A cross for Paris — and she couldn't say her name

REUILLY, Paris, 1848 AD — A ward of old men. A poultry yard. And a cross so big that people would travel from all over France to see it.

Saint Catherine Labouré is forty-two. She has lived where the eastern streets of Paris run out since 1831 AD. She is a Daughter of Charity. She has charge of the old men’s ward at the Hospice d’Enghien, and of the poultry yard.

A cross over the city

This year a vision came to her suddenly. A huge cross was to be raised in Paris. People would come to it from all over France, and from the most distant countries. St. Catherine told her confessor, Fr Jean-Marie Aladel, what she had seen. He did not act on it.

The promise she had made him

She wanted a cross set up in Paris, and she could not ask for it in her own name. At the start of all this she had made Fr Aladel promise that her name would never be spoken. He could talk about what she had seen, but never about the sister who had seen it. He kept that promise. The Archbishop of Paris, Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen, asked him for her name, and he did not give it. The archbishop even offered to let her come veiled and speak without being seen.

Fr Aladel had done one thing she asked him. On November 27, 1830 AD, the Blessed Virgin had told her to have a medal struck. She was shown the model for it. She told Fr Aladel, and he acted: the first medals were struck on June 30, 1832 AD.

There was one thing he had never done. In 1841 AD she wrote to him, begging him to put up an altar. It was to stand on the spot where Our Lady appeared. She signed that letter with no name at all: “Unworthy Daughter of Charity, Servant of the Poor Sick.” Seven years on there was no altar.

She wrote the vision of the cross down anyway.

The summer everything else happened

In June the fighting reached her own streets. Barricades went up across the east of the city. Wounded men from both sides were carried into the hospice at Reuilly. The Archbishop of Paris, Denis-Auguste Affre, went to the barricade at the entrance to the street that runs down to the hospice. He went to ask for peace. He had spoken only a few words when the men there heard shots. They thought they had been betrayed, and opened fire. The archbishop fell. He died on June 27.

No cross was raised. Not that year, and not in the twenty-eight years St. Catherine had left. The altar went up in the rue du Bac in 1880 AD, four years after she died. The marble Virgin of the Globe was not set in place until 1930 AD. Of that waiting she said: “C’est le martyre de ma vie” (That is the martyrdom of my life).

Today the Diocese of Paris honours three places in the city where St. Catherine is remembered. One of them is 77 rue de Reuilly, where she lived most of her life and died.