“An Unforgettable Book”

Today, millions of copies have spread through the world and it has been translated into thirty-eight languages. It is the great best-seller of the twentieth century… Once read, it cannot be forgotten. And the range of its appeal is tremendous: simple, ill-educated people and great scholars read it. It is a book which moves peasants and Popes. Men and women of every race and of every kind of intelligence and education succumb to its spell. Holy Scripture apart – and Holy Scripture is on a wholly different plane from any other book – no other book, whether it is concerned with secular or spiritual matters has this universality of appeal. This, I am aware, is a big claim to make and it may be dismissed as a piece of pious exaggeration … Yet it is a great book, an unforgettable book, and a book whose influence deepens and widens every year. We go wrong, I think, because we judge it by normal and natural standards. But it is not a normal or a natural book. It is abnormal because it is a supernatural book. In the words of Pius XI, St Therese ‘attained to the knowledge of supernatural things in such abundant measure that she was able to point out the sure way of salvation to others’, and it is in The Story of a Soul that she points out this sure way.”

– Introduction, The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux