To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose the person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best When I began reading Thérèse Martin’s Story of a Soul, I felt as though I had ordered steak and been served candyfloss. Thérèse’s world can seem bourgeois and sentimental. The puzzle is why this cloistered flower, who entered a Carmelite convent at 15, should be the object of such extraordinary devotion. Blokey Thomas Merton, for all his initial contempt for her pretty poems, ultimately placed himself in her tiny hands. The question I had as a new Catholic was: why?Her “little way” was not new, but no one had set it down quite like Thér&egra