One hundred years after the canonization of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, her “story of a soul” is coming to southeastern Wisconsin in powerful form during the Jubilee Year of Hope.
Pilgrims can venerate and honor her relics, including some of her bones, at the Basilica and National Shrine of Mary Help of Christians at Holy Hill in Hubertus from Nov. 15-18.
The visit comes as part of a national tour making 40 stops in 11 states, including just one other in the Midwest, from October to early December.
St. Thérèse’s relics last came to the United States in 1999 and 2000, when more than 1 million people experienced them.
“It’s a significant portion of her remains that they have put into this very special, beautiful reliquary. And then they take it all over the world,” said Fr. Michael-Joseph Paris, O.C.D., the postulant director of Holy Hill and coordinator for the relics visit there.
The Holy Hill visit offers pilgrims the chance to venerate her relics, visible links to a saint and the grace that directly moved through her life and still moves through her example. Catholics have often honored relics in a way that doesn’t worship the saint — worship belongs to God alone — but to honor the saint and all that God has done through them.
“Americans, we’re not used to seeing death. Things like relics too, even bones, for other Catholic cultures, it’s not so striking. For us, we don’t have that same exposure, so I think it does take a little bit for, for Catholics in the United States to get comfortable with relics; but it’s so part of our incarnational faith, you know, that God became man and that he uses the things of human nature to impart his grace,” Fr. Paris said.
“The saints especially are like his most beloved masterworks of grace and goodness. Their relics signify a kind of personal presence in a unique way. God’s continuing to work through them to do great things through that.”
Tour organizers say that the opportunity to venerate her relics those years led to miracles, conversions and calls to the priesthood and religious life.
“There were many stories of people who had really extraordinary graces that came through these relics,” Fr. Paris said. “The way that Thérèse encounters people so strongly, (is) compounded with Holy Hill, which is such a healing place, such a place of Our Lady’s presence.”
Born in January 1873 in Alençon, France, St. Thérèse at age 4 endured the loss of her mother along with suffering from her own numerous ailments that led to a fragile childhood.
She entered the Carmelite order when both her father and church leaders allowed her to join at an unusually young age of 15 years old.
Taking the name “Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face,” she focused her life on small humble, loving actions, all as ways of overcoming obstacles like the ones she physically faced — including tuberculosis.
She spent her short life of 24 years offering her pain to God, writing often about the need to trust in the Lord despite her challenges, even using her pain to draw closer to God. Those writings became a major part of her autobiography, “Story of a Soul.”
“People who live in difficult situations, they feel drawn to Thérèse. There’s a certain sense that she was so in touch with her own weakness, so for those of us who know our weaknesses or experience our weakness on certain levels, there’s this connaturality with St. Thérèse,” Fr. Paris said.
“We feel like she understands us and that we can still find this amazing path to God regardless of our own shortcomings and limitations. I think she’s so meaningful because she is someone who really struggled, who went through a lot, who had her own wounds from her childhood. It’s not like they just went away, but she was able through the grace of God to overcome in a sense where they didn’t control her anymore, didn’t define who she was, and they didn’t control her life.”
Thérèse died in September 1897. Twenty-eight years later, Pope Pius XI canonized her. She was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997 and is only one of four women saints to receive this honor among the 37 saints with this title.
Her relics remind pilgrims of the grace God has brought the world through the story of St. Thérèse, the universal call to simply love one another that was the hallmark of her short but incredibly inspiring life.
“The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live happily because of the knowledge of His love,” she wrote. “Each small effort of love creates in heaven a permanent flower, more beautiful and more precious than all the stars.”
For details on related local events and services, go to https://stthereseusa2025.com/schedule-of-events
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, also known as the Little Flower, died in 1897 at age 24. Her relics will visit Holy Hill on Nov. 15-18 for veneration.
