Day 8: Saint Catherine Labouré

The eighth day of the Miraculous Medal Novena turns to the saint who received the apparitions and bore the secret of them with extraordinary humility for forty-six years: Saint Catherine Labouré. The Catholic devotion to her is, in many ways, the model of Catholic discipleship under a special grace: she did what was asked, kept silent about what was not asked, and lived an entirely ordinary religious life in the works of charity until her death.

Today's invocation

O Immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother of our Lord Jesus and our Mother... (the full opening prayer)

Today's meditation

Catherine Labouré was born Zoé Labouré on 2 May 1806 in the Burgundian village of Fain-lès-Moutiers, the ninth of eleven children in a family of substantial Catholic farmers. Her mother died when she was nine; from the age of twelve she ran the household for her father and her younger brothers. She entered the Daughters of Charity in 1830 at the age of twenty-four, taking the religious name Catherine on entering the novitiate. The apparitions occurred in her novitiate year. The medal was struck in 1832, the year of her perpetual vows.

After the apparitions, Catherine was assigned to the Hospice of Enghien on the eastern edge of Paris, where the Daughters of Charity served the elderly poor. She remained there for the rest of her religious life, forty-six years, working in the kitchens, the laundry, the chicken coops, the door, and finally as the bursar. She never wrote a book, gave a public lecture, or publicly spoke of the apparitions. She told only her confessor Father Aladel, who took the matter to the Archbishop of Paris and oversaw the striking of the medal. For nearly half a century, the rest of the Daughters of Charity at Enghien did not know that the small, silent Sister Catherine in the kitchen had received the apparitions of the medal that was, by then, transforming the Catholic world.

She broke the silence only at the end. In May 1876, knowing that her death was approaching, she asked her superior Sister Dufès to come to her cell and asked permission to speak. She told her story for the first time. The superior wept. Catherine died on 31 December 1876 at the age of seventy. Her body, exhumed in 1933 for the canonization process, was found incorrupt and is preserved today in a glass-walled tomb at the Rue du Bac chapel.¹

She was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1933 and canonized by Pope Pius XII on 27 July 1947. Her feast is celebrated in the universal Roman Calendar on 28 November, the day after the anniversary of the principal apparition of the Miraculous Medal.

Today's intention

Today, ask Saint Catherine Labouré to pray with you for your principal intention. Saint Catherine, who received the apparitions of the Miraculous Medal and kept silent about them for nearly fifty years, intercede for me. Obtain for me the same humility and the same trust in the Mother of God that marked your hidden religious life.

Reflection

The Catholic spiritual tradition has long observed that the hidden saints are sometimes the most powerful intercessors. Catherine Labouré received one of the most consequential apparitions of the modern Catholic Church. She could have become a celebrity in her lifetime; instead, she became a chicken-keeper. She could have written volumes; instead, she dictated a brief Memoir at the end of her life only when her superiors required it. She could have been venerated as a visionary; instead, she was venerated by her sisters at Enghien as a kind, plain, deeply prayerful old woman who had the trust of the elderly residents and the chickens.

The Catholic devotion to Saint Catherine is, in this sense, a corrective to the modern Catholic temptation to associate sanctity with public influence. The most fruitful Catholic life may be entirely hidden. The Mother of God chose a postulant in a Paris convent, not a celebrated theologian. The Mother of God still chooses those whom the world does not see, and through them, by the same hidden Marian patience, continues to give the Catholic Church the graces it needs.

Closing prayers

Pray three Hail Marys in honor of the Immaculate Conception.

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

Footnotes

1. Father Joseph Dirvin, C.M., Saint Catherine Labouré of the Miraculous Medal (1958). Pope Pius XII, canonization homily of 27 July 1947. The records of the canonization process are preserved in the Vatican Archive. The exhumation reports of 1933 are preserved at the Daughters of Charity motherhouse in Paris. ↩