Sancta Margarita Maria Alacoque, Virgo — for her feast on the seventeenth day of October, III classis
Defecit caro mea et cor meum: Deus cordis mei, et pars mea Deus in æternum. “For thee my flesh and my heart hath fainted away: thou art the God of my heart, and the God that is my portion for ever.” — Psalm 72:26
I. Verosvres, 1647
She was born on the twenty-second of July, 1647, at the hamlet of Lautecourt (L’Hautecour) in the parish of Verosvres, in the Charolais country of southern Burgundy, in the diocese of Autun. She was the fifth of the seven children of Claude Alacoque, a royal notary and judge of the local seigneuries, and of Philiberte Lamyn. She was baptized three days later and given the name Margaret.
It was a respectable household of the provincial kind: not noble, but solid, pious, and comfortable. The France into which she was born was the France of the young Louis XIV and of the Fronde, of the great Catholic revival that followed the Council of Trent, of St. Vincent de Paul and St. John Eudes, and also of Port-Royal and the Jansenist quarrel, which was just then taking shape. The last of these would matter to her more than she could have known. The century that produced her was learning to fear God with a rigour that sometimes forgot He could be loved, and the message she would be given was addressed precisely to that fear.
II. The child’s vow and the long sickness
Her own account of her childhood, written in obedience many years later, records that while still very small she felt a horror of sin so strong that the mere mention of offending God restrained her in her play, and that at about the age of four, without understanding what the words meant, she made a vow of chastity at Mass: O my God, I consecrate to Thee my purity, and I make Thee a vow of perpetual chastity. She tells it as something she did not grasp until long afterward, and the Church has never made more of it than she did; but she held herself bound by it, and it shaped every later choice.
In 1655, when she was eight, her father died. Shortly afterward she was placed with the Poor Clares of the Urbanist observance at Charolles, where she made her First Communion at the age of nine, and where the sight of the nuns’ recollection gave her the first thought of the religious life.
The thought was interrupted almost at once. She fell gravely ill, with what her account describes as a paralysis of the limbs that left her bedridden for about four years, so that her bones, she says, pierced her skin. She was brought home. No remedy helped. At last, about the age of fourteen, she was moved to make a vow to the Blessed Virgin that if she were cured she would one day become one of her daughters, and she recovered. From that time she held the Mother of God to be the one who had given her back her life, and she took her as her mistress in the ways of prayer.
III. A house in servitude
The recovery brought her into the hardest years of her girlhood. After her father’s death the management of the family property had passed into the hands of relatives who lived in the house, among them her paternal grandmother and an aunt, and her mother and the children were reduced, by her telling, to something close to servitude in their own home. Doors were locked against them; they were refused the use of their own goods; she was sometimes kept from going to Mass, and spent the time weeping in a corner of the garden before a crucifix. Her mother fell ill, and the girl nursed her, begging from neighbours the things the household would not give.
It is in these years that Our Lord began, by her account, to teach her directly in prayer, and that she learned to meditate on His Passion without any method but His. She did not yet have a director who understood her. What she had was suffering, a crucifix, and the habit of turning to Him.
The situation eased when her elder brother came of age and the relatives’ hold on the house was broken. Then came a different trial, more subtle than the first. Her mother and brothers, now in better circumstances, wished her to marry, and she was drawn for a time, as she frankly admits, into the ordinary pleasures of a young woman of her station: fine clothes, company, the gaiety of the countryside. She never accused herself of grave sin in these years, but she accused herself of having been divided. Her account records that one evening, returning from such an entertainment dressed in her finery, she saw Our Lord as He was after the scourging, disfigured, and heard Him reproach her: that it was her vanity which had reduced Him to this state, and that she was wasting the time for which He would demand an account.
From that night the struggle was really over, though it took some years more to resolve it. In 1669, at about twenty-two, she was confirmed and took the name of Mary, so that she became Margaret Mary. Her brother tried for a while to keep her at home for her mother’s sake; her mother wept; a relative offered her a place in an Ursuline house where she would be among family. She refused. She wanted, she said, to go where she would be unknown.
IV. Paray-le-Monial, 1671
She found it at Paray-le-Monial, a small market town on the Bourbince, with its great Romanesque priory church built by the monks of Cluny, and a monastery of the Visitation of Holy Mary, the order founded at Annecy in 1610 by St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane Frances de Chantal. Her account records that on entering the parlour she heard within herself the words: It is here that I would have thee.
She entered in 1671, at twenty-three. She received the habit on the twenty-fifth of August of that year, and made her profession on the sixth of November, 1672.
The Visitation was an order designed by St. Francis de Sales for gentleness: for women of delicate health, for widows, for those who could not bear the great corporal austerities of the older orders, but who were called to an equal interior perfection through humility, obedience, sweetness of manner, and the hidden mortification of self-will. Its spirit was the spirit of the Gospel that would one day be read on Margaret Mary’s feast: Learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart. The Salesian rule distrusted the extraordinary. It is one of the ironies, and one of the providences, of her life that the most extraordinary graces of the seventeenth century were given to a Visitandine, and that she had to receive them inside a rule that told her to be suspicious of them.
Her novitiate was a long test. She was slow and clumsy at her tasks; she was so absorbed in prayer that she neglected her work; her mistresses tried, by obedience, to bring her back to the ordinary method of meditation and found that she could not keep to it, because, she said, Our Lord would not let her. They set her humiliating tasks and watched how she bore them. She bore them. Her own account notes, among other things, that she had from childhood an invincible repugnance to cheese, which her family had always respected, and that she was commanded in the novitiate to eat it; she wept, she struggled for days, and she obeyed. It is a small story, and she tells it for that reason: the conquest of self that the Visitation asked of its daughters was made out of exactly such small things.
V. The revelations, 1673–1675
The revelations that made her name came in her third year in the monastery, over a space of about eighteen months. She describes them in her Autobiography and in her letters, and they are the core of her mission. They are commonly numbered as four principal apparitions, with many lesser communications around them.
The first came on the twenty-seventh of December, 1673, the feast of St. John the Evangelist, as she knelt before the Blessed Sacrament exposed. She records that Our Lord made her rest upon His breast, as the beloved disciple had rested at the Last Supper, and disclosed to her the secrets of His Heart: that it was so inflamed with love for men that it could no longer contain its flames within itself, and must spread them abroad through her. She records too that He asked for her heart, placed it within His own, and returned it to her as a small flame, and that she felt from that day a pain in her side which never left her.
The second, early in 1674, showed her the Heart on a throne of flames, more brilliant than the sun, with the wound of the lance visible, encircled by a crown of thorns and surmounted by a cross. This is the image that the devotion has carried ever since, and it is the image she herself drew for her novices eleven years later.
The third, also in 1674, on a first Friday, showed her Our Lord resplendent, with His five wounds shining like suns, and especially His breast. He complained, by her account, of the ingratitude of men and the coldness with which they received His love, and asked two things of her: that she receive Holy Communion as often as obedience would permit, and in particular on the first Friday of each month, in reparation; and that every week, in the night between Thursday and Friday, she share in the mortal sadness He had suffered in the Garden of Olives, rising between eleven o’clock and midnight to keep Him company for an hour in prayer. This is the origin of the First Fridays and the Holy Hour.
The fourth, called the Great Apparition, came in June of 1675, within the octave of Corpus Christi, as she knelt before the Blessed Sacrament. Our Lord showed her His Heart and spoke the words for which she is chiefly remembered. In her Autobiography they run:
Voilà ce Cœur qui a tant aimé les hommes, qu’il n’a rien épargné jusqu’à s’épuiser et se consumer pour leur témoigner son amour; et pour reconnaissance je ne reçois de la plupart que des ingratitudes…
“Behold this Heart, which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to show them its love; and in return I receive from the greater part of them only ingratitude, by their irreverences and sacrileges, and by the coldness and contempt they show Me in this Sacrament of love.”
And He added that what grieved Him most was that hearts consecrated to Him should treat Him so. He asked that the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi be set apart as a feast in honour of His Heart, with Communion on that day and an act of public reparation for the indignities offered Him in the Blessed Sacrament; and He promised that His Heart would pour out its love abundantly on all who so honoured Him and caused Him to be honoured.
Two things should be said of these revelations, as of all private revelations. The first is that the Church does not oblige any Catholic to believe them with divine faith; she judges, after long examination, that they contain nothing contrary to faith and morals and that it is prudent and profitable to give them credence, and she has done so here with unusual solemnity. The second is that their content is not new. What Margaret Mary was shown is what St. John saw when the soldier opened the side of Christ and there came out blood and water (John 19:34), what St. Bernard preached when he spoke of the secret of the Heart laid open through the clefts of the wounds, and what St. Gertrude and St. Mechtilde had contemplated at Helfta four centuries before. What was new was the summons: a public feast, a practice for every parish, and above all the call to reparation, to love given back to a Love that was being refused.
VI. The disbelieved
Here the life becomes, for most of us, more instructive than the visions.
When she reported what she had received, she was not believed. Her superior, Mother Marie-Françoise de Saumaise, was cautious; the theologians called in to examine her judged that she was deluded, or that her imagination was disordered, and one of them is reported to have advised that she be given more soup. Some of her sisters regarded her as a visionary in the worst sense: proud, singular, a disturber of the peace of a house whose whole rule was peace. She was told to distrust what she had received, and she obeyed; she was told to keep silent, and she kept silent. Her health, never good, broke down repeatedly.
She did not defend herself. She did not appeal over her superiors’ heads. She did not leave. She records that Our Lord Himself told her to obey her superiors rather than Him, because He would not have obedience set aside for His sake, and that He would find His own way to accomplish what He wished. It is the most Salesian thing in her life, and the most important: the authenticity of the message was tested, and proved, by the obedience of the messenger.
VII. Claude La Colombière
Our Lord had promised her, she says, that He would send her His faithful servant and perfect friend. In February 1675, a few months before the Great Apparition, a young Jesuit of thirty-four arrived in Paray as superior of the small Jesuit residence there and was appointed extraordinary confessor to the Visitandines. His name was Claude La Colombière.
He was a man of fine education and an exacting interior life, who had bound himself some years earlier by a private vow to observe the rules of his Institute to the smallest point. When Margaret Mary first came to him, he heard her, examined her carefully over many conversations, and concluded that her experiences were from God. He became her director. He consecrated himself to the Sacred Heart, by her account on the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi, 1675, the very day Our Lord had asked for; and from that moment the devotion had a defender who could be heard outside the cloister.
He was not at Paray long. In 1676 he was sent to London as preacher to Mary of Modena, the Catholic Duchess of York, and there he preached the Heart of Jesus at the court of a Protestant kingdom. In 1678 he was caught up in the false accusations of the Titus Oates plot, imprisoned, and banished from England with his health ruined. He returned to France, and in the last months of his life to Paray itself, where he died on the fifteenth of February, 1682, at forty-one. His spiritual journal, published after his death and read aloud in the refectory of Paray, contained an account of the revelations made to “a person” whose identity no one in that refectory could mistake. The sisters who had doubted her heard her vindicated by the dead.
VIII. The victim of the house
The years after La Colombière’s departure were in some ways the hardest of her life. Mother Péronne-Rosalie Greyfié, superior from 1678, tested her more severely than anyone had, sometimes forbidding her the Communions and the Holy Hour Our Lord had asked of her, sometimes commanding her to ask for the healing of her own illnesses as a sign. She obeyed in everything, and Mother Greyfié, who was a shrewd and honest woman, came in the end to be one of the strongest witnesses to her holiness.
Her account and the testimony of the community record that during these years she was asked by Our Lord to offer herself as a victim of expiation for faults within her own community, and that this cost her dearly in the sisters’ opinion of her. She made the offering. The details of the episode are given differently in different sources, and need not be pressed; what is certain is that she understood her vocation as reparation in the strictest sense, a willingness to bear in her own soul and body the debt of others’ coldness, and that she lived it within the four walls of a small monastery among women who did not always love her.
In 1684 she was made assistant superior, and in 1685 mistress of novices. It was the novices who first kept the devotion with her. On the twentieth of July, 1685, the feast of St. Margaret of Antioch and so her own name-day, they set up a little altar in the novitiate and placed on it a pen-and-ink drawing of the Heart of Jesus surrounded by flames and thorns and surmounted by a cross, and they consecrated themselves before it. Some of the professed nuns were indignant and called it a novelty. A year later the mood had turned. On the twenty-first of June, 1686, the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi, the whole community honoured the Sacred Heart; and on the seventh of September, 1688, a chapel in the monastery garden was blessed in His honour. She had waited thirteen years to see in her own house what she had been asked to spread through the world.
In these same years, under obedience to her director Father François Rolin, she wrote the account of her life and graces that is now called her Autobiography, and she carried on a correspondence with Mother de Saumaise and others through which the devotion began to pass to other houses of the Visitation and beyond.
IX. The message to the King
One episode of her last years must be told plainly, because it has been told in many ways.
In a letter of June 1689 to Mother de Saumaise, she reported that Our Lord wished to be honoured by the King of France: that Louis XIV should consecrate himself to the Sacred Heart, have the Heart painted on his standards and engraved on his arms, and cause an edifice to be built in which it would be honoured, and that in return He would protect the king and his kingdom. The letter is authentic. Whether the request ever reached the king is not certain; it was certainly not acted upon by him or by his successors.
A century later, almost to the year, the Revolution of 1789 overthrew the French monarchy, and in 1793 Louis XVI, in prison, is reported to have made a vow to consecrate himself and his kingdom to the Sacred Heart should he be restored. Many have read the coincidence of dates as a fulfilment of a warning. That reading belongs to pious tradition and not to anything the saint herself said; her letter contains a request and a promise, not a prophecy of punishment. What is historically certain is that the Heart of Jesus became, in the century after her death, the emblem of the Catholic resistance in the Vendée, and that after the defeat of 1870 the French bishops and people built the basilica of the Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre as a national act of reparation. The edifice was built at last, by a republic, in penance.
X. Death, 1690
In the summer of 1690 she told those close to her that she would not live out the year. She fell ill in October. The physicians did not think her dying; she insisted that she was, asked for the Last Sacraments, and received them. Her last recorded words were of the kind she had always spoken: that she needed nothing but God, and to lose herself in the Heart of Jesus. She died on the evening of the seventeenth of October, 1690, at Paray-le-Monial, at the age of forty-three, in the nineteenth year of her religious life.
She was buried in the monastery. Her relics now rest in a shrine in the chapel of the Visitation at Paray, the chapel of the apparitions, which has drawn pilgrims from the whole Catholic world since the nineteenth century.
XI. The long road to the altars
The Church moved slowly, and with good reason.
The devotion spread rapidly after her death, through the Visitation and the Society of Jesus especially. Within a decade there were confraternities of the Sacred Heart in France and abroad. In 1720, when plague struck Marseille, Bishop Henri de Belsunce consecrated his city to the Sacred Heart, and the plague’s retreat was widely attributed to it. In 1729 Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy, later Archbishop of Sens, published the first full Life of her, drawn from her writings and the testimony of her sisters; its style drew the mockery of the Jansenists and the philosophes, who found in her a convenient symbol of everything they despised in Catholic devotion.
Rome itself hesitated. Petitions for a feast were refused in 1697 and again in 1727; the Promoter of the Faith in the second inquiry, Prospero Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV, raised serious objections about the theological basis of a cult directed to a bodily organ. The objections were met, over decades, by theologians who showed that the cult is directed not to the Heart considered in isolation, but to the Person of the Word Incarnate, whose Heart is united to His divinity and is the natural symbol of His love. In 1765 Clement XIII granted a Mass and Office of the Sacred Heart to the bishops of Poland and the Roman Archconfraternity, and the concession spread from there. In 1856 Pius IX extended the feast to the universal Church.
Margaret Mary herself was declared Venerable in 1824, beatified by Pius IX on the eighteenth of September, 1864, and canonized by Benedict XV on the thirteenth of May, 1920. Leo XIII consecrated the whole human race to the Sacred Heart in 1899, by the encyclical Annum sacrum, calling it the greatest act of his pontificate. Pius XI, in 1928, devoted the encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor to the duty of reparation, which was the heart of her message, and in 1929 placed her feast in the General Calendar on the seventeenth of October, the day of her death. In 1956, the centenary of the feast’s extension, Pius XII gave the devotion its fullest doctrinal treatment in Haurietis aquas, teaching that the Heart of Jesus is rightly honoured with the worship of latria, as the Heart of a divine Person, and as the natural symbol of the threefold love of the Word made flesh: His divine love, the infused charity of His human soul, and the sensible affection of His human nature.
The 1962 Missal keeps her feast on the seventeenth of October, as a feast of the third class. The Church gives her the Introit Sub umbra illius from the Canticle of Canticles, and lends her, in the Epistle and Gospel, the readings of the Mass of the Sacred Heart itself, as though to say that the saint is best honoured by the message she carried. The Collect, addressed directly to Our Lord, asks that by her merits and imitation we may love Him in all things and above all things, and so be found worthy of an abiding dwelling in His Heart.
XII. What the life teaches
That God chooses the little ones. Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones. The devotion that changed the prayer of the Latin Church was entrusted not to a theologian or a bishop or a foundress, but to a notary’s daughter who was slow at her tasks and thought deluded by her own community. Her obscurity was not an obstacle to her mission. It was part of its proof.
That obedience is the test of every private grace. She was commanded to doubt her visions, to keep silent, to give up the very practices Our Lord had asked of her, and she obeyed every time, believing that He would accomplish His will through her superiors rather than in spite of them. He did. The tradition of the Church has always held that a revelation which leads its recipient into disobedience is to be suspected, and one which leads into deeper obedience is to be trusted. Margaret Mary is the classic case.
That love asks for reparation. Her message was not merely that Christ loves us; every catechism had said that. It was that His love is wounded by indifference, above all in the Blessed Sacrament, and that those who love Him are asked to console Him by giving back what others refuse. Pius XI called reparation a duty, not a devotional luxury. The First Friday and the Holy Hour are not private consolations for the pious; they are the practical form of that duty for ordinary Catholics.
That the remedy for a cold religion is not a softer doctrine but a warmer heart. She lived in the century of Jansenism, when many good Catholics had learned to approach the sacraments rarely and with dread, and to think of God chiefly as a judge. The answer she was given was not to deny His justice, which she feared as much as anyone, but to show His Heart: that the Judge is also the Lover who has spent Himself to the last. Frequent Communion, which St. Pius X would restore to the whole Church two centuries later, was already in germ in what Our Lord asked of her.
Practice
Examine. Is my religion more fear than love, or more sentiment than love? Do I approach the Blessed Sacrament with the coldness and routine Our Lord complained of to St. Margaret Mary? And when I have been doubted, corrected, or misunderstood by those over me, have I answered with her obedience, or with resentment and self-justification?
Do. If you have never made the Nine First Fridays, begin them on the first Friday of November: Confession, Communion offered in reparation to the Sacred Heart, on nine consecutive first Fridays. If you have made them, make them again, for others. And enthrone or renew the image of the Sacred Heart in your home, with the family’s act of consecration, so that the request she carried to a king is kept in at least one house.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Domine Iesu Christe, qui investigabiles divitias Cordis tui beatæ Margaritæ Mariæ Virgini mirabiliter revelasti: da nobis eius meritis et imitatione; ut te in omnibus et super omnia diligentes, iugem in eodem Corde tuo mansionem habere mereamur: Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patre in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst wondrously reveal to blessed Margaret Mary, Virgin, the unsearchable riches of Thy Heart: grant us, by her merits and by imitation of her, that loving Thee in all things and above all things, we may be worthy to have an abiding dwelling in that same Heart of Thine: Who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Cor Iesu sacratissimum, miserere nobis. “Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.”
Devote. It is Saturday, and the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Sorrowful Mysteries tonight, and at the first, the Agony in the Garden, keep the hour she was asked to keep: Could you not watch one hour with me? (Matt. 26:40). Close with the Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and ask St. Margaret Mary to obtain for you a heart that will not leave Him alone.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with St. Claude La Colombière, her director and defender, and with the earlier witnesses to the devotion, St. Gertrude the Great, St. Mechtilde of Hackeborn, and St. John Eudes. The Church History path treats the Visitation and its Salesian spirit, the Jansenist crisis in seventeenth-century France, and the long Roman examination of the cult from 1697 to 1856. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the theology of the Sacred Heart as Pius XII set it out in Haurietis aquas, the worship of latria due to the Humanity of Christ, and the Church’s teaching on private revelation. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path treats the First Fridays, the Holy Hour, the enthronement of the Sacred Heart in the home, and the practice of reparation.
Sancta Margarita Maria, virgo, apostola Sacratissimi Cordis Iesu, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, Autobiographie and Lettres, in Vie et Œuvres de sainte Marguerite-Marie Alacoque*, ed. Mgr. L. Gauthey (3 vols., Paris, 1915); the testimony of Mother Greyfié and the contemporaries of Paray (Mémoire des Contemporaines); J.-J. Languet de Gergy,* La Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marguerite-Marie (1729); St. Claude La Colombière, Retraite spirituelle (1684); Leo XIII, Annum sacrum (1899); Pius XI, Miserentissimus Redemptor (1928); Pius XII, Haurietis aquas (1956); the Roman Martyrology; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.vv. “St. Margaret Mary Alacoque” and “Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus”; Butler’s Lives of the Saints*. The words of the revelations are given in translation from her own account; elsewhere her writings are given in paraphrase.*