On Palm Sunday, in Elizabeth, N. J., one Edward Fitzgerald, 22, was eating raspberry jelly for dessert and thinking holy thoughts. He was about to take a last delicious mouthful when he gave a cry and waved his spoon in the air. There, right in his dessert plate, was St. Thérèse, the Little Flower of Jesus. He had often seen her statue in churches. The image that now stared up out of his dish was precisely like these except that it was made out of fruit jelly and whipped cream. "Mother, come here!" cried Edward Fitzgerald. Mrs. Michael J. Fitzgerald, like her son, saw the saint in the jelly.
Awed by this humble example of transmogrification, Edward Fitzgerald quickly gave $25 to further the fund for building a shrine to St. Thérèse in San Antonio, Tex. In the meantime, gossip brought visitors to the Fitzgerald house, each visitor anxious to view the jellied saint. One of the visitors was the Rev. James A. Lundy, pastor of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, who urged that the image be given over into the keeping of ecclesiastical authorities—supposing, perhaps, that if the trembling statue had already held its shape for a period of 24 hours, it might, in holy surroundings, endure almost forever. The Fitzgeralds consented to this course, then they closed their house to the pilgrim crowds that lingered at their door.
It was absurd enough, no doubt, that any one should take seriously this religious revolt in the dessert; yet the incident has a value beyond the comic. Why did Edward Fitzgerald fancy that he saw the face of St. Thérèse, the Little Flower of Jesus, fashioned in his tidbit? Why not the face of St. Cecilia, St. Helen or the beautiful St. Priscilla? Saints, like dresses, have their fashions and their vogues; once it will be the stern St. Catherine, next the dashing Joan of Arc. Right now, the most popular Catholic saint is Soeur Thérèse, the Carmelite nun, who died in 1897 and was canonized three years ago (TIME, May 25, 1925)
Sister Thérèse Martin was one of the nine children of a jeweler of Alençon, a provincial town in Brittany. In 1889, at the age of 16, she entered the Carmelite Nunnery at Lisieux; eight years later she died of tuberculosis. That would have been all that was ever known of St. Thérèse had she not, at the request of her Mother Superior, written an autobiography, whose future publication she never imagined. In this, with bewildering and beautiful humility, Soeur Thérèse confided her desire not to leave the earth when she was dead but to stay, to help other people in the world who were unhappy and distressed. She thought that she "would spend her Heaven on earth doing good"; that she would "let fall a shower of roses." The simple beauty of her book, which is the beauty of herself, is beyond description; but in her "heaven on earth" fatal diseases were cured, as doctors testified before her canonization, and mortal sorrows healed. Millions of people have read the book that Soeur Thérèse wrote; soldiers in the War died praying to her, saying her name.