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feature · PARAY-LE-MONIAL, Burgundy, September 7, 1688 AD

The first Sacred Heart chapel is blessed; St. Margaret Mary kneels apart

Twenty-five clergy and a crowd the sisters could not keep out fill two hours of ceremonies in the convent garden; the sister who asked for it stays in another room.

Edition of · 4 min read

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque
An empty convent garden seen from under a stone cloister arcade, with gravel paths leading to a small stone chapel whose open door shows a dark painting of the Sacred Heart above a linen-covered altar.
The chapel of the Sacred Heart at the foot of the garden of the Visitation monastery at Paray-le-Monial, blessed on September 7, 1688 AD, with the picture Mother Marie-Françoise de Saumaise sent from Dijon on its altar.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of French religious oil painting of the later seventeenth century, from the paper's reference portrait based on Marguerite-Marie Alacoque — Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, religious of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary (Unknown, 19th century, Monastery of the Visitation, Paray-le-Monial (France)) View source artwork.

PARAY-LE-MONIAL, Burgundy, September 7, 1688 AD — Twenty-five clergy of the confraternity attached to the parish church of Paray-le-Monial, and with them the curés of the neighbouring parishes, gathered at that church this afternoon and walked in procession to the enclosure of the Visitation monastery. A crowd came with them, and the sisters could not keep it out of the garden. At the foot of that garden stands a small chapel, begun two years ago and finished this year. It was blessed today. The ceremony began at one o’clock and lasted two hours.

The building was put up to hold a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and it is the first chapel raised anywhere for that devotion. The devotion was given to a member of this house. Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque is forty-one, Assistant to the Superior and mistress of the school.

The greatest of the revelations of the Sacred Heart came to her in the monastery choir in June 1675 AD. She was shown the Heart of Jesus and asked that the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi be kept as a feast of reparation. Before that the sisters here had treated her as a visionary and believed neither her account nor her illnesses. The directors she was sent to consult condemned her prayer and forbade her to follow it. The opposition went on long after the revelation. Three years ago Mother Marie-Christine Melin, the Superior, shut the devotion inside the novitiate. She forbade St. Margaret Mary to put an image of the Sacred Heart where the community could see it, and took away her First Friday Communion.

That ended two years ago. On June 21, 1686 AD — the Friday after the octave, the day the revelation had named — the whole community at Paray gave itself to the Sacred Heart. Sister Mary Magdalen des Escures, one of the elders and until then the foremost opponent of the devotion, borrowed the novices’ picture. She set up a small altar in front of the grille in the choir, and left a card in her own handwriting inviting the rest of the religious to come and pay their homage. Then the sisters set about buying a picture of their own. The children of the school got their parents to contribute, and the lay sisters worked the garden and sold the produce. Mother Melin decided it would be better to wait and build a chapel to put the picture in, and building started that year. St. Margaret Mary told Mother Melin what Our Lord had said about the work. He was pleased with the care Mother Melin had taken to build a place where his Heart could be adored. He promised her that she would die while making an act of pure love.

The picture on the altar today came from Dijon. Mother Péronne-Rosalie Greyfié, now Superior at Semur, had had a miniature made and sent to Paray. Mother Marie-Françoise de Saumaise, Superior at Dijon and once Superior here, had it enlarged from that miniature. St. Margaret Mary had written of it: “I could not refrain from looking at it, for it is so beautiful.”

The chapel stands inside the enclosure and off the street. The garden took as many of the townspeople as it would hold; the rest were left outside the wall and made the circuit of the garden from there. Peasants knelt against the outer wall, facing the building they could not enter.

The devotion has been moving outward from this house. Letters carry it to the Visitation houses at Semur and at Dijon. Saint Claude de la Colombière, the Jesuit who was her director here in 1675 and 1676 AD, had asked her for a written account of the great revelation. He came back to the town and died here in 1682 AD. A copy of the account in his own hand was found in his journal of spiritual retreats, and the journal was printed at Lyons in 1684 AD and widely read. Her brother Jean-Chrysostome Alacoque, mayor of Bois-Sainte-Marie, has offered to build a chapel of the Sacred Heart there at his own expense. Her brother Jacques, the curé of that parish, is founding a Mass to be said every Friday of the year and sung solemnly on every First Friday.

Before there was a chapel there was an alcove opposite the novitiate staircase, where the novices leaving her charge had set the small picture they used to wear by turns. That alcove was fitted up as an oratory, and it was ready long before the building in the garden was finished. Sisters who could not get to the chapel in the garden went there instead. She wrote to Mother Greyfié two years ago: “I shall die happy now that the Heart of my Saviour begins to be known.”

She was not in the garden to see the picture on the altar. Through the whole two hours, and for a long time after the clergy had gone, she knelt in the convent chapel, absorbed in God. Among the many who wanted to speak to her, not one dared. People who had never seen her before came and stood around her out of curiosity, and some of them waited to see whether she would change her position. She did not move.

What passed in her during those hours she never told anyone. Tradition at Paray holds that her ecstasy that day lasted about three hours.

About this story

Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.

The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.

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Image. AI-generated image, in the manner of French religious oil painting of the later seventeenth century, from the paper's reference portrait based on Marguerite-Marie Alacoque — Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, religious of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary (Unknown, 19th century, Monastery of the Visitation, Paray-le-Monial (France)) — see the original.

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More on this saint

An oil painting of a candlelit stone room in which a young woman in a dark brown gown, white collar and linen coif kneels holding a prayer-book stuffed with written sheets, while a seated friar in a grey habit and knotted cord speaks to her, one loose sheet lying on the floorboards.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of French religious oil painting of the later seventeenth century, from the paper's reference portrait based on Apparition du Christ à Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (Unknown, 18th century, Musée du Hiéron, Paray-le-Monial; photograph by Benjamin Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0) View source artwork.

A Franciscan friar came to preach the Jubilee at Verosvres, in Burgundy, in 1670 AD. Years later, at her spiritual director's order, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque wrote down how the friar set aside the long confession she had prepared. The friar then persuaded her brother to stop keeping her from the convent.

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A painting of a bare convent cell lit by a small high window: a nun in a black veil and white linen collar sits up in a narrow wooden bed while a man in a brown coat on a chair beside her rests his hand on her arm, and a second nun stands at the foot of the bed holding a bowl.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a French seventeenth-century religious oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (Unknown artist, 19th century, Monastery of the Visitation, Paray-le-Monial) View source artwork.

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