St Teresa Feast Day 2025
We celebrated St Teresa’s feast day as a parish on 5th October 2025 at a single mass at 11am followed by a shared meal featuring food from different nationalities, provided by parishoners, in the social centre.
Parishioners celebrated the feast day by taking home the traditional rose symbolising prayers
About St Teresa of the Child Jesus and the “Little Way”
Taken from “About Today” Oct 1st Universalis APP (www universalis.com)
Teresa was born in France in 1873 and the family moved to Lisieux after her mother died when she was aged 4years old. Teresa joined a Carmelite convent in Lisieux at the young age of 15 years but died of tuberculosis at the age of 24 on 30th Sept 1897. Another forgotten nun, you could easily say:”born, was good, died”. Holy no doubt; but nothing much to write home about.
Two years earlier, in 1895, the prioress had commanded Teresa to write her memoirs, which she duly did over 12 months and filled 6 exercise books. She presented them to the prioress, who put them in a drawer unread. A year after Teresa’s death, the memoirs were published. This was the first spark that ignited a “storm of glory” that swept the world. Conversions and miracles were soon reported. The beatification process opened 13 years after Teresa’s death and she was canonised in 1925. 100 years after her death, Pope John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church (joining St Catherine of Siena and St Teresa of Avila). “The Story of a Soul” is still in print.
So what makes St Teresa so special? We have grown used to the idea that just as there are people with talents for sport or scholarship, and the rest of us can only admire them without trying to keep up, so there are people with a talent for holiness and heroic virtue, and the rest of us can only bumble on as best as we can. We can’t do better because we’re not designed to do better, so there’s no point in trying. We sink into consoling mediocrity.
Teresa wrecks this. She was physically weak and psychologically vulnerable. St John of the Cross taught her that God can never inspire desires that cannot be fulfilled. The Book of Proverbs told her, “If anyone is a very little one, let them come to me”. St Teresa’s “Little Way” means taking God at his word and letting his love for us wash away our sins and imperfections. We can’t all go off and become missionaries; but we do have daily opportunities of grace. Some of them may be too small to see, but the more we love God, the more we will see them. If we can’t advance to Heaven in giant strides, we can do it in tiny little steps. Our weakness is no excuse for mediocrity, as St Teresa said ” What matters in life is not great deeds but great love”