St. Zélie Martin

Marie-Azélie Guérin, always called Zélie, was born on 23 December 1831 at Saint-Denis-sur-Sarthon in Normandy, France. Drawn as a young woman to the sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu at Alençon, she was told that she had no vocation to religious life, and turned instead to the making of Alençon point lace, at which she became highly skilled; from 1853 she ran her own workshop and business, employing and coordinating a network of lacemakers. In 1858 she married Louis Martin, a watchmaker of Alençon. She bore nine children in thirteen years and lost four of them in infancy or early childhood, a grief she carried with a faith recorded in her many surviving letters, which together form one of the fullest portraits we possess of an ordinary Catholic household of the nineteenth century.

Her business prospered under her direction while she raised the family and kept a home marked by daily Mass, generosity toward the poor and the sick, and open affection. She had noticed a tumor in her breast years before it was recognized, at the end of 1876, as beyond the reach of surgery. She made a pilgrimage to Lourdes in June 1877 with her three eldest daughters, seeking a cure that did not come, and died at Alençon on 28 August 1877, aged forty-five, when her youngest daughter Thérèse, the future St. Thérèse of Lisieux, was four years old. Zélie and Louis were beatified together at Lisieux in 2008 and canonized by Pope Francis on 18 October 2015, the first married couple in the history of the Church to be canonized together. They are widely invoked as patrons of Christian marriage and family life, and are commemorated together on 12 July.