Vatican City – Ten years after the canonization of Louis and Zélie Martin — the parents of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus — Pope Leo XIV has sent a Message to the Bishop of Séez, Monsignor Bruno Feillet, on the occasion of the celebrations taking place in Alençon, in the very diocese where the couple lived and sanctified themselves through their married life.
The Pope describes the anniversary as “an occasion to make better known the life and merits of these incomparable spouses and parents,” so that “families, so dear to the Heart of God yet often fragile and tried, may find in them the support and grace necessary to continue their journey.”
Echoing the words of Cardinal Martins at the Martins’ beatification, the Pontiff emphasizes that Louis and Zélie “did not become saints in spite of marriage, but through, within, and by means of marriage.” This is the keystone of Leo’s message: holiness lived in ordinariness, within the daily fabric of faithful and fruitful love.
“In these troubled and disoriented times…”
The most striking passage of the text also reflects Pope Leo XIV’s doctrinal line on marriage and the family. The Pope writes: “In these troubled and disoriented times, when so many counter-models of ephemeral, individualistic, and selfish unions, bearing bitter and disappointing fruits, are proposed to the young, the family — as the Creator willed it — may seem outdated or dull. Louis and Zélie Martin prove the contrary: they were happy, profoundly happy, by giving life, radiating and transmitting the faith, watching their daughters grow and flourish under the Lord’s gaze.”
Behind this lucid and direct statement lies a precise theological vision: marriage, according to the will of the Creator, is the stable union between a man and a woman, founded on faithful love and open to life. All other forms of relationships — which the Pope defines as “counter-models of ephemeral, individualistic, and selfish unions” — do not lead to the fullness of the person, but produce, as he writes, “bitter and disappointing fruits.”
Leo XIV warns against conceiving freedom as self-sufficiency and love as emotional consumption. The family, instead, remains the place of covenant, of transmission of faith, of education and mutual growth. “Louis and Zélie — the Pope recalls — were happy in giving life,” that is, by going beyond themselves, living love as total gift, not as possession or fleeting experimentation.
Holiness in the everyday
In his message, Leo XIV portrays the Martins as an icon of “ordinary holiness,” what Pope Francis once called “the saints next door.” Yet, while implicitly citing that category, Leo XIV fills it with doctrinal substance: ordinariness, for the Martins, was inhabited by the extraordinary presence of God. “God first served” — their family motto — becomes the guiding principle of every choice, even in economic and social matters.
The Pontiff describes their home as a small domestic church: “What joy to gather on Sunday, after Mass, around the table where Jesus is the first guest.” Thus, faith is not a private feeling, but a concrete form of community life, expressed in work, ecclesial commitment, and solidarity.
The Martins’ lesson for today
Dear spouses,” writes Leo XIV, “I invite you to persevere courageously in the path — sometimes difficult but luminous — that you have undertaken. Place Jesus at the center of your families.” It is a call to spiritual perseverance in an age that tends to dissolve bonds and relativize belonging. Louis and Zélie Martin thus become a living response to contemporary disorientation: proof that happiness lies not in individualism, but in faithfulness to a vocation that gives itself and opens to life.
In an era that celebrates the ephemeral, Leo XIV points instead to a stable joy, rooted in gift and grace. The conclusion of the Message binds everything into a single image: “How could Thérèse have loved Jesus and Mary so deeply if she had not learned it from her holy parents from her earliest childhood?”
In that question lies the synthesis of the Pope’s entire magisterium on the family: holiness is inherited only where love is lived to the fullest.
p.M.C.
Silere non possum