Told she will not die, St. Margaret Mary teases her doctor

PARAY-LE-MONIAL, Burgundy, October 8, 1690 AD — On the first morning of the autumn retreat at the Visitation convent in Paray-le-Monial this week, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque could not get out of bed, and she said she was dying. None of the sisters was alarmed, because they had often seen her far more dangerously ill.

St. Margaret Mary was forty-three and Assistant to the Superior. In this convent she had received the revelations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and she had written down the words she was given.

Viaticum is the Holy Communion the Church gives to those in danger of death. St. Margaret Mary wanted it, and her Superior, Mother Catherine-Antoinette de Lévy-Chateaumorand, would not give it to a sister the doctor said was in no danger.

Doctor Billet, the convent’s doctor, had treated St. Margaret Mary for years, and he had seen her through worse. In 1674 AD she had sixty fevers, one after another, and nothing he gave her helped. The fevers stopped at once when the Superior at the time ordered her to ask God to cure her. Later Doctor Billet lanced her infected fingers to the bone two or three times. St. Margaret Mary neither moved nor made a sound, and the doctor remarked, smiling: “It is well to be a Saint!” More than once Doctor Billet told the sisters that no medicine could cure her, because her illnesses came from the love of God.

All through this year St. Margaret Mary had believed she would die soon. When the sisters expected to elect her Superior, she asked to be spared; Mother de Chateaumorand was chosen, and St. Margaret Mary was made Assistant again. The new Superior, worried by her weakness, forbade her every penance, even the hour of prayer she spent between eleven and midnight on Thursday nights. St. Margaret Mary said of it: “I shall not live much longer, for I have nothing to suffer; our dear Mother takes too much care of me.” In July she was allowed forty days of private prayer to prepare for death, and she kept up all her work as Assistant through them. She also confessed the sins of her whole life to her confessor, a Jesuit.

In October the sisters began their annual autumn retreat. On the eve, October 7, St. Margaret Mary came down with a slight fever. A sister asked whether she would be able to make the retreat. St. Margaret Mary answered: “Yes, but it will be the great retreat!” The next morning she could not leave her bed.

Doctor Billet examined her, saw nothing serious, and told her she would not die of it. St. Margaret Mary, a nun under vows talking to a layman, looked at him, smiling, and said: “After all, it is less culpable for a secular than for a religious to tell a lie.”

A little later St. Margaret Mary sent for Sister Marie-Nicole des Claines, whom she had trained as a novice and called her “little St. Louis of Gonzaga”. St. Margaret Mary wanted the young nun beside her at the end. “Come see me, my dear Sister,” St. Margaret Mary told her, “for I shall die of this illness. We shall not have a long time to be together.”

As the retreat went on, day after day, the other sisters grew uneasy at hearing a nun they knew to be holy speak of her death so certainly, and they asked Doctor Billet again and again to watch her closely. He came every day, often several times a day, and the more he saw of her, the surer he was that there was nothing dangerous. St. Margaret Mary’s calm and the doctor’s confidence reassured the sisters, and they stopped talking about the last sacraments.

St. Margaret Mary did not stop asking for Viaticum. She pressed the nuns nursing her to go to Mother de Chateaumorand for her. The request upset the Superior, and she refused it, because Doctor Billet had assured her that St. Margaret Mary was not dying. When a sister saw her pain and offered to ease it, St. Margaret Mary thanked her and said the little time she had left was too precious to waste. She was suffering a great deal, she said, but not as much as she wanted to.