A Theresian Moment: French Catholics and the Spirituality of the Ordinary in the 1930s*

Abstract

The subject of this article is the lived religion of lay Catholics devoted to the woman described as one of the greatest saints of the modern era, Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, known as Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897). It draws on letters written to the Lisieux Carmel in Normandy at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938. Much scholarship on the laity in the interwar years concerns itself with renewal and militancy in the public sphere. By contrast, the body of evidence at hand provides insights into continuities in established forms of devotion and into the religious thinking of the kinds of believers about whom we know relatively little. I argue that Catholics influenced by Thérèse's teachings, notably the “Little Way” and her “Spirituality of the Ordinary,” modelled the saint's destabilisation of the active/contemplative (or public/private) dichotomy. The letters reveal the entanglement of the spiritual and the secular in the lives of ordinary Catholics and how, after Thérèse, they participated in the Christian animation of society beyond the home. In their writing we also see evidence of the correspondents' attachment to the universal Church when they felt, acutely, the uncertainties of the international situation.