Feast day: November 28
St. Catherine Labouré
A quiet French Daughter of Charity who received the visions of Mary that gave the Church the Miraculous Medal, then spent the next forty-six years caring for the elderly in total obscurity.
Catherine Labouré was a French nun whose name is bound forever to one of the most widespread of all Catholic devotions, the Miraculous Medal — yet who lived and died in almost total obscurity, her great secret known to almost no one until after her death. She was born in 1806 to a farming family in Burgundy, and lost her mother as a child.
A quiet, hardworking country girl, she entered the Daughters of Charity, the order of St. Vincent de Paul, in Paris in 1830. Within months, as a young novice, she received a series of visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary — appearing, in the most famous, standing on a globe with rays of light streaming from her hands, and asking that a medal be struck in the image she showed.
The medal was made and, after striking cures and conversions were attributed to it, spread across the world by the millions, becoming known as the 'Miraculous Medal.' But Catherine told only her confessor that she was the visionary, and otherwise kept absolute silence. For the next forty-six years she lived as an ordinary, unremarkable sister, caring for the elderly and the sick and tending the convent's hens.
Only in the last months of her life did she reveal the truth, to her superior. She died in 1876, having spent nearly half a century hiding the greatest event of her life in humility. Canonized in 1947, she is remembered as the silent saint of the Miraculous Medal.
She kept her famous visions secret all her life, known to no one as the seer; she spent those decades feeding the aged and tending the henhouse, recognized only after her death.
Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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