Fr Aladel's manual for Catholic girls goes through edition after edition

PARIS, 1848 AD — Fr Jean-Marie Aladel, director of the Daughters of Charity since 1846 AD, has published a manual for the Children of Mary this year, and new editions are following one after another. It is a working rulebook: the rules of the association, the privileges of belonging to it and the obligations that come with them. The girls it is written for are pupils in the schools the Daughters of Charity run and young women who work for their living, and they wear the Miraculous Medal on a blue ribbon as their badge.

The spread began a year ago. On June 20, 1847 AD, Pope Pius IX gave his permission in writing for the association to be set up in every school the sisters run. It was to carry the title of the Immaculate Conception. Fr Jean-Baptiste Étienne, superior general of the Priests of the Mission and the Daughters of Charity, had asked for it. Since then groups have been set up wherever the sisters have houses.

The association began with an instruction Saint Catherine Labouré brought to Fr Aladel, her confessor, in her first years in the community. She was a young sister then, and the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her at the motherhouse in 1830 AD. “The Blessed Virgin wishes you to found a Congregation, of which you will be the Superior,” she told him. “It is a Sodality of Children of Mary; the Blessed Virgin will shower many graces upon it, and indulgences will be granted it.” Fr Aladel set up the first groups in the sisters’ own houses. The first of them met at Beaune on December 8, 1838 AD. He formally established the association on February 2, 1840 AD.

While the manual goes through edition after edition, the other book Fr Aladel wrote has not been reprinted in six years. It is the short notice he brought out in 1834 AD. It told the story of where the medal came from and of the graces people had obtained by wearing it. When its eighth edition appeared in 1842 AD, St. Catherine Labouré told him he would never publish another.

The apparition was eighteen years ago. On the evening of November 27, 1830 AD, at the sisters’ motherhouse in the rue du Bac, the Blessed Virgin appeared to St. Catherine Labouré. An oval frame formed round her with words on it in gold: “O Mary! conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!” The Blessed Virgin charged her there with having a medal struck and put into people’s hands: “Have a medal struck upon this model, persons who wear it indulgenced, will receive great graces, especially if they wear it around the neck; graces will be abundantly bestowed upon those who have confidence.” The first medals were struck on June 30, 1832 AD.

When the medals reached her own community later that year, St. Catherine Labouré took one with the other sisters and gave no sign that she was the one who had been told to have them made. By the autumn of 1834 AD more than five hundred thousand had been struck, and the people of Paris were calling it the Miraculous Medal, for the cures and the conversions that followed it.

By the eighth edition, in 1842 AD, a hundred and thirty thousand copies of the notice had gone. Each new edition ran longer than the last, with further well-attested cures and conversions added.

None of the eight editions printed her name. They told the story of the apparition in a few lines only, because Fr Aladel had cut a great deal of what she told him out of every one of them. Fr Aladel feared above all that the sister who had brought him the Blessed Virgin’s orders would be noticed. He wanted St. Catherine Labouré to stay unknown as long as she lived.

In 1876 AD, thirty-four years after that eighth edition, St. Catherine Labouré said the same thing to another priest. Fr Chevalier, assistant of the Congregation of the Mission, had been visiting her at the Hospice d’Enghien in Paris, where she had charge of the old men’s ward. He came from time to time to hear whatever she was willing to say about the apparition. One day he mentioned the new edition of the notice that he was preparing. “When M. Aladel’s edition of 1842 appeared,” St. Catherine Labouré answered, “I said to him, truly, that he would never publish another, and that I would never see another edition, because it would not be finished during my lifetime.” “I shall catch you there,” Fr Chevalier said, expecting his own edition very soon.

Then difficulties nobody had foreseen held up the printing. St. Catherine Labouré died at Enghien on the evening of December 31, 1876 AD, with the edition still unfinished.

It came out after her death, opening with a life of her and printing what Fr Aladel had kept back.