On the 17th October 1690, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque would die. And this is the day of her feast …
O St Margaret Mary, you were the instrument for a work that has changed my life beyond words.
For you obeyed your calling and you were guided by Our Lord to a convent of the Visitation in Paray-le-Monial in the East of France in 1671. And there in 1674 the great revelations of His Sacred Heart began for you and for all the world …
In 2006, I began to have the occasion and grace of providence to begin to visit Paray-le-Monial, the first of many times.
No place on the face of this Earth has done more to change me.
Your relics Saint Margaret Mary are held in the same chapel in which you beheld the Cor Jesu Sacratissimum. And the experiences to be had in this chapel still today are beyond words.
After three hundred years, the Heart of Jesus can still be felt beating in Paray-le-Monial. One can still feel bathed in His Love there. But what if you had not humbly obeyed your calling, Saint Margaret Mary?
What would Paray be, then?
What would the entire Catholic world be now, without the sacred fire that was carried from Paray?
What would my own little existence be?
More words, better words I cannot easily find right now.
But I thought I would append to this weblog entry, your own account St Margaret Mary, of that first encounter with his blazing heart of love:
“One day on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, 1674, after having received from my Divine Saviour a favour almost similar to that bestowed upon the beloved Disciple on the evening of the Last Supper, the Divine Heart was represented to me as on a throne of fire and flames, shedding rays on every side brighter than the sun and transparent as crystal.
The Wound which He received upon the Cross appeared there visibly; a crown of thorns encircled the Divine Heart, and It was surmounted by a cross.
These instruments of His Passion signified, as my Divine Master gave me to understand, that it was the unbounded love which He had for men that had been the source of all His sufferings; that from the first moment of His Incarnation all these torments had been present to Him, and that from the first moment the Cross had been, so to say, planted in His Heart; that from that moment He accepted all the pains and humiliations which His Sacred Humanity was to suffer during the course of His mortal life, and even the outrages to which His love for men exposed Him till the end of the world in the Blessed Sacrament.
He gave me to understand afterwards that it was the great desire He had to be perfectly loved by men that had made Him form the design of disclosing to them His Heart, and of giving them in these latter times this last effort of His love, by proposing to them an object and a means so calculated to engage them to love Him, and love Him solidly, opening to them all the treasures of love, mercy, and grace, of sanctification and salvation which It contains, in order that all who should wish to pay and procure for Him all the honor and love which they can, might be enriched in profusion with the divine treasures, of which It is the fruitful and inexhaustible source.”
Note: I still hope to offer here soon the previously mentioned review and extract from my book in the articles section. Both I hope will form significant contributions to this site.
From Amazon USA:
Most of these can be also be found in our Amazon UK store here – (though sadly not the beautiful French film Bernadette which does so much more to evoke the epoch than the Hollywood version).
