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Post by Elizabeth on Oct 17, 2019 16:45:20 GMT
Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque
Virgin, Apostle of the Sacred Heart
(1647-1690) Saint Margaret Mary, a soul of divine predilection, was born at Terreau in Burgundy, on July 22, 1647. During her infancy she showed a wonderfully sensitive revulsion to the very idea of sin, and while still a young child always recited the entire Rosary every day. She lost her father at the age of eight years, and her mother placed her with the Poor Clares. She was often sick and for four years was bedridden, losing almost entirely the use of her members. She made a vow to Our Lady to become one of Her daughters if She cured her, and was suddenly entirely well. She was of a gay temperament and her heart became easily attached to human affections. God began her purification when the charge of her mother's house was confided to persons who reduced the family to a sort of servitude. Margaret Mary turned to God for strength and consolation when she was accused of various crimes she had not committed. In short, the Saint of the Sacred Heart learned to suffer for Christ, with patience, what innocence can suffer in such situations. She desired to be a religious, but her mother could not bear to hear a word of that desire. Finally God came to her assistance through a Franciscan priest, who told her brother that he would answer to God for the vocation of his sister. In 1671 she entered the Order of the Visitation of Mary, at Paray-le-Monial, and was professed the following year. She followed all the practices of the monastery in perfect obedience, spending as much time as she could in the chapel with her Lord. After sanctifying her by many trials, Jesus appeared to her in numerous visions, displaying to her His Sacred Heart, sometimes burning as a furnace, and sometimes torn and bleeding on account of the coldness and sins of men. Behold this Heart which has so loved men, and been so little loved by them in return! In 1675, she was told by Our Lord that she, with the aid of Father Claude de la Colombiere of the Society of Jesus, was to be His instrument for instituting the feast of the Sacred Heart, and for spreading that devotion everywhere. This was not accomplished without great sufferings. The good Jesuit did all in his power to make known and loved the Heart of Jesus, but when it seemed all obstacles were about to disappear, his credit diminished, and his Superiors sent him to England. He returned to France exhausted and soon died. Saint Margaret Mary was for a time Mistress of Novices, and in this office exercised a true apostolate, working to win for the Heart of Jesus the hearts of the young girls who were aspiring to religious consecration. She was persecuted when she sent one of them home, not having seen in her the indications of a genuine vocation; the family attempted to have her deposed. She remained in the charge but was deprived of Holy Communion on the First Friday of the month. This practice was one of Our Lord's specific requests; for souls who communicate nine First Fridays in succession, He promised the most wonderful graces. The demons also persecuted her visibly; nonetheless her entire Community was finally won over to devotion to the Divine Heart. Saint Margaret Mary died at the age of forty-two years, on October 17, 1690, and everywhere was heard in the city: The Saint is dead! The Saint is dead! She was beatified in 1864 by Pope Pius IX, and canonized in 1920 by Pope Benedict XV. |
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Post by Admin on Oct 17, 2020 12:42:35 GMT
October 17 – St Mary Margaret Alocoque, Virgin Taken from The Liturgical Year by Dom Prosper Gueranger (1841-1875)
“Among the most striking proofs of the infinite love of our Redeemer is this, that, at a moment in which the love of the faithful was growing cold, the Divine Love proposed himself as the object of special veneration and worship, and the precious treasure of the Church was opened to enrich with indulgences the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge … In that Sacred Heart we must place all our hope, from that Heart ask and expect our salvation.” The great devotion to the Sacred Heart, of which the Sovereign Pontiff Pius XI thus speaks, and which has been so marvellously extended in the Church since the seventeenth century, is no new devotion. Much research by Catholic scholars has established the fact that there was not one of the great older religious orders but had a tradition of such devotion and saintly souls in their ranks with whom it was associated. This is true of the children of St. Benedict (both of the “Black monks” of the parent stem, and the later Cistercians), of the Carthusians, Dominicans, and Franciscans. St. Bonaventure’s beautiful and tender phrases have supplied some of the lessons for the new office of the feast, while during the octave not only St. Bernard, but one of the greatest of the early Fathers, St. John Chrysostom, exhort us in turn concerning what has been so often described, and even bitterly opposed, as a novelty unknown to primitive days. The truth is that, in post-Reformation days, a new element in the devotion has been stressed. In the ages of faith, although the devotion was always, as now, closely connected with the Passion, yet it was exultant, glorious, triumphant Love which dominated it. After the rending of the seamless garment of the Church universal, with all its dire consequences, it was the element of reparation, of loving the Heart which had so loved men, but was so little loved in return, which was emphasized; and it is this aspect of the devotion which is thus urged upon the faithful by Pius XI: the duty of reparation for the offenses, the insults, the contempt meted out to infinite Love, in our modern world which knows him not. The saint of this day is neither the first nor the only soul to whom our Lord revealed the mystery of the Sacred Heart; but she was the one whom he chose as the special instrument of its propagation. He had taught it to others, but he did not command them to preach it to the world or to work for its public cultus. He did so command this simple Visitation nun of Paray-le-Monial, Margaret Mary Alacoque, in an age when Jansenism was chilling men’s hearts, and substituting for love of God a terrible fear, which kept them from the Sacraments and made them “see the Judge severe e’en in the crucifix.”
 Not that the devotion, even as formally and finally approved and propagated by the Church, depends upon the revelations, any more than that of Corpus Christi depends upon those of Blessed Juliana of Cornillon. Revelations have only an accessory part in the institution of such feasts; what the Church seeks is, what is useful for souls; and it suffices for her that a devotion is in itself good, and will make for the greater glory of God. The saint’s own story illustrates the effect of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, rightly practiced. Like all souls specially called to a life of reparation and expiation, Margaret Mary knew much suffering. In her early life she and her beloved mother had much to endure from members of her family. She suffered from unjust constraint upon her actions, from monotony and unkindness. Her religious practices were hindered, partly by her family circumstances and partly by those of the time; she was over twenty-one before she was able to receive the sacrament of Confirmation. Want of proper direction, and more unjust opposition, rendered her vocation a further source of suffering; and when, at last, the convent doors closed behind her, she found trials compared with which what had gone before seemed but trifling. Favored at times, even from childhood, with extraordinary graces, she found herself at the very natural disadvantage caused by such in a prudently-ruled religious house; the more so as the Visitandine spirit was of another sort. It seems ironical that, though she had entered an order in its first fervor, and a house fervent among the fervent, under successive superiors distinguished for their spirituality and their wisdom, she should have been long completely misunderstood, undervalued, and somewhat distrusted. The tendency to scruples, excessive timidity and trouble in spiritual matters, the lack of peace which we notice in the early years, vanished only when the great revelations began.
Under the influence of our Lord’s own teaching, and the guidance he further gave her in his holy servant, Blessed Claude de la Colombière, her character steadily developed. Her humility, ever great, became greater, so that she could walk safely in her mystic ways; her judgment and insight in spiritual things became sure. Despondency vanished, and no trials could disturb her peace or shake her confidence till, at the end, the religious of whom once her sisters had thought little stands revealed in her biographies “a true and valiant lover.” Once pre-occupied with self, she became selfless, and all suffering became sweet; and after her has followed an unending procession of those who, again in the words of the great Encyclical of Pius XI, valiantly strive to make satisfaction to the Divine Heart for so many sins that are committed against it, who do not fear to offer themselves to Christ as victims … who not only hate sin and shun it as the greatest of evils, but offer themselves to the divine will, and use every means in their power to compensate for the offenses committed against the divine Majesty by constant prayer, by voluntary mortifications, and by the patient acceptance of all the trials that may come upon them—in fact by living their whole lives in the spirit of reparation.
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