I was very glad to see this little page on the Notre Dame website . My friend Charley and I put up this statue of Saint Therese in the spring of 1948, and I am thrilled to see devotion before it still picking up.
Charley Cingolani was a high school sophomore, and I a freshman, at the time. The statue was ordered from France for just over a hundred dollars, as I recall, and our fellow seminarians each kicked in a couple of dollars apiece to purchase it. Our not very encouraging superiors turned it over to us to figure out how to put it up, and where. That is the reason for the amateurish cement work on the pedestal (mostly mine).
That statue of Therese, as we called her, as if she were an older sister, remains today with the lilies growing up all around her.
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