Under siege, Saint Catherine Labouré says Our Lady will guard her house

PARIS, autumn 1870 AD — The Daughters of Charity at Reuilly, at the poor eastern end of Paris, have turned their house into a hospital this autumn and fixed the Miraculous Medal to its doors and windows. The sick and the wounded eat first, and the sisters go hungry. One of them, a sister of sixty-four, works across the garden at the Hospice d’Enghien, an old people’s home the same sisters run. Through the siege and the hunger she has stayed completely calm.

She is Saint Catherine Labouré, and Paris does not know her name. France is at war with Prussia, and since September the Prussian armies have surrounded the city and cut it off from the rest of the world. The Medal on the doors of the house is the one St. Catherine was shown in the chapel of the sisters’ motherhouse forty years ago, and no one but her confessor knows that she is the sister who saw it.

In 1830 AD she was a novice of twenty-four at the motherhouse in the rue du Bac. On the night of July 18 that year the Blessed Virgin appeared to her in the chapel and told her: “My child, the times are very disastrous, great trials are about to come upon France, the throne will be overturned, the entire world will be in confusion by reason of miseries of every kind.” Later that night Our Lady warned St. Catherine that “the streets will flow with blood, the entire world will be in tribulation.” St. Catherine asked silently when this would happen. The answer she understood was forty years. That November the Blessed Virgin appeared to her again, framed by the words “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee,” and showed her the design of a medal.

In February 1831 AD St. Catherine was sent to the Hospice d’Enghien. The hospice stood beside the sisters’ house at Reuilly, at the far end of the Saint-Antoine district on the south-eastern edge of Paris. Besides the old, the hospice had for years taken in patients still recovering after they left the Paris hospitals. St. Catherine has worked there ever since. She took her turn in the kitchen, the linen room, the courtyard and the poultry yard, and spent longest of all in the old men’s ward.

This autumn all of Paris was short of food. On October 8 a fixed price for horse meat was published: 1 franc 40 centimes a kilo for the best cuts and 80 centimes for the rest. At Reuilly the sisters lived on short rations, and on some days a sister’s meal after a day of exhausting work was a piece of black bread.

A sister once asked St. Catherine why she did not scold one very troublesome old man in her ward. St. Catherine answered: “I cannot; I see God in him.” Each time she crossed the garden to Reuilly, she stopped in front of a statue of Our Lady and stood there with her hands joined. More than once girls of the Children of Mary, a society of young women at the house devoted to Our Lady, hid behind the shrubs to watch her.

Of the war, St. Catherine said: “Mon Dieu, que de sang, que de ruines!” (My God, how much blood, how many ruins!) But she stayed confident. With the Medal on the doors and windows, St. Catherine said: “La Vierge veillera, elle gardera tout. Il ne nous arrivera aucun mal.” (The Virgin will watch; she will guard everything. No harm will come to us.)