participants in an enormous pilgrimage to Chartres to pray for the nation. He had to sleep in an underground chapel where Masses were being said all night. He went back there again in 1873 and wrote to Pauline, “Pray hard, little one, for the success of the pilgrimage to Chartres that I want to be part of; it will bring numerous pilgrims in our beautiful France to the feet of the Blessed Virgin so that we may obtain the graces that our country needs so much in order to be worthy of its past.”37 There is no doubt that he would have resonated with St. John Paul II’s famous question, “France, eldest daughter of the Church, what have you done with your baptism?”38
Louis and Zélie were Catholics of their time for whom faith and patriotism were intertwined, living in fear of the anticlerical left and at the same time holding a firm conviction that the Lord was sustaining their country. The anticlericalism was a reality, though we have only a dim idea of it today. Louis, when he returned from a pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1873, was mocked in the train station in Lisieux because he was wearing a little red cross, and he was almost taken to the police station under the pretext that the mayor had forbidden pilgrims from coming back in procession. The disputes between Catholics and anticlerical groups increased during their lives, but in dealing with them the Martins always affirmed their faith in a nonviolent way.
10 CF 192.
11 Ibid.
12 CF 13.
13 CF 192.
14 CF 1.
15 CF 108.
16 CF 2.
17 CF 46.
18 CF 208.
19 CF 10.
20 CF 19.
21 CF 192.
22 CF 65.
23 CF 201.
24 CF 202.
25 CF 12.
26 CF 17.
27 CF 138.
28 CF 19.
29 CF 138.
30 CF 68.
31 CF 54.
32 A seventeenth-century French writer famous for her witty letters to her daughter.
33 CF 75.
34 A general-interest Catholic newspaper in France whose name means “The Cross.”
35 CF 80.
36 CF 120.
37 CF 102-a.
38 Pope John Paul II, on his first pastoral visit to France as pope in 1980.
Chapter 3
God First
A reader might be surprised at focusing on the Martins’ faith before looking at their family life and work. In so doing, however, we’re following in the “spirit” of the Martins which can be summarized in two words: “God first.”39 It’s impossible to understand the other aspects of their lives without reference to the source that guided them in all things.
The goal of Louis and Zélie, the dream of their youth and what they pursued all their lives, was holiness. “I want to be a saint,”40 Zélie affirmed, while Louis confided to his daughters, “Yes, I have a goal, and it is to love God with all my heart.”41 What did people mean by holiness at that time? The best way to achieve it was to be consecrated, or do miracles, or die a martyr, or even all three together. It would take the coming of the Martins’ daughter and the Second Vatican Council to remind us that holiness is accessible to everyone and required of everyone. This is still not completely clear in people’s minds today.
Louis and Zélie demonstrate that holiness is possible through the simple life of spouses. If in the fervor of youth they initially turned to the ideal represented by the consecrated life, they learned little by little from the Lord that holiness doesn’t reside in one’s state in life but in a trusting and loving response to God’s call in daily life. In ordinary life, where joys and crosses alternate, they gave themselves fully to God and to their neighbor, abandoning themselves to his will in all things. They achieved a holiness that was far from the more or less spectacular examples that were being presented in the hagiography of their day. Theirs was a holiness anchored in the real and the ordinary, which the Church is highlighting today.
The Martins’ desire for holiness wasn’t capricious. They took all the means available to reach it, especially all the preferred means of sanctification accessible to all Catholics: the sacraments, prayer, and parish life.
The Eucharist was, first of all, the center of their lives and the first activity of each day. At that time receiving the Eucharist at Mass was not a given. To receive Communion in the state of grace certainly implied regular confession and faithfulness to God’s commandments, but a concern to
