You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for June 2, 2022. All week, Kelly from Redbird

ministry has been here speaking about grief, and she is back again to tell us about another

saint who experienced grief.

Well, welcome back. Today's saint is St. Perez of this year.

Yes, I know. She's one of my favorite saints, so we wanted to talk more about her life.

St. Perez is quite a charming French saint.

She has the title of the Little Flower.

And I just absolutely love this term of endearment that she calls herself, Jesus' Little Flower.

But by as the 10th proclaimed her the greatest saint of modern times.

She earned this accolade not so much through her charm, but through her virtuous life and wisdom.

Her teachings found principally in her autobiography, the story of a soul, explained her doctrine known as the Little Way, a brief description in her own words,

the abandonment and the love of a child who knows that his father loves him.

However, this childlike confidence came to perfection in a crucible of suffering.

In the last 18 months of her life, she was dying of tuberculosis.

She passed through a trial of faith, as she termed it, He God allowed my soul to be enveloped in utter darkness, she says.

And thought of heaven, which had consoled me from my earliest childhood, now became a subject of conflict and torture. So you can see, something that I once

consoled her was something that she feared. It was torture to her. In her youth she thought atheists were not being truthful,

but now she had an intimate experience of their thoughts. She did not stand by idly under the

deluge of these thoughts, though. She went to work. I try to practice my faith, she says, even though it brings me no joy.

I have made more acts of faith in the last year than during all the rest of my life.

By day and by night, she clung to the truths of the faith, even to writing out the creed with her own blood.

Oh, if you knew what horrible thoughts constantly oppressed me, she said. Her methods consisted of

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