Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal

The Miraculous Medal comes from what a twenty-four-year-old novice told in a house in Paris, in 1830. Catherine Labouré was the daughter of farmers from Burgundy and had joined the Daughters of Charity on the Rue du Bac, at number 140. She said that in that year she had several apparitions of the Virgin. In the second, on November 27, 1830, she was reportedly shown an image to be struck as a medal, with the invocation that can still be read around its edge today. Catherine told her confessor and no one else. Then she went back to her work, which for the next forty-six years was caring for the elderly at the hospice of Enghien, on the outskirts of Paris: bringing soup, washing, looking after them. None of her sisters ever knew that she was the novice of those apparitions; it came out only a few months before she died. The medal was struck in 1832 and handed out by the Daughters of Charity during the cholera epidemic that killed twenty thousand people in Paris in those months. So many healings were credited to it that people started calling it the miraculous medal, and the name stuck. The chapel on the Rue du Bac is still open, and it’s one of the most visited places in Paris. The Smorfia puts the Madonna at number eight. If your name is Catherine, today is your name day.