St. Thérèse of Lisieux is widely known among Catholics as “the little flower,” but she also called herself a “winter flower” in “The Story of a Soul” and wrote about her love for snow, thanking God for the gift of a miraculous snowfall on the day she was clothed as a novice in her Carmelite habit.
She wrote of snow, “when I was small, its whiteness filled me with delight, and one of the greatest pleasures I had was taking a walk under the light snowflakes.”
“Where did this love of snow come from? Perhaps it was because I was a little winter flower, and the first adornment with which my eyes beheld nature clothed was its white mantle,” she wrote. “I had always wished that on the day I received the Habit, nature would be adorned in white just like me.”
A miracle of snow for the ‘little flower’
The weather was mild the day she took her habit, but when she entered the cloister, Thérèse saw “the statue of ‘the little Jesus’ smiling at me from the midst of flowers and lights” and “immediately afterward, my glance was drawn to the snow, the monastery garden was white like me! What thoughtfulness on the part of Jesus! Anticipating the desires of His fiancée, He gave her snow. Snow! What mortal bridegroom, no matter how powerful he may be, could make snow fall from heaven to charm his beloved?”
“Many considered the snow on my Clothing Day as a little miracle and the whole town was astonished,” she noted. “Some found I had a strange taste, loving snow!”
St. Thérèse also expressed a desire in her writings to “spend my Heaven doing good on Earth” and that seems to extend even to her “strange taste” for snow given that a devotion to her is a common thread among several Catholic Winter Olympians.
Bobsledder’s strong St. Thérèse devotion throughout health challenges
One athlete in the Milan-Cortina Olympic games with a devotion to the little flower was Jadin O’Brien, a member of the bobsled team who finished seventh in the two-woman bobsled event and a three-time track and field national champion in the pentathlon for the University of Notre Dame.
O’Brien’s devotion to St. Thérèse was a key part of overcoming a struggle with Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections (PANDAS), a rare condition that she faced in childhood.
As her family struggled to get a diagnosis and treatment for Jadin, her mother Leslie O’Brien told The National Catholic Register that she turned to St. Thérèse. “I started a novena and really dove into asking for her intercession,” she said. “Then I started to get mad at her, because after my novena, I was like, ‘Okay, I got no roses. Are you listening?’”
Jadin said St. Thérèse’s example was helpful for her at the time. “St. Thérèse suffered with OCD as a child,” she told the Register. “That was one of my symptoms with PANDAS. That’s why my parents chose her to be my patron saint during that period.”
Before finding an accurate diagnosis and treatment of her condition, the O’Brien family received signs from St. Thérèse including her grandfather at Mass having a sudden chill pass through him and a feeling that his granddaughter would be okay as he walked by a stained-glass window. “Later he went back to the church and realized the stained glass depicted St. Thérèse,” she said.
O’Brien said that Thérèse’s “‘Little Way’ and her unrelenting trust in God have brought me back to my center many times.” Thérèse is also her confirmation saint.
She was grateful to make it to the games after she and her partner, Elana Meyers Taylor, experienced a serious bobsled crash in January at the World Cup in Switzerland.
“When you think about the Olympics, your thoughts go to, ‘That’s the biggest stage in sports.’ But viewing it through St. Thérèse’s lens and as an avenue to glorify God and do a lot of good helps me to keep everything in perspective,” O’Brien said.
St. Thérèse devotion reignited hockey player’s faith
Another Catholic athlete in the 2026 Winter Games also went to Milan with a devotion to the little flower.
Britta Curl-Salemme, a newly-minted Olympic gold medalist with the U.S. women’s hockey team, told OSV News before the games that St. Thérèse of Lisieux was the first saint she felt “really attached” to in a serious way. She credited her with reigniting her faith in college.
She read “I Believe in Love,” a book based on the teachings of St. Thérèse the summer after she graduated from high school. She said the book “just blew my mind” and St. Thérèse’s “spirituality and the way that she thought about humility just totally opened my eyes to a new way of thinking and of praying.” She has loved the wisdom in the little flower’s writings ever since.
Devotion to the ‘winter flower’ by Olympians, past and present
Perhaps St. Thérèse’s most famous devotee from past Winter Olympic games is Tara Lipinski, a figure skater who won a gold medal in the 1998 Winter Games and, in a 2001 interview with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, attributed her success, in part, to the intercession of St. Thérèse.
Like O’Brien’s mother, Lipinski’s mother Pat began a novena to St. Thérèse for her daughter and their family. In her case, it was after she was feeling fed up with the mental and emotional toll figure skating was taking on them. At the end of the novena, she was “amazed to see a church with an image of St. Thérèse with roses cascading from her arms” and took it as “a sign that the saint whose prayers she had requested would carry her family through any hardships ahead.”
Tara said that she liked the saint “because she didn’t seem perfect, which makes you feel you have something in common with her.”
“She was struggling to get into the convent kind of like I was struggling to be accepted, because I was too young,” she added. Lipinski won her Olympic gold medal at just 15 years old.
“I think she’s changed me as a person,” she said at the time. “She crosses my mind often. I think, what would she do? Her Little Way applies to everything in life.”
At the conclusion of the Milan-Cortina Olympic games in which St. Thérèse devotees played, it seems as though the “winter flower” holds a special connection with the winter athletes who turn to her intercession.
Lauretta Brown is culture editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @LaurettaBrown6.
The post The ‘winter flower’ and her shower of Olympic blessings first appeared on OSV News.
