St. Thérèse and the Church’s Criteria for “Doctor Ecclesiae”

by Fr. Robert I. Bradley, S.J.

Published in 1992, this article originally appeared in St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Doctor of the Church?, edited by James Likoudis, and is reprinted below. St. Thérèse of Lisieux was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II five years later in 1997.

Some 20 years ago, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI proclaimed as Doctor of the Church two saints, both long since canonized, widely venerated, and deeply loved: St. Catherine of Siena and St. Teresa of Avila. It was the first time that women had been so named. There were now, on what is perhaps the most exclusive roll call in the Church, thirty-two names: two popes, eighteen bishops, nine priests, one deacon, and two women religious.

This last addition to the list of Doctors constituted a precedent—the last of a series of precedents—which has undoubtedly accelerated a movement to add yet another name to the roster. In the opinion of many of the faithful (an opinion in which I enthusiastically concur), the next nominees for this singular honor should be St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, the beloved “petite Thérèse of Lisieux.”

The following brief essay offers some reflections on this timely topic. We will address in succession the two points made in this introduction: 1) the title “Doctor of the Church”: its provenance and its precedents; and 2) St. Thérèse of Lisieuix: her qualifications and her prospects.

A New Doctor of the Church
In its 700-year history the title “Doctor of the Church” has undergone a significant development. Certain changes in its application have occurred which constituted a series of precedents, the relevance of which to our present topic is obvious.

It all began in 1295 when Boniface VIII decided to single out from among the scores of “Fathers of the Church” the names of just four men, whom the Church would henceforth honor as her “Doctors,” i.e., her teachers par excellence: St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory the Great.

Implied in this new title of “Doctor” at the end of the thirteenth century were the criteria by which the Church had, for nearly a thousand years, acknowledged her “Fathers.” A “Father of the Church” was any “ecclesiastical man” (not necessarily, but usually, a bishop), renowned for his orthodoxy and sanctity—and his antiquity. He was also (not necessarily, but usually, by virtue of his office) a teacher of the faith. There has never been any official list of “Fathers of the Church”; nor has there been any official cut-off point for determining their “antiquity.” (St. Bernard in the twelfth century has often been called “the last of the Fathers,” but most Patristic scholars consider St. Bede in the West and St. John Damascene in the East, both in the eighth century, as closing the Patristic age.)

The three criteria for a “Father of the Church”—viz., orthodoxy, sanctity, and antiquity—thus presupposed some contemporary prominence and some subsequent recognition. But neither the prominence nor the recognition were defined. And so the “Fathers” receded into the Church’s past, and assumed something of the Biblical aura of the Patriarchs. Although neither liturgical nor canonical, the title of “Father” reminds us of their irreplaceable and non-repeatable position as the privileged witnesses of the Tradition, whose corporate authority is forever normative of our knowledge and practice of the faith.

What Boniface VIII did in 1295 by his introduction of “Doctor of the Church” as a new formal title was not to replace or repeal the “Fathers,” but rather to intensify them. By singling out four men—one pope, two bishops, and one priest—as “Doctors,” he was in effect saying to the faithful: “You need not invoke the entire Patristic roster to teach you the faith; settle for these four saints as your teachers and you will have more than enough! What you may have lost in range you have more than made up in depth.”

Yet, definitive as was this official action of the Holy See in thus narrowing the Church’s contact with her “Fathers,” its eventual effect would be a broadening of her contact, not only with the distant Patristic past but with every age since then in her great ongoing life.

This eventual effect was made possible by the decision of St. Pius V in 1568 to add to the number of the Church’s “Doctors.” It was a two-fold decision, and in both respects it set a precedent which more than matched in importance the original precedent of Boniface VIII. First, the saintly pope decided to extend to the Greeks the same honor already given to the Latins. Four of the Greek Fathers were now proclaimed “Doctors of the Church”: St. Athanasius, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. John Chrysostom. Secondly (and even more significantly), he conferred the title for the first time on one who was not a Father of the Church, viz., St. Thomas Aquinas. This was an epochal decision, for it now open-ended the perimeters of the “Doctorate” in space and time. A “Doctor of the Church” need no longer be a writer of Latin or Greek, nor even a “Father.” The Church thus saw her Catholicity symbolically vindicated, and by a pope who was perhaps the greatest leader in the Counter-Reformation—that movement of embattled reform which supposedly narrowed the Roman Church to the dimensions of a sect!

The precedent set by St. Pius V was confirmed 20 years later by Sixtus V when he added one more name to the roster of Doctors: St. Bonventure, the exact contemporary of St. Thomas and ranking with him as the greatest of the Schoolmen. The list now had 10 names: eight Fathers and two Scholastics, or six Latins and four Greeks. For over a century, the list remained untouched. But then, in the early eighteenth century, with Clement XI’s nomination of St. Anselm, a steady flow of 20 new names began, until, with John XXIII’s nomination of St. Lawrence of Brindisi in 1959, the total number reached 30. Of the 20 new Doctors, nine were Fathers, five were from the Middle Ages, and five were “moderns”—saints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was only one additional saint who could be said to have been a “contemporary”: St. Alphonsus Ligouri, made a Doctor of the Church by Pius IX in 1871, only 84 years after his death. This last name precedent dramatically broadened the previous precedents and hastened the fulfillment of their potential. And, appropriately, it was Pius IX, the pope maligned for his anti-modernist “negativism,” who thus opened the door.

This brings us to the most recent precedent of all—the one mentioned at the beginning of this essay. In 1970, Paul VI added two more names—both women. With St. Catherine and St. Teresa on the list of Doctors, we finally have a clarification which until then was only implicit. To be a “Doctor of the Church,” one does not have to be in sacred orders. Even less, as we have already seen, one does not have to be a “Father.” Although the title of “Father” was understood in the ancient Church (as in the Scriptures) as referring primarily to the prophetic, not the priestly, office, any possible ambiguity remaining in the title “Father” is absent from the title “Doctor.” Saving only the prerogative of ultimate and definitive judgment regarding the teaching charism (as with any other charism) which must reside with the sacred hierarchy (and especially with its Roman head), anyone of the faithful can be endowed by the Holy Spirit—who breathes where He wills—with the gifts of prophecy or teaching.

As the precedent of 1871 justifies the naming of a contemporary, so the precedent of 1970 justifies the naming of a woman. Now, 95 years after her death and 67 years after her canonization, we have a contemporary and a woman whose outstanding charism as a prophetic teacher surely justifies her nomination as Doctor of the Church: St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux
In the second half of this essay, let us briefly review the claims we can make for the recognition of St. Thérèse’s “doctorate.” The claims can be summarized under these two headings: 1) the external evidence regarding her person; and 2) the internal evidence regarding her work.

There is a combination of incidents in her life that suggest that Thérèse Martin had, throughout her short life, a perception of herself as a thinker and a teacher, and that this perception was held by many others. Perhaps the best early episode illustrating this incipient charism occurred in the spring of 1883, preceding her First Holy Communion. Asked by her teacher how she spent her school holidays, she answered that she just liked to “think.” Her thinking may not have been matched as yet by her ability to communicate her thoughts, but she tells of her having been called a “little doctor” as head of her class.

Her childhood questions and answers prefigured the wisdom and grace of her years in Carmel when, shortly after her profession, she was appointed to help with the spiritual formation of the novices. This task, along with her correspondence, provided her the opportunity to articulate her “doctrine.” This opportunity culminated in the three autobiographical manuscripts, in which—from January 1895 to July 1897—Sr. Thérèse of the Child Jesus left for her sisters in Carmel, and eventually for the Universal Church and all mankind, the “story of (her) soul.”

What had begun as a simple collection of childhood reminiscences expanded into more formalized reflections on her vocation as one called to love God in total self-surrender. But nowhere did she essay a systematization of her doctrine, in the sense of a technical treatise in spiritual theology. Not that she did not appreciate the role of formal teaching in the Church; in fact, one of her insatiable desires was “to enlighten men’s minds as the prophets and doctors did. “Rather, reflecting on how little the reading of books had affected her—apart from the Sacred Scriptures (and the Imitation of Christ), she saw her writing as she saw all her deeds: as the merest nothings. But then, so also had thought the great Angel of the Schools, Thomas Aquinas, referring as he did to his writings as but straw. Indeed, all the Doctors of the Church must in effect have said the same, precisely because they were such Doctors. So, our little 24-year-old Carmelite nun was by the very fact of her “empty hands” all the more qualified to be found among the Doctors, “listening to them and asking them questions.”

From this tiny tableau of her “career” as thinker and teacher, we can savor the truth of the Church’s judgment regarding her person: Sr. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face is a saint—indeed, (as was said of her by Pope Pius X, who was himself a saint and therefore well qualified to speak, years before her canonization!) “the greatest saint of our times.” She was canonized 28 years after her death (she would then have been 52 years old)—something of a record in modern times. But, as far as I know, there is no indication in her canonical process of her having been considered for the “doctorate.” It may well be that at the time it was still simply assumed that a woman saint was ineligible for the title. Hence the need now to go beyond the external evidence regarding her person to the internal evidence regarding her work.

To summarize her work—that which she “did and taught”—has been essayed by many commentators, but none can match for succinctness and power the summary which she herself made. In the second of her autobiographical manuscripts, written a year before she died, she tells Jesus (for she turns to Him directly in what she is writing as a letter to her sister Marie) that “love is everything!”, that “to be love in the heart of her Mother, the Church” is her vocation, as it is the vocation of everyone who is “little.” To be “little” is to know and live the truth: the truth of our creaturehood, of our sinfulness, of our being the object of God’s infinitely merciful love. We have but to abandon ourselves to that Love which is Himself. This is her “little way.” It is not some optional way, one more available alterative in the exhaustless storehouse of the Church. Rather, it is the way—the “more excellent way”—of the Gospel.

As an added confirmation of its truth, Sr. Thérèse reminds Jesus (and us) that there could be no more appropriate instrument of its teaching than herself. If indeed He, the one Teacher, could find one littler, more wholly abandoned to His mercy, than herself, then that person and not she would be His chosen instrument. In this respect she stands practically unique among the Doctors. The only saint with whom we can compare her is St. Paul who glories in his infirmities, and who enjoins us to imitate him as he imitates Christ. St. Paul, “Doctor of the Nations,” is not listed among the “Doctors of the Church”; he anticipates them. In some comparable and complementary way, St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus summarizes them.

Indeed, “little Thérèse” verifies the “Omen Novum” inscribed on the book carried by her statued image at the entrance of her great basilica in Lisieux. What more fitting “Doctor” could we have had to guide the Church and the world through the course of this twentieth century? There were other “doctors” in her lifetime—Pope Leo XIII and Cardinal Newman, to name but two. But is there anyone who knew better what this century was really like, and what the prospect of the new century and millennium really holds for the Church and the world, than she? Who can be a better “doctor” than one who was wounded, wholly belittled, made to see nothing but the naked truth?

Such, then, was and is St. Thérèse of Lisieux. As widely venerated and as deeply loved as St. Catherine of Siena and St. Teresa, as indeed all the great thinkers and teachers preceding her in the Church, she remains always where Jesus put her: in the very heart of the Church, her Mother. There she is, in deed and in truth, “Doctor of the Church.” May this truth, in God’s good time, be so declared.

Father Robert I. Bradley, S.J. is an esteemed member of CUF’s advisory council and was CUF’s spiritual advisor for 30 years. A close friend of CUF founder H. Lyman Stebbins and his wife, Madeline, Fr. Bradley has supported CUF since its founding in 1968. He is beloved by multiple generations of CUF members. Fr. Bradley has written numerous articles for Lay Witness magazine, including "The Components of Catechesis and the Senses of Scripture" (Nov./Dec. 2005). He writes from Austin, TX.

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