St. Catherine Laboure

Hello Friends,

So tomorrow the sisters in the Vincentian Session will go on a short 3 day pilgrimage. We will travel to Fain-les-Moutiers and Ars. These are places that were special to St. Catherine Laboure. She was born and grew up in Fain-les-Moutiers. That is where her family's farm was and where she helped her father run the household. Her mother died when she was a girl. It was then that she prayed that Mary would be her mother from then on. The church in her town did not have a priest, so she would walk to St. Jean to attend Mass. Tomorrow, we will take the same walk.

I will share more about that after we have gone.

I do want to share a little bit about St. Catherine Laboure though. She was a young Daughter of Charity when in 1830 Mary appeared to her. She was asked to have a medal struck - the Miraculous Medal. What is amazing about Catherine is that she is the Saint of Silence. It was not until her death that the other sisters knew that she had been the visionary of the Miraculous Medal. They only knew it was a Daughter of Charity. She was humble and spent most of her community life caring for elderly men.

We were able to visit Reuilly, where she spent her life after being missioned from the Motherhouse Seminary (Where she had the apparition).

We were able to spend time in the very chapel where she pronounced her vows for the first time and every year after that. We saw the bed she breathed her last breath in. We also saw the very first statue that was made of Our Lady with the Globe.

Mary asked for that statue to be made - showing that she was praying for the whole world. It wasn't until the end of Catherine's life that the first statue was finally made. (The problem was that until then, the only thing Mary was every pictured holding was Jesus. This seemed a little scandulous to have a statue of Mary holding something other than Jesus. But her sister servant had the statue made to bring peace to Catherine before her death.)

We were also able to see the relic of her heart which sits where her first burial site was - in the coal bin under the chapel.

Her body was exhumed during her beatification process and it was found that her body had not decayed at all. So you can go to the Motherhouse Chapel today and see her laying there in a glass case - her actual body still undecayed after about 150 years. Amazing!

Anyway, we were also able to see some of the first Miraculous Medals that were made. It's awesome how many of those medals have been made. During her life, there had been over 2 million medals made and spread. None of those two million people even knew who she was.