Church inquiry opens into the medal; priest will not name the sister

PARIS, February 16, 1836 AD — The witness called first this morning is Fr Jean-Marie Aladel, of the Congregation of the Mission. He has been confessor and director to Saint Catherine Labouré since she entered the seminary of the Daughters of Charity in April 1830 AD, and he is the only man who knows that she is the sister to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared. Questioning him is M. Quentin, vicar general of Paris and promoter of the diocese. The inquiry was ordered by Mgr Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen, Archbishop of Paris. Two other people are quoted below only where Fr Aladel reports their words: St. Catherine Labouré, and the Blessed Virgin, whose words St. Catherine reported to him.

What is being examined is the small oval medal Paris has been wearing for three and a half years. The first ones were struck on June 30, 1832 AD by the engraver M. Vachette of the quai des Orfèvres; more than five hundred thousand had been made by the autumn of 1834 AD, and more than a million by last year. The design came from what the Blessed Virgin showed a young Daughter of Charity in the chapel of the motherhouse at 140 rue du Bac in November 1830 AD, and what that sister then told her confessor.

Until now the medal has had nothing behind it but the archbishop’s spoken word. The law of the Church requires a formal judgment before a new image may be brought into the worship of the Church, so Mgr de Quélen has ordered this examination of where it came from. Witnesses appear before the promoter over sittings that will run into July; a written record of each sitting is kept, and those who give evidence sign it.

One witness will not appear. St. Catherine Labouré made Fr Aladel promise at the outset that her name would never be spoken; he could speak of the apparition and nothing else. Fr Aladel has told the promoter that he tried to persuade St. Catherine Labouré to come and could not. Questioning her would serve no purpose in any case, he said: she has forgotten everything about it.

She came to you in the seminary, a country girl with almost no schooling. What did she tell you, and what did you make of it?

That the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her, more than once; that she had been charged to tell her director what she had seen and heard; and that a medal was to be struck in honour of the Immaculate Conception. Fr Aladel testified today that he listened with mistrust and treated what she said as of little value, the daydreaming of a young girl. He told St. Catherine Labouré to regard it the same way, and reproached her for a want of submission.

So she stopped telling you.

“Such was the reason,” Fr Aladel told the promoter, “that she spoke to him concerning the matter but three times, although the visions were much oftener repeated.”

What changed your mind?

During the July disturbances of 1830 AD she told him after confession that a bishop would come to Saint-Lazare asking for refuge, and could be taken in without fear. Fr Aladel paid little attention and walked home, where he was met at the door with the news that Mgr Frayssinous, Bishop of Hermopolis, had just arrived begging asylum. Months more passed with nothing done. Then she brought him a rebuke: the Blessed Virgin had complained that her orders had not been carried out. Her own answer to that complaint, as he reports it, was: “But, my good Mother, you see that he will not believe me.” The Blessed Virgin answered her: “Be calm; a day will come when he will do what I desire; he is my servant, and he would fear to displease me.”

What did you take to the archbishop, and when?

At the beginning of 1832 AD, on a visit made with M. Étienne, then procurator general, he laid the apparitions before Mgr de Quélen. The archbishop said he saw nothing in it contrary to the faith, had no objection to the medal being struck at once, and wanted some of the first ones sent to him. The cholera that broke out that February held the work up until June. When he sent her one of the first medals struck, she said only: “Now it must be disseminated.”

What is the tribunal being shown as proof?

The proofs admitted are five. The first is the sister’s character; the second, the care her director took against being deceived. The third is the content of the apparition. It holds nothing contrary to the teaching of the Church. The fourth is the spread of the medal, vouched for by Vachette’s registry and by the publisher M. Bailly, who attests a hundred and nine thousand copies of Fr Aladel’s notice of it sold in sixteen months. The fifth is the cures and the conversions, several of them attested in law by witnesses who have come before the promoter and signed the record. Of the first months Fr Aladel testifies: “As soon as the medal was struck, it was freely circulated, especially among the Daughters of Charity… Three cures and three conversions were wrought, some of them in Paris and some in the diocese of Meaux, all of a very sudden and unexpected nature.”

You told the promoter she would not come, and you have given him the apparition without the name. When did you stop doubting her?

Several of the things St. Catherine Labouré foretold came about. After that, Fr Aladel testified, he began to think that the Spirit of God was at work in her, and could believe the rest of what she had told him. The tribunal has been told that he took every precaution against deception, and gave way to her pleading only because he was afraid of displeasing the Blessed Virgin, and on the advice of his superiors.

He had once asked St. Catherine Labouré: “Will you and I see the accomplishment of all these things?” She answered: “If we do not, others will.”