Pope Pius IX declares Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque Blessed in Rome

ROME, September 18, 1864 AD — The cannon of the Castel Sant’Angelo began firing at first light. Hours later the apostolic decree of Pope Pius IX was read out in the Basilica of St Peter. Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Visitation sister who died at Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy in 1690 AD, may now be called Blessed and venerated publicly by the faithful. She had been dead 173 years and eleven months.

What was settled today had been contested in her lifetime by the people who lived with her. Christ had shown her his Heart and charged her with getting it worshipped. He asked her to have the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi kept as a feast of the Sacred Heart, with Communion and a solemn act of reparation. That meant persuading, in order, the sisters of her own house, the priests who directed her, and at last Rome. The sisters at Paray thought she was imagining it, and believed neither her ecstasies nor the pain in her side. When she asked the doctor to bleed her they laughed at her, and the doctor said bleeding would be no use and would do her harm. The priests whom her superiors called in judged that St. Margaret Mary was wrong to pray as she did. They ordered her to stop, and told her to act on nothing she was given in prayer.

The decree read in St Peter’s puts the Church’s own judgment on the record. Christ, it says, “intimated to her that it would be most pleasing to Him if the worship of His most Sacred Heart, burning with love for mankind, were established, and that He wished the charge of this to be consigned to her.”

Beatification is a permission, and a bounded one: the Pope allows the faithful to venerate a person and to call her Blessed, in named places and in named rites. What was granted today is narrow. Her body and relics may be shown to the faithful. Her Mass and Office may be said on October 17, the day she died, in the diocese of Autun and in every house of the Visitation in the world, and nowhere else. The decision is the Pope’s, and he takes it after the cardinals of the Congregation of Rites have weighed the candidate’s virtues and the miracles worked at her intercession. The decree names those who asked for this one: nearly all the bishops of France, and the religious of the Visitation.

The gathering of evidence began in 1715 AD. Mgr d’Hallencourt, the Bishop of Autun, had documents on her life and miracles drawn up at the urging of Mother Anne-Élisabeth de la Garde, then superior at Paray. Many of the sisters who had lived with her were still alive to give evidence. Then the Revolution stopped the cause for more than a hundred years. It closed the convent at Paray along with the rest of the convents of France and drove the sisters out, and they took her coffin with them. In 1823 AD they bought the house back for fifty thousand francs, and the whole town walked with the old sisters as they carried her remains home. On March 30, 1824 AD, Pope Leo XII signed the commission introducing the cause, and she was declared Venerable.

Six years later the Holy See’s examiners sat at Paray for five months. Before going back to Rome they opened her tomb to identify the relics, with Mgr d’Héricourt, by then the Bishop of Autun, presiding and four physicians present. The flesh was gone and the bones dry; the head was whole after a hundred and forty years, and the physicians put that in the record they signed. Two people were cured on the spot that July, and one of the two cures was sent to Rome, examined and declared miraculous.

A decree of August 23, 1846 AD, found that her virtues had reached an heroic degree. For eighteen years after that the Congregation of Rites worked through the miracles claimed at her intercession. The devotion had long since gone beyond France and the Visitation: in 1856 AD Pope Pius IX extended the feast of the Sacred Heart, until then kept only in certain dioceses, to the whole Church.

Five years ago the bishops of England, meeting in council under Cardinal Wiseman, sent a petition of their own to Rome for her beatification. On April 24 this year Pope Pius IX pronounced the miracles true, and on June 24 he decreed that the honours of the Blessed might be paid her. In July her relics were carried in procession at Paray, from the cloister to a throne set up in the middle of the choir, at the grille where she had once knelt and seen the Heart of Jesus shown to her.

St Peter’s was lit up for the ceremony. The apostolic decree was read out, and at the reading the Te Deum (We praise thee, O God), the Church’s hymn of thanksgiving, was intoned. The bells of Rome took it up across the city, and the cannon of the Castel Sant’Angelo fired again. Then the veil came down from the picture of the new Blessed. It shows her ascending on her way to Heaven.

In the evening Pope Pius IX came back to the picture and knelt in front of it, with more than two hundred French priests in the procession behind him.