The seer of the Miraculous Medal used to say that “Trust always has this reward. Asking with confidence, one receives more, with more certainty and more abundantly. Trust opens up to us the Wise and Immaculate Heart of Mary”.
Newsdesk (30/11/2022 11:37 AM, Gaudium Press) Towards the end of 1858, news was going round Paris about the apparitions of Our Lady to a peasant girl from the Pyrenees in Lourdes, a small corner of France. Impressions were exchanged about the extraordinary cures that took place after the use of the waters of the miraculous spring of the Grotto of Massabielle and, above all, there was talk of the celebrity of the young seer, Bernadette Soubirous, whose unpretentiousness and unshakable faith aroused the admiration of the people, who already venerated her as a saint.
Spreading rapidly through the French capital, the news also reached the ears of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul who were serving the elderly in the nursing home in Enghien. They engaged in an animated conversation, during which an exclamation came from the lips of a sister who, though discreet, was seized with vehement enthusiasm at that moment: “It’s the same one! None of them grasped the meaning of these words. Looking at each other strangely, they continued talking, as if they had heard nothing.
“A mystic rainbow between the Rue du Bac and Lourdes”
In 1830, a novice of the Mother House of the Company of the Daughters of Charity, located in Paris on Rue du Bac, had also been granted apparitions of Our Lady, which had already acquired worldwide fame. In addition to making important revelations about the future of the Congregation and of France, the Mother of God had entrusted the seer with the mission of having a medal made, through which she would bestow abundant graces upon the world. The first copies were distributed because of the cholera epidemic that was raging in Paris, and so many and such surprising cures were attributed to the use of this medal – that not without reason the people called it Miraculous and that in a short time it had already spread to several countries.
The name of the seer, however, remained unknown, even among her sisters in habit. And it was only revealed after her death: it was the silent, diligent and always good humoured Sister Catherine Laboure! Her blue eyes, serene and clear, shone with joy on hearing for the first time of the recent apparitions of Lourdes, an echo of those in the Rue du Bac. It was another light blazing on the same path of mercy traced out by the Queen of Heaven to lead humanity into a new era of Marian graces.
There was no doubt, it was “the same one”! To the novice of Paris, the Virgin had taught the formula for invoking her: “O Mary conceived without sin! To Bernadette, this is how she had introduced herself: “I am the Immaculate Conception. Exultant with joy, Sister Catherine began to feel deep admiration for the new seer, even though she did not know her. She did not know that at Lourdes, Bernadette was wearing the Miraculous Medal around her neck when she saw the Mother of God, and she probably nourished in her heart noble feelings of veneration for the unknown visionary of the Virgin of the Medal… From the supernatural perspective, there was a close union of the souls of the two saints, forming “like a mystical rainbow between the Rue du Bac and Lourdes”.
Saint Bernadette gave proofs of heroic humility, returning to the Queen of Heaven the honours and praises that the people paid her. Saint Catherine practised humility in a different way: she lived with the most modest duties in the asylum of Enghien, where she served the elderly and the poor for more than forty years.
A childhood stamped with faith and seriousness
When Catherine was born on May 2nd, 1806, the wounds of irreligion opened by the Revolution of 1789 were still present in France. In the small Burgundian village of Fain-lès-Moutiers, where the Labouré family lived, there was no priest. To baptize the newborn, the parish priest of the neighboring hamlet had to be called. Despite the widespread religious negligence of the time, from which her father, Pierre Labouré was not excluded, the faith of Catherine and her nine siblings was safeguarded and strengthened thanks to the commitment of her mother, Magdalene Gontard, whose main concern in bringing up her children was to inculcate in them an unlimited trust in the Blessed Virgin.
The first years of Zoé – as she was called before entering the religious life – were happy ones, amid the joys of a childhood perfumed by innocence. From an early age, she acquired a taste for prayer and did not hesitate to abandon her childish amusements when her mother called her to pray together before the simple statue of Our Lady enthroned in a room of the house.
Gifted with a precocious sense of responsibility and seriousness, Zoé soon noticed her mother’s difficulties in performing the arduous tasks of housekeeping, and decided to help her. Before she was eight years old, she already knew how to sew, milk the cows, prepare the soup and sweep the floor. And she herself explained the compunction that moved her to embrace with joy the monotonous daily chore – both at home, during her childhood and youth, and in the nursing home in Enghien, for more than four decades – in simple words full of light: “When one does the will of God, one never feels bored”.
A transforming grace
At the age of nine, little Zoé saw the horizon of her life clouded by tragedy: in October 1815, her mother died. As she gazed upon her inert body, she wept profusely, but not for long, for her mother herself had taught her whom to turn to in times of trouble. After the first shock, she went to the room where the statue of Our Lady was, before which she had prayed so often in her mother’s company. Resolute, she climbed up on a chair to put herself at the height of the image, embraced it and exclaimed, between sobs: “From now on, you will be my Mother!”. The response of the Queen of Heaven was immediate. The child, who had arrived before her weak and broken down in tears, went away strong and ready to face any adversity. That was the last time she wept in her life, for the virtue of fortitude accompanied her in a crescendo until the end of her days.
In 1871, when she was already a 65-year-old nun, the revolutionary movement of the Paris Commune provided her with several occasions to manifest this virtue with heroism. One day, for example, she took the initiative of going to the headquarters of the insurgents to defend her superior against whom a warrant had been issued for her arrest. She presented her arguments with such firmness before the sixty or so men present that she was finally victorious. Impressed, the revolutionaries began to treat her with great deference; they even asked her to testify in the trial of a prisoner, and took her testimony, favorable to the accused, as the last word in the case.
A consequence of this childhood grace was the constancy of mind with which she endured the numerous expressions of impatience and incredulity of her confessor when, on the orders of Our Lady, she told him of the visions she had seen. A few months before her death, she confided to her superior that the priest’s attitude was a real martyrdom for her. She suffered with the strength of martyrs this silent holocaust, which the Blessed Virgin herself had announced to her in the first of her apparitions: “My daughter, the Good Lord wants to entrust you with a mission. You will have many difficulties, but you will overcome them, considering that you are acting for His glory. You will know how to discern what comes from the Good Lord. You will be tormented until you tell the one who is to be in charge of leading you. You will be contradicted. But you will have grace. Do not be afraid. Say everything with confidence and simplicity. Have confidence.”
A true daughter of St Vincent de Paul
“You will be happy in coming to me. God has plans for you”. When she was about fourteen years old, Catherine heard these words addressed to her in a dream by an unknown priest, whose penetrating and light-filled gaze engraved itself forever on her memory. Some years later, while visiting a house of the Daughters of Charity, she came across a picture of the founder of the Congregation, St Vincent de Paul, in whose face she recognised the priest of the dream. It was then that the vocation to which she had so often felt drawn became clear to her: she was to be a daughter of St Vincent!
However, when on her 21st birthday, May 2nd, 1827, she announced her decision at home, her father categorically opposed it. After trying in vain to dissuade her from religious life, he sent her to Paris to work in one of his brothers’ restaurants, under the illusion that she would find a good match and get married there.
But that environment, frequented by rough and often immodest workers, did nothing but strengthen the unblemished purity of the young girl. Such was her love for her vocation that she was already behaving like a true Daughter of Charity, fulfilling to perfection the recommendations made by the Saint to his spiritual daughters, including this one: “If one degree of perfection is required of [cloistered] religious, two must be required of the Daughters of Charity”.
Catherine wanted nothing more than to embrace this daring ideal fully, and she persevered in her purpose until she overcame her father’s obstinacy: “If we do the little things well, we will do the big things well,” she would write decades later at the end of a period of spiritual exercises.
The trust and simplicity of an innocent soul
Finally, on April 21st, 1830, Catherine arrived at the Convent in Rue du Bac. The Council of Superiors soon discerned in her a genuine vocation: “She is 23 years old and is very suitable for our community: pious, good character, strong temperament, love of work and very cheerful“, was the opinion written about her. Moreover, she was a genuine peasant girl, just as St Vincent wished, who took the good qualities of the peasant girls as the natural basis for the ideal of virtue of the Daughters of Charity. And, whether in community life or in the service of the poor, and even during the supernatural manifestations of which she was the object, one of the virtues most loved by the Holy Founder always shone in Sister Catherine: simplicity of heart.
“The spirit of the peasant women is very simple: no trace of pretence nor words of double meaning; they are not stubborn nor attached to their opinions. [Thus, my daughters, must be the Daughters of Charity, and you will know that you are so if you are simple, without stubbornness, submissive to the opinion of others and candid in your words, and if your hearts do not think one thing while your mouths pronounce another. This ideal outlined by St Vincent found, after his death, almost two centuries later, perfect fulfilment in the soul of this beloved daughter.
The week after her arrival at the convent, the heart of St. Vincent appeared to her three times on consecutive days, foretelling the impending doom that would befall France, with the promise that the two Congregations he had founded would not perish. The happy novice had the grace of also seeing Christ present in the Sacred Host during the whole time of her novititate, “except each time I doubted”, she confided.
Imbued with the faith that moves mountains and attracts God’s benevolence, Catherine did not hesitate to ask for more: she wanted to see Our Lady. On the eve of the Founder’s feast – then celebrated on July 19th – she confided her wish to him in a brief prayer, and went to bed hopeful: “I went to bed with the idea that that very night I would see my Good Mother. I had wanted to see her for a long time. And she was generously granted, not only “that very night”, but also in two other apparitions, one in November and another in December of the same year 1830.
As the years went by, her filial and unlimited trust in those three pillars of devotion intensified, to such an extent that shortly before she died, she could not hide her amazement when the superior asked her if she was not afraid of death: “Why should I be afraid to go and see Our Lord, His Mother and St Vincent?
“The Blessed Virgin has chosen well”
Saint Catherine never violated the secret about her being the seer and messenger of the apparitions of the Miraculous Medal. However, many people came to glimpse in her the favorite of the Queen of Heaven, such was her love of God, not only affective, because her ardent piety was undeniable, but also effective, as one of her contemporaries testified: “Her actions, in themselves ordinary, she did them in an extraordinary way. There was in her something discreet, lofty and ineffable.
Her holiness was the main protector of the secret. To the Sisters who dared to question her on this matter, her answer always consisted of absolute silence. A silence born of humility, with nothing taciturn or harsh about it; on the contrary, a sacred silence, which even stirred veneration.
When, after her death, the name of the seer of Rue du Bac was announced to the Daughters of Charity, they reacted more with admiration than surprise. It was not difficult to associate the exemplary sister with the figure – already somewhat mythified – of the unknown seer. And it was impossible not to be dazzled by the excellence of her humility which kept her anonymous even while she exercised a mission of universal reach.
Perhaps at that moment it occurred to the sisters to remember the innocent saying that the children of the orphanage run by the Daughters of Charity used to repeat to each other as they watched Sister Catherine Laboure from afar: “The Blessed Virgin has chosen well”. Could these words, so true, have been merely the fruit of childish imagination, or had God, once again in history, revealed to the little ones the mysteries hidden from the wise and the learned?
Even so, more luminous than her heroic silence is the lesson of filial trust left by Saint Catherine in the Mother who never abandons. “Trust always has this reward. Asking with confidence, one receives more, with more certainty and more abundantly. Trust opens up to us the Wise and Immaculate Heart of Mary”“.
By Sister Isabel Cristina Lins Brandão Veas, EP
Compiled by Roberta MacEwan
