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19 January
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Agency awards top marks for ACU standards
Poetic papal meditation
Will privacy laws hit hospital visits, prayer requests?
Sisters say 'goodbye' to St Mary's
Rosary makers stake claim to title
Thérèse - An Australian Story
Editorial: No cause for war
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Year of Pope John Paul II
Thérèse - An Australian Story
Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne
By Marilyn Rodrigues
This time last year Chris Downey was a bit concerned about how his job was going to pan out - filming and editing the visit to Melbourne of the 100-year old remains of the Catholic nun, Thérèse Martin.
After all, he could only film the sacred reliquary for so long. "Where do you go after that?" he wondered.
"But it was more than we expected, the crowds were amazing," he says.
"At one point, at St Patrick's Cathedral, they were trying to police the crowd but there was a huge rush on it [the reliquary], people were even scratching at it.
"I had the camera and I was being bumped around.
"It was like a mobbing, like it was U2 visiting or something."
The unexpected crowd of 900 pilgrims who welcomed the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux to the Church of the Infant Jesus in the Perth suburb of Morley at 3am on January 31 last year was the first sign of the storm of interest and devotion that would follow the relics around the country.
Chris spent 10 days filming during the Victorian leg of the relics tour.
The result is Thérèse - An Australian Story, which goes to air on ABC-TV on Sunday, February 9, at 11.30am.
It tells the story of the Australian tour of the relics of St Thérèse from January 31 to May 1 last year and of the hundreds of thousands of people who went to see the closed reliquary at one or more of the tour's 60 stops.
Apart from footage from the tour, producer-director Peter Thomas brings together observations and reflections from Australians who have been inspired by Thérèse.
They illustrate how Thérèse, rather than being merely a plaster saint, still has a ollowing today, how different aspects of her story can touch people and impact upon their lives.
Writer Kate Cleary is struck by the "rationalist pain", the temptation against faith and towards suicide that plagued the devout young nun at the end of her life.
The documentary also tells the story of Thérèse's life.
The youngest of a devoutly religious family, she struggled all her life with ill health and other weaknesses.
Carmelite Fr Paul Chandler says it has been surmised that she may have been afflicted with neuroses.
After having a fulfilling awareness of the close personal presence of God all her life, Thérèse was tormented by a sense of emptiness shortly after she discovered she had tuberculosis.
Her seeming crisis of faith, something known in the contemplative tradition to which she belonged as the 'dark night of the soul' for some who are advanced in a life of prayer, lasted right up until her death.
St Thérèse, a Discalced Carmelite, was only 24 when she died in a convent in the French village of Lisieux in 1897.
She took the veil at the age of 16, after following two of her sisters into the convent; another sister also entered that convent; the fifth Martin daughter embraced a different religious order.
Thérèse's life story, Story of a Soul, was published in 1898. It has never been out of print.
It earned her a papal accolade as the "greatest saint of modern times".
Many of the thousands of Australians who went to see the relics did so out of curiosity, but most of the people who saw the relics responded in faith by spending time to pray by the reliquary and listening to talks on her life and teachings.
The National Catholic Television Library - a member of the Australian Churches Media Association, which represents the mainstream Christian Churches in Australia - arranged for the documentary to be shown on the ABC.
Actor Robert Menzies narrates the documentary, which has been produced by Albert Street Productions.
Thérèse - An Australian Story, ABC-TV Sunday, February 9, 11.30am.