The Way to Celebrate A Wedding Anniversary

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - July 11, 2008

Back in 1994, as he was preparing the Church to put out into the deep for the third Christian millennium, Pope John Paul II wrote that "there is a need to foster the recognition of the heroic virtues of men and women who have lived their Christian vocation in marriage. Precisely because we are convinced of the abundant fruits of holiness in the married state, we need to find the most appropriate means for discerning them and proposing them to the whole church as a model and encouragement for other Christian spouses."

Eight days ago, his successor on the chair of St. Peter, proposed just such a saintly couple to the whole Church, when he certified a miraculous healing through the intercession of Louis and Marie-Zélie Martin and cleared the path toward their joint beatification sometime in the next year.

The news auspiciously coincides with the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the marriage, which took place July 13, 1858 at Notre Dame Church in Alençon, France. This weekend, thousands of couples and faithful will celebrate that anniversary in Lisieux, on the grounds of the beautiful basilica built in honor of their ninth and last child, St. Thérèse de L'Enfant Jesus et de la Sainte Face, popularly known as the Little Flower. The multitudes were coming, initially, to pray for their beatification. Now they are coming to celebrate its imminent occurrence.

The crowds will gather around the graves of Monsieur and Madame Martin, which are located in a garden behind the apse of the basilica. Near their headstones is a statue of St. Thérèse, with an inscription from her famous autobiography, Story of a Soul: "The good God gave me a father and a mother who were more worthy of heaven than of earth."

God gave dramatic confirmation of that assessment by the miracle he worked through their intercession.

It involved the healing of a young boy, Pietro Schiliro, of Monza, Italy. In 2002 Pietro was born with a fatal malformation in his lungs. A Carmelite priest encouraged his parents to pray a novena through the intercession of the parents of the famous Carmelite nun of Lisieux, to receive the strength to endure their parental sufferings. He informed them that Louis and Zélie had lost four of their nine children as infants and for that reason could be counted on as powerful models and compassionate intercessors. Pietro's mother, however, decided to make the novena begging les Martins to intercede for her son's cure. They did not let her down. Soon after the novena, Pietro miraculously regained his health and six years later is still doing fine. His parents in fact brought him to Lisieux so that he might thank them himself at their graves.

The marriage of Louis and Zélie is not a hagiographical Romeo and Juliet. It begins not with erotic love but with the agapic love of God, which ordered their romantic love and gave it far greater beauty.

At the time of their marriage, 150 years ago, Louis was a 35 year-old watchmaker. At the age of 22, he had sought to become a monk at the famous Grand Saint Bernard Monastery in the French Alps. He was initially accepted, but when they discovered that he knew no Latin, he was sent home to study the humanities privately. He assiduously began, but a succession of illnesses forced him to give up his studies. After some travels, he returned to Alençon, where he earned a good living as a watchmaker and sought to please the Lord of time and eternity.

His mother, however, was not satisfied with his being a bachelor, no matter how pious. One day in 1858 a 26-year-old lace-maker, Zélie Guérin, came to her notice as someone who would make an excellent wife for her son. She began to work with various celestial matchmakers to try to bring them together.

Like Louis, Zélie was a very pious young woman who had sought religious life. After years of suffering from migraines and receiving scant consolation from her mother, she tried to follow her older sister Marie, a Visitation sister, into religious life, expecting to find there understanding and support than she received at home. She was drawn by the work of the Daughters of Charity and applied for entrance. The superior informed her, however, that she did not have a vocation to the religious life. Zélie took this rejection as a clear sign from God and responded with faith. "Since I am not worthy to become your spouse like my sister," she prayed, "I will enter the married state so as to fulfill your holy will, O God. I beg you, however, to send me many children, and grant that they may all be consecrated to you!"

Their fateful first encounter happened on St. Leonard's Bridge in Alençon. As Zélie was passing Louis in the opposite direction, she heard an interior voice saying, "This is the husband I have destined for you." She stopped and they became acquainted. Three months later they were married.

Louis' original hope was to live as brother and sister in a "Josephite marriage," where they could dedicate themselves to prayer and charity. Although Zélie was willing to make this sacrifice for her husband and lived this way for ten months, she was hoping instead to have many children and raise them up for God. Eventually a confessor helped them to see that God was asking them to demonstrate that sanctity could be obtained in a holy marriage, through mutually self-giving sexual love according to God's designs. They followed his advice without reservation and, over the span of 19 years of marriage, were blessed with seven girls and two boys.

Zélie's prayer that her children all be consecrated to God was fulfilled in several ways. They were all first consecrated to the Lord in baptism almost immediately after birth. The Lord saw fit to call four of them home soon thereafter, still in their baptismal graces. The five girls who survived childhood all were consecrated to the Lord in religious life, four in the Lisieux Carmel and the fifth as a Visitation sister.

The Martin's home was a school of holiness with the parents as model students and teachers. The whole family attended Mass each day at 5:30 in the morning. They recited daily prayers as a family in front of the statue of our Lady in their home. They all took responsibility for serving each other in the home and for doing their schoolwork. As a family they made pilgrimages to various shrines in France. Louis made retreats with the Trappists, Zélie with the Poor Clares. Louis was a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and was very generous to the poor and needy. Zélie ministered to the sick and the dying, making sure they were prepared by the sacraments to meet the Lord. Both parents formed their children in the faith, in life, and in virtue. St. Thérèse said that in whatever plans her parents made, they looked toward eternity, oft-repeating the phrase that "true happiness is not of this world."

Zélie died at the age of 45, having battled breast cancer for a decade and migraines for even longer. Until the end, she overcame her pain to attend daily Mass, where she would unite her sufferings to Christ on the altar. At her death, her husband and the priests of Alençon in unison said there was one more saint in heaven.

Louis would die 17 years later, spending the last seven years of his life mainly in institutions as a result of severe strokes that caused hemorrhaging, memory and speech loss, hallucinations, and partial paralysis. He accepted it all with resignation to the will of God and looked at all these events as a means by which he could live as a hermit in this world in anticipation of the communion of the saints in the next.

The Church teaches that the two-fold end of the sacrament of marriage is the mutual sanctification of the spouses and the procreation and education of children to be saints. Louis and Zélie Martin fulfilled this vocation with distinction and joy. May they help the married couples in our diocese to do the same!

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.