St. Louis Martin

Louis Martin was born on 22 August 1823 at Bordeaux, France, the son of an army officer, and grew up in Alençon in Normandy. As a young man he sought to enter the Augustinian canons of the hospice of the Great St. Bernard in the Alps, but was turned away for want of Latin; he trained instead as a watchmaker and opened his own shop in Alençon. In 1858 he married Zélie Guérin, a lacemaker of the town whom he had met on the bridge of Saint-Léonard over the Sarthe. The couple had nine children, four of whom died in infancy or early childhood; all five surviving daughters entered religious life, and the youngest was Thérèse, who would become St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Doctor of the Church.

After Zélie's death in 1877 he sold his interest in the business and moved the family to Lisieux to be near her relatives, and he supported each daughter's vocation in turn, accompanying Thérèse, then only fourteen, to Rome in 1887 so that she could ask Pope Leo XIII for permission to enter Carmel at the age of fifteen. From 1889 a series of strokes and cerebral arteriosclerosis left him confused and helpless, and he spent three years in the Bon Sauveur hospital at Caen, an illness of great humiliation that he bore as a share in the passion of Christ. He died at the château of La Musse, near Évreux, on 29 July 1894. Louis and Zélie were beatified together at Lisieux in 2008 and canonized by Pope Francis in Rome on 18 October 2015, during the Synod on the Family, the first married couple in the history of the Church to be canonized together. They are commemorated together on 12 July.