The nun her sisters didn't believe gets Rome's cannon

ROME, September 18, 1864 AD — The cannon of the Castel Sant’Angelo started firing at first light. Hours later, inside the Basilica of St Peter, a decree from Pope Pius IX was read out loud. From now on Catholics may honour Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque in public and call her Blessed. She was a Visitation sister who died at Paray-le-Monial, in Burgundy, in 1690 AD. She had been dead 173 years and eleven months.

Being called Blessed is a permission, and it has limits. The Pope names the places where she may be honoured and the services she may be honoured in. Her Mass may be said on October 17, the day she died. It may be said in the diocese of Autun and in every house of the Visitation in the world, and nowhere else.

Christ had shown her his Heart, and he told her to get people to worship it. He asked her to have the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi kept as a feast of the Sacred Heart. First she had to win over the sisters of her own house, then the priests who directed her, and at last Rome.

The sisters at Paray thought she was imagining it. They did not believe the pain in her side was real either. She asked the doctor to bleed her, and they laughed at her. The doctor said bleeding would be no use and would do her harm. The priests her superiors called in decided she was wrong to pray the way she did. They ordered her to stop, and told her to act on nothing she was given in prayer.

The gathering of evidence started in 1715 AD. That year the Bishop of Autun had papers drawn up about her life and her miracles. Then the Revolution stopped it all for more than a hundred years. It closed the convent at Paray, along with all the other convents in France, and drove the sisters out. They took her coffin with them when they went.

In 1823 AD the sisters bought their house back for fifty thousand francs. The whole town walked with the old sisters as they carried her remains home. On March 30, 1824 AD, Pope Leo XII signed the papers that took her case to Rome. She was declared Venerable.

What they found when they opened her tomb

In 1830 AD officials sent from Rome opened her tomb. The Bishop of Autun was in charge, and four doctors stood by. The flesh was gone and the bones were dry. But her head was whole after a hundred and forty years, and the doctors wrote that down and signed it. Two people were cured on the spot that July. One of the two cures was sent to Rome, where it was studied and declared a miracle.

Nearly all the bishops of France asked Rome to let her be honoured as Blessed. The sisters of the Visitation asked too. On April 24 this year Pope Pius IX judged the miracles true. On June 24 he decreed that she could be given the honours of the Blessed.

St Peter’s was lit up for it. The decree was read out, and as it was read the Te Deum (We praise thee, O God) was begun. The bells of Rome took it up right across the city, and the cannon of the Castel Sant’Angelo fired again. Then the veil came down from a picture of her. The picture showed her rising on her way to Heaven.

In the evening Pope Pius IX came back to that picture and knelt down in front of it. More than two hundred French priests walked behind him.