St. Therese Novena – text and mp3 download
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:31 — 3.2MB) | Embed
featuring Teresa Monaghen of Pro Sanctity
O great Saint Therese, through your devotion and prayer life, you lived an example of your love for God. Help me to grow closer to God, living in honesty with myself and with others. Teach me to grow in faith, believing that He will always hear my prayers. I pray that I may be strengthened by God’s love and renewed in my spiritual commitment.
O Saint Therese, help me to release my fears to you. Open my heart to God’s love and send a “shower of roses” to intercede for me in times of need. Bring my prayer requests before the Lord: (mention your needs here). With your loving care, reach out to all of God’s people who seek His unconditional forgiveness. Please fill us with patience and peace of mind, and guide us with your gentle hand.
Beloved Saint Therese, you showed us how to live in God’s example through your “little way.” Lead us to the light of God and the beauty of His Kingdom. Teach us how to see the good in everyone we meet and the beauty in ourselves. O Saint Therese, help me to remember that Our Lord waits for me at the end of this life. Keep me hopeful and longing for the day when I can meet you and all my departed loved ones in heaven.
O Saint Therese, you suffered silently the unbearable pain of your illness–please be with me and my loved ones during our times of suffering. Help me to understand God’s Will. Through my suffering, help me to better understand the trials others face. O Saint Therese, strengthen me emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Bring comfort to all who whisper your name in prayer and heal them with your loving way.
I pray to you, Saint Therese, to show me the way to the Lord. Lead me to live for His glory and honor. You gave your life and death to the Lord as a sacrifice for others’ salvation. Pray that I may become like you, and that He may welcome my acts of kindness toward others as a humble offering.
I pray to you, Saint Therese, to help me face each day with God in my heart and by my side. Show me how to see God in everything around me and to grow closer to Him in my triumph and failure, joy, and sorrow. Remind me that He is everywhere, and that He will be there to brighten even my darkest days. Let your devotion be a steady inspiration for me, and give me the strength and courage I need to follow the path to God.
Loving Saint Therese, pray for me that I may not stray from the Lord. Help me to face temptation with strength and resolve. Make your deep love for God an inspiration for me. Help me to grow closer to God and abandon myself to His Love, so that I may one day rejoice with you in heaven! Amen.
St. Therese…OK saints in the making…start your novena engines!!!! – Discerning Hearts
OK, everyone lets put the Little Flower to work (it brings her great joy, don’tcha know)! Today begins the novena to St. Therese of Lisieux. Her feast day is Oct. 1. She’s only merely huge… why she’s only slightly enormous…barely gigantic in all the little ways…she’s Our Little Flower. A Doctor of the Church, who’s little way leads to the greatest love.
Teresa of Elkhorn, (Teresa Monaghen of course) leads us in our
Novena to St. Therese.
St. Therese of Lisieux and the Little Way
VATICAN CITY, 6 APR 2011 (VIS) – In his general audience in St. Peter’s Square today, attended by more than 10,000 people, Benedict XVI dedicated his catechesis to St. Therese of Lisieux, or St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, “who lived in this world for only twenty-four years at the end of the nineteenth century, leading a very simple and hidden life, but who, after her death and the publication of her writings, became one of the best-known and loved saints”.
“Little Therese“, the Pope continued, “never failed to help the most simple souls, the little ones, the poor and the suffering who prayed to her, but also illuminated all the Church with her profound spiritual doctrine, to the point that the Venerable John Paul II, in 1997, granted her the title of Doctor of the Church … and described her as an ‘expert in scientia amoris’. Therese expressed this science, in which all the truth of the faith is revealed in love, in her autobiography ‘The Story of a Soul’, published a year after her death”.
Therese was born in 1873 in Alencon, France. She was the youngest of the nine children of Louis and Zelie Martin, and was beatified in 2008. Her mother died when she was four years old, and Therese later suffered from a serious nervous disorder from which she recovered in 1886 thanks to what she later described as “the smile of the Virgin”. In 1887 she made a pilgrimage to Rome with her father and sister, where she asked Leo XIII for permission to enter Carmel of Lisieux, at just fifteen years of age. Her wish was granted a year later; however, at the same time her father began to suffer from a serious mental illness, which led Therese to the contemplation of the Holy Face of Christ in his Passion. In 1890 she took her vows. 1896 marked the beginning of a period of great 
physical and spiritual suffering, which accompanied her until her death.
In those moments, “she lived the faith at its most heroic, as the light in the shadows that invade the soul” the Pope said. In this context of suffering, living the greatest love in the littlest things of daily life, the Saint realised her vocation of becoming the love at the heart of the Church”.
She died in the afternoon of 30 September, 1897, uttering the simple words, “My Lord, I love You!”. “These last words are the key to all her doctrine, to her interpretation of the Gospel”, the Pope emphasised. “The act of love, expressed in her final breath, was like the continued breathing of the soul … The words ‘Jesus, I love You’ are at the centre of all her writings”.
St. Therese is “one of the ‘little ones’ of the Gospel who allow themselves to be guided by God, in the depth of His mystery. A guide for all, especially for… theologians. With humility and faith, Therese continually entered the heart of the Scriptures which contain the Mystery of Christ. This reading of the Bible, enriched by the science of love, does not oppose academic science. The ‘science of the saints’, to which she refers on the final page of ‘The Story of a Soul’, is the highest form of science”.
Dear Saint Therese, Saint Micheal the arc angel and you are my patron saints.
My favorite prayer of yours is,” JESUS, help me to love you more and more everyday “.
No other prayer has ever struck me as this. One simple loving sentence.
Which honestly I pray for strength to pray at least 3 times a day. With all that is within me.
I love you so very dearly saint Therese! Thank you!
In His loving Service,
Gloria Marie Gaffney Clearwater