Day 1: The Rue du Bac

The first day of the Miraculous Medal Novena begins where the devotion itself begins: in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity at 140 Rue du Bac in Paris, on the evening of 27 November 1830, when the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to a young postulant named Catherine Labouré and revealed the medal that would carry her image and her promise of grace to the modern Catholic world.

Today's invocation

O Immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother of our Lord Jesus and our Mother, penetrated with the most lively confidence in your all-powerful and never-failing intercession, manifested so often through the Miraculous Medal, we your loving and trustful children implore you to obtain for us the graces and favors we ask during this novena, if they be beneficial to our immortal souls and the souls for whom we pray. Amen.

Today's meditation

The Catholic faithful have venerated the chapel of the Rue du Bac as one of the most important Marian shrines of the modern Western world for nearly two centuries. The unassuming exterior of the chapel (set back from the busy Parisian street, reached through an arched passageway, hidden among the apartment buildings of the seventh arrondissement) gives no hint of the extraordinary events that took place there on 18 July and 27 November 1830. Yet inside, in the chair where the Mother of God sat with the young Catherine kneeling at her feet, and on the wall above the high altar where the apparitions of the medal took place, the Catholic faithful from across the world have come and continue to come for two centuries.

The Mother of God appeared at a moment of profound crisis for the Catholic Church in France. The July Revolution of 1830 had only just deposed the Catholic-restorationist Bourbon king Charles X. The Catholic Church in France was emerging painfully from the dechristianization of the French Revolution and the partial restoration of the Napoleonic Concordat. The young Daughters of Charity in the Rue du Bac novitiate were the daughters of the small Catholic families that had kept the faith through the persecutions of the previous generation. The Mother of God came to them, and through them to the wider Catholic world, with a sign of her continuing maternal protection.

Today's intention

Bring to the Blessed Virgin Mary today the principal intention for which you are praying this novena. Be specific. Mother of God, who appeared at the Rue du Bac to give the world the medal of your protection, I bring to you today this matter on which I am asking your maternal intercession.

Reflection

The Catholic faithful who visit the Rue du Bac chapel today witness an extraordinary continuity. The same chair in which the Mother of God sat with Catherine Labouré is preserved in a side niche, with a railing for the pilgrims to kneel and pray. The body of Saint Catherine Labouré, found incorrupt at the exhumation of 1933, is preserved in a glass-walled tomb under the side altar (with her hands holding the Miraculous Medal). The chapel is staffed by the Daughters of Charity in the same uniform Catherine wore in 1830, with the distinctive cornette (the wide-winged starched white headdress, retired in 1964 in keeping with post-conciliar adaptations of the religious habit, but preserved in many Catholic memories of the Daughters of Charity from the previous era).

To begin the Miraculous Medal Novena is, in this Catholic sense, to enter the same chapel where the Mother of God appeared, even from a distance of half a world away. The medal we wear is the same medal she revealed; the prayer we pray is the same prayer she gave. The novena is the deliberate Catholic act of placing ourselves under her promise.

Closing prayers

Pray three Hail Marys in honor of the Immaculate Conception, and the closing invocation:

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.