Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, popularly known as the Little Flower, died in 1897 at the age of twenty-four. Had she lived to be ninety, as two of her blood sisters did, she would have died in 1963. She is, therefore, in a sense, our contemporary. As Pope John Paul II said when he named her a Doctor of the Church in 1997, she offers us a contemporary understanding of love, the essence of the gospel.