The friar who wouldn't listen to her list of sins

VEROSVRES, Burgundy, 1670 AD — A Franciscan friar was coming to stay at her family’s house. About two weeks before he came, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque wrote out her confession on sheets of paper. What upset her most was that she couldn’t see her own sins clearly. So she copied down nearly every sin listed in her prayer-book. Some of them horrified her to name. She thought she might have done them without knowing, or done them and forgotten.

St. Margaret Mary wrote about that confession years later, in 1685 AD, when she was a nun. Her spiritual director had ordered her to write an account of her life.

It was 1670 AD, in the village of Verosvres, in Burgundy. St. Margaret Mary was twenty-two or twenty-three. She wanted to be a nun. But her brother, Jean-Chrysostome Alacoque, was head of the family. He had kept her at home for four or five years.

The friar had come to preach because Pope Clement X had granted a Jubilee when he became Pope. Everyone in the parish wanted to take part in the Jubilee by making a general confession to the friar. He stayed the night at the Alacoque house to hear the family’s confessions.

The pages he skipped

When her turn came, the friar wouldn’t let her read the list. St. Margaret Mary wrote: “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.”

The friar told her to confess simply and honestly, without making anything bigger or smaller than it was. She wrote: “I was in great peace after this confession.”

A brother who said no

Chrysostome had never agreed to her becoming a nun. He was in charge because their father, Claude Alacoque, had died in 1655 AD. Chrysostome even offered to give his sister some of his own money toward a marriage if she would take a husband. St. Margaret Mary refused.

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 to blame for her mother’s death.

After her confession, St. Margaret Mary told the friar about her brother.

The friar argued long and hard with Chrysostome. Afterwards Chrysostome asked his sister whether she still meant to become a nun. She answered that she “would rather die than change”. Then Chrysostome promised to give her what she wanted.

Chrysostome went to Mâcon to arrange her dowry with the Ursuline nuns there. That was the convent some of her relatives wanted for her. The money was her own.

But St. Margaret Mary wanted a different order, the Visitation. She knew nothing about its nuns except their name, the Holy Marys. That name alone made her want to join them.

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 answered her brother: “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. As she went in, she heard words she wrote down as Christ’s: “It is here that I would have thee to be.”