Apostleship of Prayer - Saints
October 16 - Margaret Mary Alacoque
Margaret Mary was born in 1647 at Janots in Burgundy. She was the fifth child of a notary. She had an unhappy childhood, which was marked by sickness and a painful home. After the death of her father things became worse with her relatives virtually taking over her home. She is recorded as saying that the heaviest of her crosses was that she could do nothing to lighten the cross that her mother was suffering.
At the age of twenty-four she entered the Visitation Convent at Paray-le-Monial. As a novice she was regarded as humble, simple and frank, but above all kind and patient under sharp criticism. As she was quiet and clumsy she was given the task of assisting the infirminarian. She took her vows in 1672. From 1674 she received a series of visions of Christ. She was always afraid that she was deceiving her herself. In France both the lack of religion within the lives of people and the growth of Jansenism, had obscured the teaching of Jesus that God loved all men, sinners included. During the next thirteen months Jesus appeared to her at varying interval. Jesus taught her that his heart was the symbol of the love that he had for everyone. Thus she emphasized the basis teaching of the Church, the devotion to the Sacred heart of Jesus.
Some of her sisters became hostile to her and theologians called in to examine her said that her visions were delusions. A new confessor, Claude de la Columbiere, SJ, recognized her genuineness and supported her. Eventually she won the confidence of her contemporaries and she became first novice-mistress and then as assistant to the superior.
She died at the age of forty-three in 1690 and was canonized in 1920.
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