Her doctor says she will live. She smiles and disagrees.

PARAY-LE-MONIAL, Burgundy, October 8, 1690 AD — All through 1690 AD, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque was sure she was going to die soon. She was forty-three, a nun of the Visitation convent in Paray-le-Monial, and Assistant to the Superior. In this convent, Jesus had revealed his Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary. She had written down the words she was given.

That year the sisters chose a new Superior, Mother de Chateaumorand. She was worried by how weak St. Margaret Mary was. Mother de Chateaumorand banned all of St. Margaret Mary’s penances, the hard things she chose to do. She even banned the hour of prayer St. Margaret Mary kept from eleven to 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.”

Being ill was nothing new for St. Margaret Mary. In 1674 AD she had sixty fevers, one after another. Nothing the convent’s doctor, Doctor Billet, gave her helped. The fevers stopped at once when the Superior of those days ordered her to ask God to cure her. More than once Doctor Billet told the sisters that no medicine could cure her. He said her illnesses came from the love of God.

A fever the night before

Every autumn the sisters made a retreat together. On October 7, the day before it began, 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 couldn’t get out of bed, and she said she was dying. None of the other nuns was alarmed, because they had often seen her much sicker than this.

Doctor Billet had looked after St. Margaret Mary for years. He checked her and found nothing serious. He told her she would not die of it. St. Margaret Mary looked at him, smiling, and teased him: “After all, it is less culpable for a secular than for a religious to tell a lie.” In her words, Doctor Billet was a “secular”, a lay person. St. Margaret Mary was a “religious”, a nun under vows.

A little later St. Margaret Mary sent for Sister Marie-Nicole des Claines, a young nun she had trained. She 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.”

She kept asking

As the retreat went on, the other sisters grew uneasy. They knew St. Margaret Mary was holy, and here she was, speaking of her death so certainly. They kept asking Doctor Billet to watch her closely.

Doctor Billet came every day, often several times a day. The more he saw of her, the surer he was that nothing was dangerous. St. Margaret Mary was calm and the doctor was sure, so the sisters stopped worrying. They stopped talking about the sacraments for the dying.

St. Margaret Mary didn’t stop asking for Viaticum, the Holy Communion the Church gives to those in danger of death. She kept pressing the nuns nursing her to go and ask Mother de Chateaumorand for it. The request upset the Superior. Mother de Chateaumorand said no, because Doctor Billet had told her St. Margaret Mary was not dying.

One sister saw how much pain St. Margaret Mary was in 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.