St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

Who they were

Margaret Mary was a Burgundian farm girl, marked by childhood paralysis, a widowed mother, and years of household mistreatment by relatives, who entered the Visitation convent at Paray-le-Monial. There, between 1673 and 1675, she reported the apparitions that gave the modern Church the devotion to the Sacred Heart: Christ's heart shown as a furnace of love wounded by indifference, with the requests that became First Friday communions, the Holy Hour, and a feast of the Sacred Heart. All are now universal, and all were first spoken to a nun her own community judged deluded.

The vindication came through her confessor, Claude de la Colombiere, whose calm judgment that she was honest carried the weight hers was denied, and the two names travel together. She spent her remaining years in ordinary convent obscurity as assistant novice mistress and in infirmary work, and died at forty three. She was canonized in 1920. The image her visions produced, the heart with its flames and thorns, hangs today in more homes than possibly any other Christian image, which makes her one of the most consequential disbelieved women in history.

Why people turn to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

Keepers of the Sacred Heart devotion: First Friday families, and homes with the image. And the second one is this page's pastoral edge: people telling the truth whom their own community will not believe.

How to ask their intercession

Before an image of the Sacred Heart if your home has one. And for the disbelieved: her prayer plus Claude's steady listening is the model, so ask for one Colombiere in your situation.