So who was this saint who became known as "The Little Flower" and is venerated by armies? Therese was a young Carmelite nun who died at the age of 24 in the provincial French town of Lisieux where she had lived in a convent since she was 15.
Her extraordinary passage from obscure death to such esteem is attributed primarily to her one book, Histoire d'une Ame (The Story of a Soul). In it, she democraticised holiness, teaching that it is for all, not just the exceptional, and is lived through the ordinariess of life. She affirmed the body and feeling, as opposed to over-intellectualised spirituality/theology. As Father Ryan has said, "she felt more than she reasoned".
This, after all, was a saint who said her schooldays were "the saddest of my life". She also slept through sermons and prayer services, explaining that just as parents continued to love their children while they slept, so God loved her even while she dozed off during prayers.
Her fellow nuns saw her as in no way exceptional, but she pioneered a return to a simple living out of the gospel commands of love.
"What matters in life is not great deeds, but great love," she said.
Within 10 years of her death, she was described by Pope Pius X as "the greatest saint of our time". She was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1923 and canonised by him in 1925; she would then have been 52 had she lived. In 1997, Pope John Paul made her a Doctor of the Church, the youngest of just three women in that small group of 33 which includes saints such as Thomas Aquinas. The other two women are Catherine of Sienna and Teresa of Avila.
Equally extraordinary is that she is the only Doctor of the Church to be so declared by Pope John Paul, a minimalism not generally associated with this Pope who has canonised more and beatified more than all his predecessors put together.
But Therese's great appeal for many in Church circles today is that she suffered in a thoroughly modern way. Away from the realms of cultish, popular piety, as well as the physical pain that went with her illness in latter days, she was plagued by disbelief. "Temptations against faith", as she described it, particularly in her final 18 months of life.
As the Jesuit author, Father Michael Paul Gallagher, said in a 1997 address in Dublin on the centenary of her death, "her insight into the lived actuality of atheism leads her immediately to see unbelievers as her `brothers', to an identification with them in a void of feeling which she embraces in a missionary spirit on their behalf". She lost the "joy of faith" but continued to make acts of faith. "My madness is to hope," she said, Fr Gallagher recalled. Some suggest that as such she could be described as "the patron saint of unbelievers".
Fr Gallagher continued that "the tone of unbelief . . . has shifted over these last centuries from seeing God as an unnecessary hypothesis (the scientific denial of faith) to seeing God as an insult not just to human intelligence but to human freedom (the humanist-nihilist dismissiveness). In our own day, the tone is a less angry mixture of apathy and lostness, where God is made culturally unreal by lifestyle and the assumptions by which we live", he said.
"There is an argument to be made that she [Therese] is strangely `post-modern' in her response to her encounter with unbelief: she cultivated a mature, feminine trust in her deepest experiences of tenderness as capable of overcoming the emptiness on the level of mind or meaning. She would live - and love - what she could no longer think," he said.
He quoted from an essay by novelist Georges Bernanos who imagined an agnostic preaching in a cathedral. Addressing the congregation the agnostic said: "I cannot help feeling that this is your last chance. Your last chance and ours. Are you capable of rejuvenating our world or not? The New Testament is eternally young, it is you who are old . . . The remarkable fate of an obscure little Carmelite girl seems to me a serious sign for us all. Christians, hurry up and become children again, that we unbelievers may become children too. It can't be so very difficult. If you do not live your faith, your faith stops being a living thing. It becomes abstract - bodyless."
Therese, Fr Gallagher concluded, was the opposite of abstract, where that imagined agnostic was concerned. She was an incarnation of childlike freshness, a gospel glimpse of salvation for our tired world and culture.
"No doubt her authenticity can provoke hope and healing in others who think they cannot believe in God," he said.
The Relics of St Therese arrive in Ireland on Easter Sunday, visiting 74 venues (from Tuam to Falcarragh, from Mountjoy Prison to Knock and Lough Derg) between April 15th and June 28th. For more information on the visit 01-4927697. Website: www.sttherese.com