Science Reveals a Surprising Trace of St Thérèse’s Faith

Her patella (kneecap), preserved as a relic, shows signs of repeated kneeling and rising. Not surprising for a Carmelite Nun who spent much of her day in prayer.

 From Aleteia

By Cerith Gardiner & Agnès Pinard Legry

Nearly 130 years after her death, one tiny relic is offering a fascinating glimpse into the very physical reality of St. Thérèse's Little Way.

Almost 130 years after St. Thérèse of Lisieux died, scientists are still discovering things about the young Carmelite, and as Aleteia France shared, the latest clue has come from a rather unexpected source: her kneecap.

A new scientific study has examined one of Thérèse's patellas, preserved as a relic in the Church of St. Catherine in Honfleur, France. The small bone, protected inside a glass and gilded-metal reliquary, comes from the remains of the saint exhumed in 1923, shortly before her beatification.

Dr. Philippe Charlier, a French physician, anthropologist and paleopathologist, noticed unusual changes on the upper surface of the bone, where the quadriceps tendon attached. Known as enthesopathies, these changes included what radiologists rather wonderfully call the “patella tooth sign,” thanks to its jagged appearance, and can be associated with repeated strain on the muscle.

Such wear might be unremarkable after many decades of life. Thérèse, however, was just 24 when she died of tuberculosis in 1897, which left Charlier with an intriguing question: What had this very young woman been doing with her knees?

A day that involved a lot of kneeling

One possible answer lies in the daily rhythm of life at the Carmel of Lisieux. The community's ceremonial instructions were extraordinarily precise about the sisters' movements during prayer, specifying when they should stand, sit, or kneel. There were genuflections on one knee and on both knees, along with different forms of prostration, including one in which a sister kissed the ground and another in which she lay completely flat with her arms extended in the form of a cross.

And all those movements were repeated, day after day, as part of a routine Thérèse followed from the age of 15, when she entered the Carmel, until her death nine years later. Charlier believes that the constant kneeling and rising could have placed enough strain on her quadriceps to leave a trace where the tendon met the bone.

The study cannot tell us for certain that prayer caused those changes. This is a retrospective diagnosis based on a single piece of bone, and the connection with Thérèse's religious practices remains an interpretation. But the possibility offers an unusually physical glimpse into a life we tend to know through photographs, manuscripts and, increasingly, statues.

The Little Way, in flesh and bone

That physical dimension is particularly interesting with Thérèse because her spirituality was rooted in the ordinary. Her “Little Way” did not depend on heroic adventures or grand gestures, but on trust in God and love expressed through the smallest actions of daily life.

When Pope Francis devoted an apostolic exhortation to Thérèse in 2023, he described her earthly life as “brief, a mere 24 years, and completely ordinary,” while noting that she lived charity “in the smallest things of daily life.”

Those daily things required a body. Thérèse's knees touched the ground, her legs lifted her back up, her feet carried her through the convent and her hands performed the work assigned to her. Long before she became a statue holding roses and a crucifix, she was a young woman responding to bells, turning up for prayer, completing chores and living alongside the same small community every day.

The kneecap preserved in Honfleur cannot tell us what Thérèse was thinking as she performed any of those movements, nor can science measure the faith with which she made them. What it can reveal is that the ordinary life behind the Little Way was not an abstraction. It was lived in a body, through thousands of small actions repeated so often that some of them may eventually have left their mark on her bones.

And that may be the loveliest detail in this curious discovery. Nearly 130 years after Thérèse's death, researchers have not uncovered evidence of some dramatic, previously unknown chapter of her short life. Instead, a tiny bone may have preserved the trace of something she did over and over again: bend her knee, rise, and begin again.

For a saint who spent her life showing that the smallest actions need not be insignificant, it's quite a legacy for one little kneecap.