St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

Margaret Mary Alacoque is the great instrument of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in its modern form. She entered the Visitation convent at Paray-le-Monial in 1671 and was there visited, over a period of years, by a series of apparitions in which Christ presented his Sacred Heart to her as an object of reparatory devotion. She was asked to promote the holy hour, the communion of the first Friday, and ultimately the feast of the Sacred Heart itself. The resistance she met within the convent — doubts about the authenticity of her experiences, difficulties with superiors, opposition from other sisters who found her behavior strange — is one of the most important parts of the story and should not be passed over.

The Church is careful about private revelations, and the resistance she met was not in principle unreasonable. What resolved the situation was in large part the testimony of Claude de la Colombière, her Jesuit confessor, who examined her experiences carefully and gave them his cautious but firm endorsement. The character of the devotion Margaret Mary was asked to promote deserves close attention: not merely pious sentiment toward the humanity of Christ, but a call to reparation for the ingratitude and coldness of Christians, backed by specific practices. The devotion spread slowly through France and then through the broader Church, was resisted vigorously by Jansenism, and finally won formal approval and then a universal feast only in the century after her death. She was canonized in 1920.