem to me clothed in love.” The measure of this transformation, by Thérèse is a vivid remembrance for me of the Jansenistic influence in the 1950s in our seminaries, then passed on to the laity. Perhaps its influence is best recalled in the weekly confessions of our humanness, misplaced guilt, that could have been healed by trust in a loving God. The Sacrament has a benign, creative place in Catholicism, but the practice was twisted, not a celebration of Mercy. Thérèse immunized herself from the retreats of the clergy that fostered fear in her sister companions, and two young priests she mentored received an unending reminder that God loves all, even the most debased, repugnant sinner. Thérèse asked for a sign from God that this message was “Gospel” and prayed for her “first child,” Pranzini. Pranzini was convicted of murdering three family members and sentenced to the guillotine, an angry, defiant, unrepentant man. Standing before the guillotine, he took the crucifix from the priest’s hand and twice kissed the wounds of Christ before the blade fell. That was sign enough for Thérèse that God was with her quest to save all. Brother Joe’s sense of Thérése’s non-violent love begins with loving oneself (she liked herself) and accepting the gift of being loved. This faith enabled her to dismiss as a child “Limbo”, as unworthy of God, 100 years before the church caught up and quietly abandoned this unholy belief. The basic minimum of loving your neighbor is to be non-violent, verbally, physically, even rudeness is to be abhorred. Violence is when we aren’t about the flourishing of life in the other. She thirsted to be a martyr for love, language that may sound bizarre to us, but to this late convert, she is the real thing. As Brother Joe noted, the Bishops in affirming her a saint, and one of only thirty-three Doctors of the Church, (three women) didn’t realize how subversive a force she represents. As she said of herself, she was skipping Purgatory, already purged by love.
Joe Bradley
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