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There is to be a private ceremony of welcome before the relics go on a month-long tour of 28 venues, starting tomorrow at Portsmouth Cathedral.

Huge crowds have greeted the casket in the 42 countries it has already visited. The UK tour will include the Catholic cathedrals of Plymouth, Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, Salford, Lancaster, Middlesbrough, Leeds, Nottingham and Westminster.

St Therese, a French Carmelite nun, widely known throughout the Catholic world as the Little Flower, was born in Alencon, Normandy, and entered a Carmelite convent in Lisieux aged 15-years-old.

She died from tuberculosis in 1897, at the age of 24 and declared a saint in 1925 by the Catholic Church.