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II.
Her Apparitions
And Historic Interventions
Verify Mary's Prerogatives
10.
Our Lady of Grace Designs a Medal
THE
EVENING ANGELUS was ringing. On the village street no wagon rumbled, no
pedestrian walked. Action had come to a standstill. And indoors it was
no different, certainly not in the Labouré home. While the youngsters
looked on in wonder, the older members of the family had their hands
folded and their heads bowed in prayer—with one exception. The mother
upstairs, aided by a midwife, was giving birth to her ninth child.
The child would afterwards consider it an honor
to have been born at such a moment, when from the belfry of the village
church came this appealing reminder of the Annunciation. Within a few
years of the date, May 2, 1806, no one in Fain-les-Moutiers would obey the
call of that blessed bell thrice a day more eagerly than little Zoé
Labouré. She had her mother's piety and in the opinion of her father, the
sharpest mind of his eleven children; yet she alone of them would never
attend a school. But that didn't matter to heaven. Providence chose her
in preference to the educated to usher in, as the witness to a series of
apparitions, the Age of Mary.
It was on the night of July 18, 1830, her
twenty-fourth year, that the new epoch opened. Sister Catherine, as she
was now to be called, had entered the novitiate of the Daughters of
Charity in Paris only months before. Having retired for the night in a
dormitory where each novice enjoyed the privacy of a curtained enclosure,
she was awakened from a sound sleep. A voice had been calling her name.
She pulled the curtain open at her bed to
behold, in her own words, "a child dressed in white, about four or five
years old." Radiating a golden light, the youngster was a fascinating
presence. He was in truth an angel. He spoke with authority.
"Come to the chapel," he said, urging the
novice to hurry. "The Blessed Virgin is waiting for you."
Could this be possible? And if she went,
wouldn't the other novices hear her go?
"Everyone is asleep," the angel assured her,
remarking without a look at any clock that it was 11:30 sharp.
The angel, it is interesting to note, in
referring to the Mother of God called her the Blessed Virgin. The
visionary herself in a review of her apparitions would use the same term
of reference. While Sister Catherine did not know of the likes of Bonosus
who would disallow to Mary her perpetual virginity, the angel did. And he
knew they were not to be taken seriously. He acknowledged, in a
monumental disregard of their denial, the truth.
The novice followed her guiding angel in his
appealing form to the chapel. It intrigued her that he knew his way about
the convent better than she and that the corridors through which they
passed were brightly lighted at an hour they were not supposed to be. To
her further surprise, the door to the chapel swung open the moment the
angel barely touched it with a fingertip and inside the lamps were all
burning and on the altars all the candles. The sanctuary, in anticipation
of St. Vincent's feast, had bouquets of choice flowers in every niche, on
every stand. The recent newcomer had never seen the chapel so
gay-looking. It gave her the distinct impression that there was going to
be a midnight Mass in July.
The angel led Sister Catherine into the
sanctuary toward the high-backed chair which stood on the altar platform
at the Gospel side, and from which the spiritual director would give his
instructions to the community. Nobody sat in it now. And then suddenly
the angel said, "This is the Blessed Virgin," and with a swish of her robe
there she was—seating herself with the dignity of a queen who yet had the
approachable benignity of a mother.
"I flung myself toward her," Sister Catherine
relates, "and falling upon my knees on the altar steps, I rested my hands
in her lap."
The Blessed Virgin, in a voice to match her
beauty, spoke first.
"My Child," she said, "God has you in mind to
undertake a mission for him."
With those words the new era, which St. Louis
de Montfort had predicted a century before, began: an era of prolonged
threats of ruin to the world when Mary in her solicitude would reveal
herself in a chain of apparitions and through her chosen seers offer the
remedy to the option of man. Her present visionary was hearing of the
calamities to befall France, and of the need to come habitually into the
Real Presence to pray for courage. From the Christ of their altars the
faithful would obtain graces in abundance, if only they ask them.
"My child, it especially pleases me to confer
graces on your community."
Here there was, from Mary herself, an allusion
to the traditional belief that God channels his graces to mankind through
her. The fascinated novice did not sense the passing of time, not tiring
on her knees as she listened, intent rather on hearing more. But what her
forthcoming mission would be she was not told, although she knew from how
she felt that carrying it out would be for her a sweet compulsion.
For two hours did the heavenly Mediatrix of
Grace speak with the young novice, answering her questions, correcting her
misgivings, holding her in ecstasy, while the community slept, and an
angel stood by—perhaps to keep an eye on the entrance. It may be assumed
that he wanted no intrusion from some prying busybody. No intruder
appeared. The witnesses to this sanctuary conversation between two women
belonged there with them: the Divine Son of one, present in the
tabernacle, and the guardian angel of the other.
The angel escorted Sister Catherine back to the
dormitory. She walked in bliss. Too soon had the joy of her eyes
vanished "like a candle blown out" and the sanctuary chair stood empty,
but the memory sang in her heart. The angel did not disturb her musings
as in silence he led the novice through the corridors and up the stairs,
and the moment they arrived at her cot he himself disappeared, and it was
dark. He had shone brightly, more brightly than light, yet so as not to
hurt the eyes, and Sister Catherine would never be satisfied with her
attempted descriptions of his luminous beauty. With Hamlet, she could
have confidently informed the materialist that reality holds grander
possibilities "than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
She could not sleep for sheer happiness. "I
heard two o'clock strike," she recalls, and it occurred to her that it was
now the community feast of St. Vincent de Paul. The kindly old priest had
appeared to her in a dream, while she was yet a postulant at Chatillon, to
tell her that "God has plans for you and do not forget it." Now she knew
what he meant.
No cardiograph can measure the joy in a human
heart. If the instrument could and every member of her community had
submitted to a test that day, Sister Catherine would have been the last
one the others would have suspected of the highest rating. The
illiterate, who had been accepted as a postulant only on the promise of an
influential older nun to teach the girl a little of the essentials, why
should she be enjoying the happiest feast of them all? They had no way of
knowing that she already possessed a knowledge beyond theirs, beyond that
of the mere academic graduate. Events that have since become history, she
knew before the historians, before even they occurred. The least of the
novices in that hidden convent on a side street in Paris was destined to
put it on the city map.
If the now famous convent attracts the tourist,
it is because Zoé Labouré was not sent back to her father's farm a
reject. Suppose she had been, would Our Lady of Grace have appeared to
her there? We cannot know. We do know by dint of a grand irony, that the
least likely of novices among the French Daughters of Charity had an angel
escort her like a queen to a tryst one night with the Mother of God.
A second face-to-face meeting of the two
occurred four months later, not at night, but at 5:30 one Saturday
evening, November 27. Zoé Labouré used to walk six miles every weekday to
early Mass, since in her village the little church had no priest in
residence. But her early devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, which never
waned, she intensified after her first Marian apparition. She had been
told in a voice more entrancing than that of her angel, to come with her
troubles to the tabernacle and confide them to her Eucharistic Lord, and
they would lose their power to disturb. She was kneeling before him now,
at her regular place in chapel, when presently to the extreme right of the
sanctuary (over the altar where the saint now lies incorrupt in death)
there flashed into glorious view the Blessed Virgin again.
She was standing on a globe, trampling a
serpent, and in her hands she held a smaller globe and seemed to be
offering it to almighty God, for she was looking upward and her lips were
moving in prayer. "Her face was of such beauty," writes Sister Catherine
in retrospect, "that I cannot describe it." The visionary did not know
how long she had been gazing on that heavenly face before the brilliant
rays of light, which emanated from the hands of the blessed Lady, caught
her attention. Despite their brilliance, the rays could be traced to the
gems on her fingers, gems that studded the rings she wore, three on each
finger. The emanations were not of equal intensity, and some of the gems
gave off little or no luster. What could this mean?
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