More than an image: On the other lessons from Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque

Every statue, painting, icon, medal, or other representation of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque includes a depiction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This is hardly surprising since it was largely her visions of Jesus Christ, which caused devotion to the Sacred Heart to spread all over the world. But there is much more to this French nun’s revelations than a simple image. One might say that God, through Margaret Mary, has also provided Catholics with a devotional weapon.

Margaret Mary (1647-1690) was born into a well-to-do family in France, but her father died when she was only eight years old. A few years later, she became bedridden with a serious illness. She suffered patiently for four years, but after she made a private promise to Our Lady to become a religious sister, she was instantly healed.

At this point, her family had fallen into poverty. A greedy uncle had become the guardian of her father’s estate, and he refused to use those funds to help her family. A domineering sister assumed control of the household, and she forced both Margaret and Margaret’s mother to become mere servants in their own home. A few years later, the family finances improved when a brother was old enough to be given legal control of the estate.

The atmosphere of the family improved as well, and seventeen-year-old Margaret was encouraged by her family to marry. Marriage would have been an obvious way to escape her dysfunctional family, and for several years she did enjoy attending balls and social events. But as she returned from a dance one evening, she received a vision of our Lord, bloody and bearing the marks of the Passion on his body. He reproached her for forgetting her promise to enter religious life and reminded her of his love for her.

Deeply moved, Margaret soon entered the Visitation convent at Paray-le-Monial, with her brother providing the required dowry. She became a professed nun at the age of twenty-five.

Margaret Mary was one of those childlike souls who appear throughout the history of the Church, women and men who are devout even from childhood and who promise God that they will never say no to him—and mean it. That is probably why Jesus had been appearing to Margaret since her childhood. She just assumed that happened to everyone. The fact that Jesus appeared to her repeatedly after she became a nun was not that unusual. What was unusual was the content of his messages.

In previous visions, our Lord had spoken to her about her own spiritual growth, but the visions she received between 1673 and 1675 concerned his spiritual plan for the world. First, Jesus appeared in front of her and showed Margaret his heart. He encouraged her to share the image of what she had seen with others. He also told her to promote devotional practices that have since become commonplace: receiving Communion on nine consecutive First Fridays of the month; praying a Holy Hour on the eve of a First Friday; and celebrating a feast in honor of the Sacred Heart on the Friday after Corpus Christi. The faithful, Jesus said, were also encouraged to pray to him under the title of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to offer reparations for sins committed against God. In one of the visions, Jesus told her to tell the king of France to publicly honor the Sacred Heart in specific ways.¹

Margaret, of course, balked at the idea of sharing these visions with anyone, much less the king of France. Who would believe her? In her autobiography, she described herself as slow, clumsy, and awkward, and she humbly accepted criticism from others even when she was clearly not at fault. (She also scrupulously avoided criticizing anyone, including her troublesome relatives and the religious sisters who made her life difficult.) On the other hand, many of the nuns who knew Margaret well described her as kind, humble, frank, simple, and patient.

Eventually Margaret managed to convince her superior that her visions were real, but her priests and many of her sisters still refused to listen. A new priest, Saint Claude de la Colombière, was assigned to the convent, and he recognized that her visions were genuine. He encouraged Margaret to obey our Lord’s wishes, but he was later transferred.

When a new superior was elected in her community, Margaret became the superior’s assistant and later novice mistress. An account of her visions became public, although without identifying her as the visionary, and her community began to practice some of these devotions. Although Margaret managed for many years to keep others from learning that she was the one who had received the visions, eventually the truth came out.

After her death, the content of the visions was carefully investigated by the Church, along with Margaret’s life, and both were judged positively. When the tomb containing her body was opened, two people experienced instantaneous cures, and her body was found to be incorrupt. Margaret was declared a saint in 1920, and in 1928, Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical encouraging devotion to the Sacred Heart, Miserentissimus Redemptor, mentioning Margaret by name.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque was not the first or the only Catholic to promote devotion to the Sacred Heart,² but she is certainly the most famous. With the perspective of history, it is not hard to see why our Lord chose to share this message with that nun at that particular time.

While France remained a Catholic country throughout the Protestant Reformation, many Protestant ideas had been percolating in French culture. By the seventeenth century, the dour heresy of Jansenism had become widespread. A warm, friendly image of Jesus Christ and his visible heart, burning with love for every person, was an effective tool in defeating the Jansenist concept of a cold, uncaring God who seemed to prefer to send people to Hell rather than to Heaven.

But devotion to the Sacred Heart was not meant to benefit seventeenth-century France alone. By the time the bloody, anti-Catholic French Revolution caused hundreds of thousands of innocent Catholics to be imprisoned, tens of thousands to be executed, and hundreds more to die as martyrs,³ the message of Margaret’s visions had been spreading throughout France for a hundred years. When the ordinary people of the Vendée region led an uprising against the Revolutionary government, the image they stitched on their clothing to unite them in battle was the image of the Sacred Heart.

But they did more than make Sacred Heart badges. They knew the Revolutionaries sought to destroy the Catholic Church, and they were deeply offended by the Revolutionaries’ blasphemous acts, such as their desecration of churches and their slaughter of priests and religious. Perhaps the two most famous examples of these acts were the conversion of Notre Dame de Paris into a “Temple of Reason” (which included a public procession led by a scantily-clad woman variously described as an opera singer or a prostitute) and the executions of sixteen innocent nuns of Compiegne.

French Catholics had also learned another key message from Margaret’s visions: the importance of reparation. Our Lord encouraged Catholics to offer prayers and sacrifices through this devotion in reparation for the offenses committed against him. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains (no. 2487):

Every offense committed against justice and truth entails the duty of reparation, even if its author has been forgiven. When it is impossible publicly to make reparation for a wrong, it must be made secretly.

Faithful Catholics knew that these blasphemous acts obligated them to make acts of reparation to God. During and after the French Revolution, many Catholics secretly prayed and offered their covert Masses in atonement for these public sins. But they also formed confraternities to encourage one another to pray, and some were inspired to found religious orders devoted to offering acts of reparation, particularly through Eucharistic Adoration.

Throughout the Church’s long history, innumerable members of the Catholic Church have certainly offered prayers in atonement for blasphemous acts such as pagan worship, the destruction of churches, and the mockery of the Catholic faith by heretics. But ever since Saint Margaret Mary—and her mystical sister, Saint Faustyna Kowalska—Catholics have an extra devotional tool in their arsenal to respond to those who intentionally (though, one would hope, out of ignorance) perform acts that offend God. That is, we can offer acts of reparation.

These acts may involve individuals practicing devotions related to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, such as prayers, litanies, consecrations, novenas, Holy Hours, and First Friday devotions. Or they may involve individuals offering their own personal sacrifices, such as fasting or almsgiving. Or they may involve groups of people joining in communal acts of prayer and sacrifice. Our Lord even promised he would bless those who practice this devotion.

Whether these horrible acts are committed by anti-Catholic mobs or militia during a time of civil war, by groups who are offended by Catholic moral teaching, or by other troubled individuals or groups, Saint Margaret Mary’s visions have offered us an alternative to feeling outraged or fearful or even retaliating in kind. When such events appear in our newsfeeds, we should simply turn to our loving Savior. We should gaze upon images that remind us of his compassion and his desire to save every soul from Hell. And we should commit ourselves to offer reparation for the sins of others, as he did on the Cross.

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