Thérèse of Lisieux in Austria : a case study of transnational catholic revivalism

This article explores the cult of Thérèse of Lisieux in Austria within a larger context of popular devotion to her throughout the world. What place did a French saint have in the prayers of Austrian Catholics in the years after her canonization? The evidence that considerable numbers of Austrians prayed to a French saint in the interwar years is significant not only for the growing popularity of Thérèse in parts of Europe, North America, Latin America, Great Britain and Australia, but also for how national and local traditions of Catholicism in Austria had seemingly been trumped by a transnational religious movement by the start of the twentieth century. Histories of nineteenth-century Catholicism have only recently explored the wider transnational dimensions of modern religious movements. Sites of religious apparitions, pilgrimage, congresses, and cults of particular saints are some of the ways that historians can begin to study transnational phenomena in modern Catholicism. Thérèsian devotion represents one example of a transnational religious movement that drew Austrian Catholics alongside their counterparts in France and elsewhere in the early twentieth century.