July 27, 2003

Born at Lautecour in France, 22 July, 1647, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque died at Paray-le-Monial on 17 October, 1690, her thirty-three years of life on earth matching the age of our Lord. She made her first communion at nine years old and within a short time was paralyzed and confined to bed for four years, when she made a vow to the Blessed Virgin to consecrate herself to the religious life and was instantaneously restored to perfect health. Her father died and a dishonest relative reduced her relatively prosperous family to poverty. By the time she was 17, the family’s fortune was restored. Her instinct was to serve God at home by acts of penance and helping the poor. To please her mother and brothers, she began to dress stylishly and attended a masked ball, but was reminded in a vision of Christ of the vow she had made.

She entered the Visitation Convent at Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy in 1671 and had a hard time adjusting to the rules, but took pronounced her final vows a year later. During bouts of severe illness, she believed she was seeing Christ in the form of a physician healing her, and telling her that He had chosen her to promote confidence in His merciful love symbolized by the Sacred Heart. Her religious community severely reprimanded her for what they thought were prideful hallucinations, but her humility and unfailing charity quieted even her most bitter critics.

In the first major apparition, Christ told her of His desire to be loved by all and appointed the Friday after the octave of the feast of Corpus Christi as the feast of the Sacred Heart. Other mystical experiences followed, and she was counseled by the priest Claude de la Colombiere who would be recognized as a saint for his own heroic virtue. Dying in great physical pain, her last word was the Holy Name of Jesus. Her message of God’s merciful love was a radical contradiction of the Calvinistic form of rigorist piety that had spread in the Church in France. These “Jansenists” attracted many luminaries, including the philosopher-scientist Pascal, as an antidote to the spiritual laxity of the day but, as Monsignor Ronald Knox put it, they were “pure as angels and proud as devils.” They put austere limits on reception of the sacraments and would denude the Mass of its ancient rituals and artistic decoration.

After vigorous examination of her case, Leo XII declared St. Margaret Mary Venerable in 1824, Pius IX beatified her in 1864, and Pius XI canonized her in 1920.

Fr. George W. Rutler