Spirituality Summit 2025

Dr Susan Muto

Living in Hope: The Spirituality of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

Dr Susan Muto is executive director of the Epiphany Association and dean of the Epiphany Institute of Formative Spirituality,Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA. She holds a doctorate in English literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr Muto has been teaching the literature of ancient, medieval, and modern spirituality for over forty years.

Saint Thérèse states unequivocally in her autobiography, Story of a Soul, that “all my hope was in God alone.” Hope, understood as the bridge between faith and charity, enabled her to overcome such obstacles as scrupulosity, discouragement, and fear of failure. Hope, as we shall see in this keynote address, enabled her to accept her nothingness and to pray that God would transform it into living fire. The love song of her life expresses complete confidence in God’s personal care for her. In this Jubilee Year of Hope, she bears witness to the world of a love so hopeful that the cross itself became not an instrument of torture but the way to the empty tomb.

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Fr Vincent O’Hara, OCD

Hope in the Darkness: Thérèse’s Struggle with Faith and Its Relevance Today

Fr Vincent O’Hara is an Irish Discalced Carmelite, who has served in various Carmelite communities in Ireland and England over the past 50 years. He has also been Provincial and Prior on several occasions, as well as giving retreats in Carmelite spirituality. At present he is Prior of St Teresa’s community, Clarendon Street, Dublin. Even in her darkest moments, Saint Thérèse clung to hope. This presentation will reflect on the suffering she endured throughout her life and how it became so much part of her sanctification. There will be particular emphasis on her struggle with faith during her final years and how her example can inspire us to persevere in hope, even when faced with doubt and suffering.

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Dr Cyprian Blamires, OCDS

Winning Friends and Influencing People: Thérèse Since 1897

Dr Cyprian Blamires OCDS is a historian, a writer, and a translator. His translation of talks by Blessed Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus was published not long ago by the Teresian Press, and he has been responsible for many other translations. He is currently writing a book on the legacy of St Teresa of Avila, and in the course of research for this he has uncovered all kinds of fascinating facts about one of the best-loved saints of the post-Medieval era. He is involved with the Secular Carmelites at Regional and National Level and is currently helping in the foundation of new OCDS groups in Romsey, Coventry, Northants, and Cardiff.

The saint of Lisieux was unknown to the outside world in her lifetime, but as soon as she died, her reputation exploded across the globe through her little book, Story of a Soul. Pope Pius X described this as ‘a hurricane of glory’. She quickly became a dear and beloved friend for multitudes of individuals. Soldiers in World War I trenches entrusted their lives to her. Edith Piaf – the most famous female singer in the world in the 1950s – was absolutely devoted to Thérèse and talked constantly to her. The celebrated American social activist Dorothy Day wrote a book about her, as did the convert novelist Francis Parkinson Keyes, whose best-selling novels adorned bookshops everywhere in the 1950s. Saint Teresa of Calcutta took her name in religion and said that her canonisation was the most important event of the twentieth century.

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John Dalla Costa

Prophet of Kenotic Hope: The Baptismal Imagination of St. Thérèse of Lisieux

John Dalla Costa has spent four decades working at the intersection of faith with business. He is an author, consultant and teacher. In 1996 he founded The Centre for Ethical Orientation (CEO). In addition to consulting to multinationals, NGOs, and Bishops Conferences, CEO undertook research on a variety of ethical issues, including trust, governance, and moral management. John helped to draft and edit Mensuram Bonam. Faith Based Measures for Catholic Investors, The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2023. He has contributed to interfaith conferences at the Vatican, Istanbul, and Doha to support Muslim scholars in their research of the Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad; the interfaith conference in Najaf to mark the second anniversary of Pope Francis’ visit to Iraq. He also completed the “Signs of the Times” report for the Caux Roundtable for Moral Capitalism, Interfaith meeting in Caux Switzerland, 2023; and co-developed the School for Prophets with the Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality in 2023. He is a founding faculty member of a governance certification programme for public and private sector directors at the Directors College—McMaster University (Toronto, Canada). Originally from Canada, now resident in Sansepolcro (Tuscany, Italy). He and his wife, Lucinda Vardey, continue to work together to serve the Church locally and globally.

In her famous litany of vocational yearning, St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus imagined becoming a “warrior,” “priest, “apostle,” “doctor,” “missionary,” and “martyr” for the love of Christ and His Church. So complete was her desire for self-offering, and so creative her imagination, that she leapt to embrace categories of ministry far beyond the grasp of her gender, culture, social position, role in the Church, frailty, and youth. This audacious spirituality qualified Thérèse as a Doctor of the Church, in part, because she prophetically incarnated the charisms of Baptism long before they were recovered by the Second Vatican Council. This presentation will examine the insights and example of St. Thérèse from this prophetic perspective. As well as identify those of her qualities that meet the criteria of prophet, we will use her as the “reference point” for delving into the gifts and graces Baptism confers for our own vocation as prophets of hope.

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Annette Goulden, OCDS

Being a Parent Today: A Guide to Everyday Holiness in the Family Life of Louis and Zelie Martin

Annette Goulden is a Secular Carmelite near Oxford, and has served the Discalced Carmelite Order in numerous capacities over twenty years, including writing a book on Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of Therese of Lisieux.  She is the current National President of the Secular Order in England and Wales.  Before retirement, she worked in the NHS as a doctor specialising in child and adolescent psychiatry, and now enjoys being a grandmother with three grandchildren.

In this talk, my aim is to show how family life can be, and often is, a magnificent path to holiness.  Don’t let the word “holiness” put you off; it means “wholeness”.  Children bring out aspects in their parents that they didn’t know they had.  The dependency of these little human beings, the thrills and sorrows that are part and parcel of bringing up children, call for inner resources that penetrate the depths to reveal the whole person. Louis and Zelie Martin had nine children, of which four died. The youngest survivor was Therese of Lisieux.  Married in 1858, the trials and joys of their parenting experience resonate with us today.  Because they were canonised as a married couple in 2015, we know their experience of family life offers all parents a valid path towards holiness, towards a deeper trust in God. This ordinary couple, in their ordinary lives, balanced work and child-care, coped with a difficult child, survived war, suffered illness, bereavement and loss.  As a single parent, Louis cared for five young girls, and at the end of his life, made the sacrifice of his mind his final gift of self to God, when he developed dementia. By the end of this talk, my hope is that listeners will be enriched to know that our modern experiences of parenting plumbs the same depths as those portrayed by Louis and Zelie Martin.  There is no need to search for another path to holiness, to a deeper relationship with God, than to live family life to the full; as a child, as a parent, as a relative or as a friend.

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