Feast day: October 16
St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
French Visitation nun whose visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus — His heart 'which has so loved men' — spread one of Catholicism's central devotions.
Margaret Mary Alacoque was born in 1647 in Burgundy, France, and lost her father young; a long childhood illness and a difficult, dependent position in her own household marked her early years with suffering, which she came to offer to God. Drawn from girlhood to the religious life, she entered the Visitation convent at Paray-le-Monial in 1671.
An ordinary, even unremarkable nun in the eyes of her community, she became the recipient of a series of extraordinary visions of Christ, beginning in 1673. In these revelations, Jesus showed her his Heart, burning with love for humanity and wounded by human ingratitude, and entrusted to her the mission of spreading devotion to his Sacred Heart.
Her claims met with skepticism and even harsh treatment from her own sisters, who doubted and tested her. Her great support came from her confessor, the Jesuit St. Claude de la Colombière, who recognized the authenticity of the visions and became, with her, an apostle of the devotion. Christ's requests through her — the Holy Hour, Communion on the First Friday, a feast of the Sacred Heart — gradually took root.
She died at Paray in 1690, still little known. But the devotion to the Sacred Heart that she had been given grew, over the following centuries, into one of the most widespread and beloved in the whole Church. She was canonized in 1920.
The image of the Sacred Heart in millions of homes traces back to a quiet nun in a small French convent whom almost no one believed at first.
Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/09653a.htm
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