Novena to Saints Louis and Zelie Martin (Patrons of Marriage and Family)

Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin (Louis, 1823-1894; Zelie, 1831-1877) were a French married couple — a watchmaker and a lacemaker of Alencon in Normandy — and the parents of St. Therese of Lisieux and eight other children. Married in 1858, they longed for a large family offered wholly to God. Of their nine children, four died in infancy or early childhood, and the couple bore that grief with a faith that never curdled into bitterness; their five surviving daughters all entered religious life, the youngest becoming the Little Flower and a Doctor of the Church. Zelie endured a long struggle with breast cancer and died at forty-five, leaving Louis to raise their daughters; he in turn suffered a series of strokes and a final, humbling illness of his own. Their holiness was not the holiness of the cloister or the mission field but of ordinary married and family life — the daily fidelity of work, worship, the raising of children, and the acceptance of suffering without complaint. Pope Benedict XVI beatified them in 2008, and on 18 October 2015, during the Synod on the Family, Pope Francis canonized them together — the first spouses in the history of the Church to be raised to the altars as a couple. They are patrons of marriage, of families, of parents grieving the loss of a child, and of the pursuit of holiness in the midst of ordinary domestic life. Their feast is kept on July 12, near the anniversary of their wedding.