St. Catherine Labouré

Catherine Labouré entered the Daughters of Charity at Paris in 1830 and, within months of her arrival, received the vision that defined her life — and that she kept almost entirely secret for forty-six years. The Lady who appeared to her in the chapel of the motherhouse on the Rue du Bac showed her the design of what became the Miraculous Medal: an image of Mary standing on a globe, rays of grace streaming from her hands toward the earth, surrounded by an oval of stars and the words of a prayer she asked to have struck in metal and distributed. The medal was approved by the Archbishop of Paris, struck in the thousands, and spread through the Catholic world with a speed that surprised everyone who witnessed it. Conversions and healings were attributed to it. The name Miraculous Medal — not given it by Catherine herself — came from the fervor of those who received it.

But Catherine returned to her ordinary work among the elderly at the house of Enghien-Reuilly and told no one except her confessor, Aladel, that she was the seer of the Rue du Bac. She spent forty-six years there — tending to the old men in her care, doing laundry, working in the garden — unrecognized by the thousands who came to venerate the medal she had been shown. She revealed the secret to the mother superior of the house only weeks before her death in 1876, when she knew she was dying and wanted to ensure that a particular aspect of the design she had always asked to be completed would be carried out. She was canonized in 1947. The long silence tells more than the vision itself: a woman trusted with a great commission who chose to carry it in complete hiddenness for half a century.