Marble and Jelly

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. Therese, 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. Therese 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. Therese, 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 Therese, the Carmelite nun, who died in 1897 and was canonized three years ago (TIME, May 25, 1925)

Sister Therese Martin was one of the nine children of a jeweler of Alenc,on, 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. Therese 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 Therese 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 Therese wrote; soldiers in the War died praying to her, saying her name.

It is not so very hard to see why the saintliness of Therese is a saintliness of present day appeal. There is a harbor of peace in her isolation from the loud materialism that generalizers condemn in the contemporary chaos, and it pleases an age of youth to worship a girl who died when she was 24. People still come crowding to be healed* at the doors of the convent at Lisieux, where now the Saint's sister is Mother Superior.

Statues of St. Therese are in thousands of Roman Catholic Churches even in many where the roster of the saints is no more than hinted at by half a dozen effigies. Last week in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Manhattan, Patrick Cardinal Hayes blessed a new altar for La Petite Fleur, St. Therese. The altar had been presented by Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas F. Brady; it was made of pure white Carrara marble. Above the altar was a marble statue of the little Saint. The altar is surrounded by a Florentine framework of marble chiseled as fine as lace. Five hundred people came to the consecration, which lasted for two hours and which was unusual in that the Cardinal blessed the entire altar instead of the altar stone alone.

-Last week, in Montreal, Alice Provost, 22, Marie Blanche Armande Nichol, 17 and Therese Morier, 17, claimed to have been cured suddenly on Jan. 28 of well-defined infirmities (discrepancy in the length of legs, paralyzed leg, stiff arm); when and because one Father Jacques Dugas subjected them to a laying-on of a reliquary which contained the bones of some recently beatified Jesuit martyrs. Physicians examined the girls, sent a certificate of their cure to Rome by a Jesuit Father and said: "You may thank God for such extraordinary benedictions!"