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Maurice and Thérèse: The Story of a Love

by Bishop Patrick Ahern, Auxiliary Bishop of New York (Darton, Longman & Todd, £8.95)

Reviewed here by Fr. James McCaffrey O.C.D.

Originally written for "The Tablet" and reproduced here by kind permission

In 1973, The General Correspondence of St. Thérèse was published and with it 21 letters which passed between the saint and a missionary priest, Maurice Bellière, whom she never met. In this book, aptly subtitled The Story of a Love, Bishop Ahern sensitively explores the relationship between the two revealed in their correspondence. This is an utterly absorbing book. It is also a giant step forward in our search for the real Thérèse.

The letters themselves are the record of a beautiful human love between a man and a woman whose lives were totally given, in vowed celibacy, to God and others. Here we see Thérèse as she truly is, "the greatest saint of modern times", and not the popular caricature of her, perfumed and smothered with roses; or the stoic figure with laundry water splashed across her face. She is a real woman of flesh and blood, with a woman's tender heart and an enormous capacity for friendship. But these letters are also about a man who carries uneasily a great burden of guilt and with whom we can easily identify in his struggle with human weakness. Thérèse becomes his teacher, guide and soul-companion.

We read these letters like eavesdroppers on a confidential sharing between intimate friends. At first Maurice is uneasy in his approach to her. There are barriers to be overcome. But Thérèse is a shrewd observer of human nature. She never lectures him. Her stature and his trust in her grow with every shared confidence. Disclosure begets disclosure until the relationship matures and he is completely disarmed by her candour, simplicity and charm. At times, he teeters on the brink of despair, but she never despairs of him. In her replies, she constantly reassures him with an honest sharing of her own struggle and weakness. Her open declaration of love and friendship written already in her third letter to him touches him deeply: "I feel our souls are made to understand each other." In reply, he confides: "I feel the same myself", and later adds: "You will never know the good you do to me."

Her final letters are brimming with tenderness. They were written on her deathbed partly in pencil, with a trembling hand and only in starts. "The Spouse is at the door", she tells him. He is heart-broken, but resigned. Death has no power over such a friendship, she assures him: "No more cloisters, no more grilles. My soul will be free to fly with you to the missions."

But this book does not just provide the letters in full; it also sheds light on them within the general framework of Thérèse's own life, her other writings and her spiritual growth. There is scarcely an important event in her story which is not revisited and recorded by the author and then clarified by his perceptive comment. He has probed and understood her message well and discovered her real greatness. We marvel with him in his introduction at the stately array of diverse figures whose lives have been profoundly changed by this 'ordinary' woman. It is reassuring to find recorded here Karl Rahner's revised assessment of her greatness and the words of Thomas Merton: "I owe her a profound public apology."

Unobtrusively, Thérèse distils her whole spiritual message into these letters. The editor comments on it and clarifies it for us with adroit references to her teaching elsewhere. "Nothing but confidence can lead us to love" is a constant refrain. God is merciful love, all compassion and tenderness. Weakness is not an impediment to intimacy with God; it is a stepping-stone.

As the editor reflects on each letter in turn, he highlights repeatedly the originality of her teaching. We understand better now in what way she anticipates so remarkably the insights of the Second Vatican Council, why she is the most quoted woman saint in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and why she ranks today, officially, beside the other great Doctors of the Church.

The poetry of Thérèse makes a profound impact on Maurice. He shares with her his enthusiasm for one of her poems, To Live by Love. It was composed in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament exposed, and later written down from memory at a single stretch. It provided him with food for prayer and meditation, as Thérèse wished all her poems would.

So, too, these letters are a mosaic of Scripture texts, like the Rule of Carmel she so faithfully lived and loved. Here we meet someone who has "pondered day and night on the law of the Lord" as the same Rule enjoins, so much so in fact that she became and has herself been rightly called "a word of God".

All these letters, like so much of her best poetry, were written during her "night of nothingness". But her style is crystal clear and there is never even a hint of this darkness in what she writes.

The letters will also help us to reassess the character of Mother Gonzague. She has never enjoyed a favourable press. But without her approval of the correspondence, her encouragement and broad-mindedness, remarkable in a prioress of her day, this new window would never have opened for us on the mind and heart of Thérèse.

The editor fills in the final painful chapter in the life of Maurice, his subsequent success and failure on the missions in Africa, and his death in Caen with the Bon Sauveur Sisters, where Thérèse's own father also lived for three years, deranged in mind, like Maurice, and like him, broken in body. Today an epitaph in a quiet graveyard tells of Maurice's claim to greatness. It reads, simply 'Spiritual Brother and Protégè of St. Thérèse'.

This highly commendable book in an inspiring read.

James McCaffrey, O.D.C.

James McCaffrey is a Discalced Carmelite based in Boer's Hill, Oxford.

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