Zélie prayed that God would give her many children who could become consecrated to God. God blessed them with nine, four of whom died soon after they were divinely consecrated in baptism, while the other five discerned vocations to live out a more intimate form of consecration as religious sisters.
The most famous of their children is St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, who spoke effusively about how she had been blessed with “incomparable parents” and how God had given her “a mother and a father more worthy of heaven than of earth.”
When they were beatified in Lisieux in 2008, Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints emphasized in his homily: “Louis and Zélie understood that they could sanctify themselves not despite marriage but through, in and by marriage, and that their nuptials would be considered as the starting point for a mutual rise.”
He proposed them as models for engaged couples in purity of heart, for married couples in mutual love and honor, for parents as ministers of love and life, for educators in guiding the vocational choices of the young, for widows and widowers in approaching loss with faith, for the dying in peaceful surrender to God, and for every Catholic in living with a missionary spirit.
He said their being raised to the altars was an occasion for everyone to think of their own mom and dad and to thank God for them, not just for their cooperating with God in giving them life but also for their collaborating with God in leading them to him and to his Church.
I’ve always enjoyed celebrating 25th, 50th, and other major anniversaries liturgically in parishes and have always encouraged couples to give this witness to God’s fidelity and their own. It’s one of the best ways to inspire young people not to be afraid to make the commitment of marriage at a desacralized time when far fewer young men and women are willing to make such lifetime commitments to God and to each other.
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