Pope Francis, who has long been a devotee of St. Therese of Lisieux, said he received a surprise message from her the day after the September 7 prayer vigil for peace in Syria.

Vatican Insider is reporting that Archbishop Edoardo Menichelli, Archbishop of Ancona and Osimo, heard the story of the incident from Pope Francis himself, who later gave him permission to reveal it to the public. Francis related the story while attending the presentation of a book about St. Therese which the Holy Father had read during his trip to Brazil in July.

“The Pope told me he received the freshly-picked white rose out of the blue from a gardener as he was taking a stroll in the Vatican Gardens on Sunday 8 September,” Mgr. Menichelli said. “The Pope sees this flower as a 'sign', a 'message' from Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, whom he had turned to in a moment of worry the day before.”

The white rose has a particular meaning to Pope Francis. In the book, The Jesuit, which was written while he was still Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina, he was giving journalists a tour of his library in Buenos Aires. They paused before a picture of St. Therese which had a vase full of white roses standing before it.

“Whenever I have a problem,” Bergoglio explained to the journalists, “I ask the saint not to solve it, but to take it into her hands and to help me accept it and I almost always receive a white rose as a sign.”

Therese, a Doctor of the Church whose feast day is celebrated today, has carried on her tradition of sending down a shower of white roses for Pope Francis. During the September 7 prayer vigil in St. Peter's Square, the pope recited the rosary along with passages from the Gospel and verses from a poem by St. Therese.

We can only assume that the Holy Father made his customary plea to the saint, asking her to take the problem of Syria into her hands and help him to accept it.

Once again, she responded with a white rose, which was delivered the following day through the humble hands of a Vatican gardener.

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