Suggest an Edit — Louis Martin and Azélie-Marie Guérin

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Saints Louis Martin and Marie-Azélie Guérin, known as Zélie, were a Roman Catholic married couple of nineteenth-century France who were canonized together as models of holiness in ordinary married and family life. They are widely known as the parents of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Louis Joseph Aloys Stanislaus Martin was born on 22 August 1823 in Bordeaux. His father served as a soldier, and the family lived in several places during Louis's youth. Louis learned the trade of watchmaking and worked for a time in Paris and elsewhere. He wished to enter religious life at the monastery of the Augustinian Canons Regular of the Great Saint Bernard in the Alps, but he was not accepted because he did not know Latin. He then settled in Alençon in Normandy, where he kept a watchmaking and jewelry shop.

Marie-Azélie Guérin was born on 23 December 1831 at Saint-Denis-sur-Sarthon in the Orne. Raised in a family of modest official standing—her father was a gendarme—she sought admission to the Daughters of Charity but was refused, an event commonly linked to her health. She turned to lacemaking, mastered the difficult Point d'Alençon technique, and built a prosperous workshop in Alençon that employed other lace workers. Louis and Zélie met in Alençon and married on 13 July 1858 in the church of Notre-Dame. At the beginning of their marriage they lived in continence, intending a Josephite marriage; after some months a confessor advised them that they should have children. Nine children were born to them between 1860 and 1873. Four died in infancy or early childhood: Hélène, two infant sons named Joseph, and Mélanie-Thérèse. The five surviving daughters were Marie, Pauline, Léonie, Céline, and Thérèse. All five later entered religious congregations: four became Carmelites at Lisieux and Léonie became a Visitandine at Caen. The youngest, Thérèse, was canonized in 1925 and later named a Doctor of the Church.

The Martin household combined work, family duty, and a regular life of prayer, including daily Mass when possible, recitation of the rosary, observance of fasts and feast days, and care for the poor. Zélie continued to run her lace business after marriage; Louis eventually sold his own shop in order to help manage the lace enterprise. Correspondence that survives, especially Zélie's letters, shows a practical, affectionate, and sometimes anxious family piety rather than an abstract ideal. In 1876–1877 Zélie suffered from breast cancer. She died in Alençon on 28 August 1877, at the age of forty-five. Louis then moved with his daughters to Lisieux, to be near Zélie's brother Isidore Guérin and his wife. The family lived at Les Buissonnets. Louis encouraged his daughters' vocations. From the late 1880s he was afflicted with cerebral arteriosclerosis; after episodes of confusion and wandering he spent several years at the Bon Sauveur psychiatric hospital in Caen. He was later brought back to the Lisieux region and died on 29 July 1894 at La Musse, a country property at Arnières-sur-Iton.

Interest in the couple's reputation for holiness developed in the twentieth century alongside the cult of their daughter Thérèse. Pope John Paul II declared them venerable in 1994. They were beatified on 19 October 2008 at Lisieux, in a rite celebrated during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, acting as papal legate. A miracle accepted for beatification concerned the healing of an Italian child, Pietro Schiliro. Pope Francis canonized Louis and Zélie on 18 October 2015 in Saint Peter's Square, during the Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family. They were the first husband and wife to be canonized as a couple in a single ceremony. Their feast day is 12 July. The Church presents them as witnesses to married love, parenthood, the sanctification of daily work, and fidelity in illness, bereavement, and old age. Their family homes in Alençon and Lisieux and the basilica of Notre-Dame in Alençon, where they were married, remain places of pilgrimage.

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