St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face promised, “I will send down a shower of roses from the heavens; I will spend my heaven doing good upon the earth.” Many thousands of people recall receiving roses after praying to St. Thérèse for some intercession. It may have been actual roses, a card with a rose, or the scent of roses. It does not matter. Each is taken as a sign of St. Thérèse’s hearing the person prayer.
The Blessed Rose Petal Project run by members of the Flos Carmeli Choir at the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is an attempt to recall that promise of St. Thérèse. The choir provides music at the monastery’s midday Mass on Wednesdays and feast days. They volunteer in various other ways at the monastery.
They noticed that after big celebrations, the flowers in the chapel would be unceremoniously discarded in the garbage. Around 2018, Carmelite priest Chris Kulig, who occasionally celebrates the Mass, began collecting the old flowers, drying them out, and putting them in bags as a remembrance of Thérèse promise to shower roses down from heaven. As the demand for the rose petals grew so did their volunteer list. Mt. Carmel supplied the little bags. The people supplied the flowers. The Flos Carmeli folks provided the finger power to fill the bags.
Soon it was not enough. “We just ran out of rose petals,” said Yolanda Bartley, one of the steady volunteers. But someone, while driving through nearby St. Catherine, noticed a field of roses at a wholesale of rose bushes. They were willing to sell roses at a discounted price for use at the monastery. Then they discovered three fields belonging to another wholesale plant nursery. They supply rose bushes to large stores like Cosco and Walmart.
After a conversation with the sales manager and the sales manager’s conversation with the owner, choir members were told they could have “all the roses we could pick,” said Angie Walledor, another member of the choir. After securing permission to park in a nearby non-Catholic church lot (the choir is very ecumenical in its work!), the members descended on the fields. Of the three fields, the smallest has about 30,000 plants.
“They grow in rows like corn,” said Angie. The fields bloom every second year as the nursery rotates through the fields to maintain a large number of plants to sell each year.
“It is St. Thérèse and Mother Mary at work,” said Yolanda. “It isn’t a shower of roses anymore. It is pouring roses.”
The small packages of roses are ready for the crowds expected to come to the Monastery of Mount Carmel in Niagara Falls for the October 1 celebrations. But after the crowds have gone back home, there will be more roses to pick, remove the petals, dry the petals, and then put in the small bag. It is all done with love in an effort to recall St. Thérèse’s magnificent promise to continue to do good works on earth.
