When St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) entered the Carmel of Lisieux in 1888 at fifteen, she took the religious name 'Thérèse of the Child Jesus.' At her clothing in 1889 she added a second title: 'and of the Holy Face' (Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus et de la Sainte-Face). The Holy Face was, for her, the suffering face of Christ during the Passion — disfigured, despised, the man of sorrows of Isaiah 53.
Her devotion was shaped by interior visions of this Face and by an intense personal communion with Christ in his suffering and humiliation — particularly during the final two years of her life when she herself suffered tuberculosis. Her poem To the Holy Face ('O Visage adoré du Maître') and the related prayers in her Story of a Soul are among the most influential 19th-century devotional texts. The devotion to the Holy Face that she popularised through her Carmel was instrumental in the broader popular reception of the photographic image of the Shroud of Turin after Secondo Pia's 1898 photograph (a year after her death) revealed the Shroud's negative-image quality. The two devotions — Holy Face and Shroud — have been intertwined ever since.