St. Catherine Labouré is told a great cross must rise over Paris

REUILLY, Paris, 1848 AD — At the far end of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, in a hospice for the old where the eastern streets of Paris run out, a vision came suddenly to Saint Catherine Labouré this year. A monumental cross was to be raised in the city. It would be held in great veneration, and people would come to it from all over France and from the most distant countries, out of devotion, on pilgrimage and out of curiosity. St. Catherine told her confessor, Fr Jean-Marie Aladel, what she had seen. He did not act on it.

St. Catherine is forty-two, a Daughter of Charity, and has been in this quarter since 1831 AD, with charge of the old men’s ward at the Hospice d’Enghien and of the poultry yard. She wants a cross set up in Paris, and she cannot ask for it in her own name. At the start of all this she made Fr Aladel promise that her name would never be spoken, so that he was free to speak of the apparition and never of the sister who received it. He has kept that promise, even when the Archbishop of Paris, Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen, asked for her name and offered to let her come veiled and speak unseen.

The road out runs east. The hospice stands on the rue de Picpus, in the commune of Reuilly, at the end of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, in a poor quarter in the south-east. The Duchess of Bourbon founded it in 1819 AD in memory of her son the Duke of Enghien, as a refuge for old women; it later took convalescents from the Paris hospitals and old servants of the houses of Orléans and Condé. Its garden runs through to the sisters’ house at Reuilly, and a statue of Our Lady stands on the walk between the two. St. Catherine stops in front of it every day; the Children of Mary and the postulants have hidden behind the shrubs to watch her stand there.

The city has spread this way and the sisters have followed: a school in the rue de Reuilly, with a refuge, workrooms and a night school for boys. The children come off these streets, where girls of eight and ten and twelve go out to work in the factories.

St. Catherine came to this house on February 5, 1831 AD, a few weeks after the last of the apparitions in the chapel of the motherhouse in the rue du Bac. On November 27, 1830 AD, the Blessed Virgin had told her there to have a medal struck on the model she was shown. She told Fr Aladel, and he acted: the first medals were struck on June 30, 1832 AD, and the short account he published of where they came from ran through six editions inside a year. At the Archbishop of Paris’s canonical inquiry into the medal in 1836 AD he was the chief witness, and gave everything but her name.

There was one request he had never carried out. In 1841 AD she had written to him begging him to put up an altar on the spot where Our Lady appeared. She signed that letter with no name at all: “Unworthy Daughter of Charity, Servant of the Poor Sick.” Seven years on there was no altar, and no statue of Our Lady holding the globe.

She wrote the vision of the cross down anyway, pressed to put it all on paper, and signed the letter “toute dévouée au Sacré-Cœur de Jésus et de Marie” (wholly devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of Mary).

In June the fighting reached her own streets. Barricades went up across the east of the city, the fighting was savage and the reprisals that followed were brutal, and wounded from both sides were carried into the hospice at Reuilly. The Archbishop of Paris, Denis-Auguste Affre, went to the barricade at the entrance to the faubourg Saint-Antoine — the street that runs down to the hospice — to ask for peace. He had spoken only a few words when the insurgents heard shots, thought they had been betrayed, and opened fire on the National Guard; the archbishop fell. He died on June 27.

No cross was raised, that year or in the twenty-eight years she had left. The altar went up in the rue du Bac in 1880 AD, four years after her death; the marble Virgin of the Globe was not set in place until 1930 AD. Of that waiting she said: “C’est le martyre de ma vie” (That is the martyrdom of my life).

The old people of the hospice were moved out to the Château d’Ambroise in May 1901 AD, and the buildings in the rue de Picpus were pulled down in 1905 AD. Her body lay in the vault under the chapel at Reuilly from January 1877 AD until 1933 AD, when it was carried back to the rue du Bac. The Diocese of Paris counts 77 rue de Reuilly, where she lived the greater part of her life and died, among the three places in the city where she is honoured today.