St. Margaret Mary writes how a Jubilee friar won over her brother

VEROSVRES, Burgundy, 1670 AD — This year a Franciscan friar came to Verosvres, in the Charolais, to preach the Jubilee that Pope Clement X granted when he became Pope. Everyone in the parish wanted to gain the Jubilee by making a general confession to him, a confession of the sins of a whole life. In her Autobiography, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque tells how the friar would not let her read out the pages of sins she had prepared. The friar then argued with her brother, Jean-Chrysostome Alacoque, until Chrysostome agreed to let her become a nun and went to arrange her dowry.

St. Margaret Mary began the account in 1685 AD, as a Visitation nun at Paray-le-Monial, because her director, the Jesuit Father Francis Rolin, ordered her to. She opened the copybook with an apology to God: “It is for the love of Thee, O my God, and through obedience, that I submit to write this account, asking Thy pardon for the resistance I have made.”

St. Margaret Mary was twenty-two or twenty-three and living at home. Several people, priests among them, told St. Margaret Mary that her mother could not live without her. If she left, they said, God would hold her answerable for her mother’s death. With their father, the royal notary Claude Alacoque, dead since 1655 AD, Chrysostome was head of the family. Chrysostome had never agreed to her becoming a nun. He offered to add his own money to what his sister would bring to a marriage if she would take a husband. St. Margaret Mary refused.

The relatives who would let her become a nun wanted her with the Ursulines at Mâcon. A cousin, the daughter of her uncle and guardian, was a nun there and pressed her to join. St. Margaret Mary wanted the Visitation instead. Its nuns were called les Sainte-Maries (the Holy Marys), and that name alone drew her to the order, though she knew nothing else about it.

Before the friar came, St. Margaret Mary had prayed for a guide: “Alas! my Lord, give me someone who will lead me to Thee!” The next section of her account opens with the friar: “I did not know what ‘direction’ meant; but I felt an ardent desire to obey, and in His Goodness, my Divine Master permitted that, on the occasion of a Jubilee, a Franciscan Father should come to our house.”

The friar stayed the night at the Alacoque house to hear the family’s confessions, and St. Margaret Mary had written hers out about a fortnight before. St. Margaret Mary writes that what hurt most was not being able to see her sins clearly: “My greatest anguish arose from the fact that I was so blinded as not to be able to recognize them, nor express myself in such a manner as to show their full enormity.” So she copied nearly every sin listed in the examination of conscience in her prayer-book into the confession, including some that horrified her to name. She gives her reasoning: “It may be that I committed these sins without knowing or I may have forgotten them, and it is but right that I should have the confusion of accusing myself thereof, in order to make satisfaction to the Divine Justice.” In the next sentence she adds that if she had really believed herself guilty of those things she would have been inconsolable, “if My Divine Master had not assured me that He pardoned all to a will free from malice.”

The friar would not listen to the list. St. Margaret Mary writes: “When I made my confession to that good Father, he made me pass over several sheets of paper without allowing me to read them, although I begged him to permit me to satisfy my conscience, being a greater sinner than he thought me to be.” He told her that a penitent should confess simply and sincerely, without making anything bigger or smaller than it was. She writes: “I was in great peace after this confession.”

St. Margaret Mary then told the friar that her brother had kept her in the world for four or five years while she thought constantly of becoming a nun. She writes that the friar took the matter up with Chrysostome: “Thereupon he remonstrated so much with my brother that the latter afterwards asked me whether I still had the intention of entering religion, and when I replied that I would rather die than change, he promised to satisfy me in the matter.”

Chrysostome went to Mâcon to arrange her dowry, the sum a convent asked for when it accepted a new nun. The money was her own. Chrysostome came back and told her: “They ask four thousand [livres], it remains for you to do as you please with your money, for nothing as yet has been settled.” St. Margaret Mary writes that she answered her brother firmly: “It will never be settled, for I wish to go to ‘the Holy Marys,’ in a distant convent where I shall have neither relations nor friends, because I desire to be a religious for the love of God alone.”

The next May, Chrysostome took her to the Visitation nuns at Paray-le-Monial, and as she entered the parlour she heard the words she records as Christ’s: “It is here that I would have thee to be.”