It was in the mid-1980s during yet another winter of disbelief. A popular colleague was losing her mother to cancer. Slowly, and with that merciless inevitability which is its style, it sipped at her mother's existence as though it were a cocktail. Her only comfort through this casual savagery was St Therese of Lisieux. She prayed to the saint constantly.
So did Cathy, our colleague and her mother's only child. Cathy told us there was a belief that when a devotee died, St Therese would shower the room with the smell of roses. This, she said, was a way of letting the bereaved know the death had been a happy one. Cathy's mother wanted this, for Cathy. We, her sceptical colleagues, heard the story as an illustration of Cathy's desperation and that of a still-young woman, grieving for the grief of her child.
Cathy's mother died. We gathered after the burial at their home. We were standing around talking when I got the distinct smell of roses. I dismissed it as imagination, but it persisted. I went searching, but could find no roses anywhere in the room or outside. I was astounded and somewhat embarrassed. Any previous experience I had which might even be remotely described as "paranormal" would have been associated with drink or a mix of that heady trinity of "sex and drugs and rock 'n roll". But there I was, sober as most judges, and suddenly everything was coming up roses.
My impulse was to stay silent. The last thing I wanted was to be lumped in with the growing moving statues brigade, then burgeoning all over the country. But I couldn't keep it to myself.
I gestured to another colleague, a doughty Londonderry (as she insisted on calling it) Presbyterian, who was particularly close to Cathy. She was also a no-nonsense, down-to-earth, common-sense woman. "Sheila . . .," I beckoned. I knew immediately by the recognition in her eyes that she smelled the roses too. "Do you smell them . . .?" I asked. She just nodded and began to cry. "I must get Cathy," she said and left the room.
What was most surprising was that Cathy did not seem surprised at all. She just wept calmly, assured her mother was at peace.
I have wondered many times since about that experience. Whether it was inspired by some deep, sub-conscious suggestion/need to console a distraught colleague. I don't know. I have never been able to explain it, and I learned long ago to live comfortably with the inexplicable. But neither do I doubt what my senses told me that day. I smelled roses there in Dublin 4, where there were no roses, and so did others as sceptical as myself. It did happen, even if it did not dispel that winter of disbelief.
Tomorrow week, on Easter Sunday, the remains of St Therese of Lisieux will begin a 75-day tour of the island of Ireland, following similar visits all over the globe. Between April 15th and June 28th the remains will be brought to all 26 Catholic cathedrals and every Carmelite institution on the island, to Mountjoy Prison, the Army camp at the Curragh, Knock shrine, and to Lough Derg. The ghoulish parade of saints' bodies and body parts by the Catholic church is something many, both within and without the Church, find disturbing, whether it be events such as the procession of St Oliver Plunkett's head through the streets of Drogheda every year or, now, the grand tour of what's left of St Therese throughout the length and breadth Ireland.
To many, the practice seems medieval, primitive, belonging more to a Silence of the Lambs-type script, the graveyard scene in Hamlet or Michael Jackson's Thriller video than, for instance, in the Cathedral of the Annunciation, Ballaghaderreen (on June 6th).
But, as Father Joe Ryan said, "it comes down to faith. We [believers] see beyond [the bones]". People of faith don't see the bones, so much as the things they are emblems of (see panel). Some expect the Therese visit to be the biggest Catholic event in Ireland since Pope John Paul visited in 1979. That is what prompted the slogans of a recent teaser outdoor poster campaign. "She will attract more people than U2 at Slane" or "Soon you'll get to meet one of the real All Saints".
The Relics of St Therese's arrive here at the invitation of the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference; in February, 1999, they issued the invitation to the authorities in Lisieux through the Catholic Primate Archbishop, Sean Brady.
A committee to organise the visit was set up with Bishop Brendan Comiskey as chairman. He and Cardinal Cahal Daly, separately and together, have led the annual Irish pilgrimages to Lisieux in recent years.
The Carmelite priest, Father Joe Ryan, was appointed national co-ordinator and most work has been voluntary, with subscriptions paying remaining costs.
The reliquary containing the remains will be taken on the tour of Ireland in a privately-sponsored "Theresemobile". They will be met at Rosslare at 10.30 a.m. on Easter Sunday by an Irish Army ceremonial unit (illustrating the State's involvement) which will transfer the 400-lb reliquary ashore from the Irish Ferries vessel, the MV Normandy. The relics return to Lisieux "courtesy of Irish Ferries" before departing for Lebanon by air.
Not much - just bones - is left of Therese since she died (of TB) in 1897. She has been exhumed three times, once as part of the canonisation process - to verify the remains' existence - and later to allow for greater public access. However, her habit had not completely disintegrated at the first exhumation, while a palm buried with her was intact.
At the second exhumation a habit, placed over her after the first exhumation, was found to have decayed also, but a white silk ribbon on it was intact, bearing Therese's words: "I intend to spend my Heaven doing good on Earth. After my death, I shall make a shower of roses rain down."
Recent visits by Therese's remains to the US, South America, and Russia took many by surprise. "The saint who stopped the traffic on 5th Avenue" was a headline in the London Independent over an article on last year's visit to the US. After the Brazil visit, the bishops there issued a statement expressing astonishment at the crowds which had turned out. When the remains were brought to Russia in 1999, they were carried through Moscow by the Kremlin Guard, past the old KGB building to the Church of the Immaculate Conception.
Therese's military connections were strong. Both her grandfathers were in the French army. Her cult received a terrific boost during the first World War when it is said hundreds of thousands of young soldiers on all sides went to their graves carrying her badge. She became known as "The Angel of the Trenches". It continued in the second World War. As poet John F Deane has written: They drew strength from her in Auschwitz /they made her protectress-saint in Russia.
The same poet also wrote:
I had thought of her as an insipid saint
standing demurely within her coign of dimness;
they had fenced her round with a dissonance of candles,
. . . But I have come to see
how she was an island of pain, how God enjoyed
whittling and refashioning her so he could tell
how we are breakable and mortal, how
suffering is a grace and pain a lived pearl.
