Have a Medal Struck
Our Loving Mother asked the Miraculous Medal be given out at Conyers. To date, well over one million medals have been made available to the pilgrims visiting Conyers. The Blessed Mother said to St Catherine Laboure that “All who wear it will receive great graces.”
St. Catherine Laboure & The Miraculous Medal
The Miraculous Medal and St. Catherine Laboure are inseparable because the Blessed Mother initiated the great Marian age through Her apparitions to St. Catherine asking for the Miraculous Medal to be struck and given out. The Miraculous medal, originally called the Medal of the Immaculate Conception, is one of three sacramentals given great honor by the Church--the Rosary and the Brown Scapular being the other two.
St. Catherine, in her life, portrayed the humble adherence to daily duty that Our Lord finds so pleasing and, in her death, witnesses to the power of God over death in her incorrupt body which is venerated in the Chapel of her order in the Rue du Bac in Paris.
All that Mary is trying to teach Her children about their relationship to Her Son and the Blessed Trinity is contained in the messages She gave to this humble, ill-educated sister, and then shown in the way Catherine lived her life. It is not easy to perfect one's ordinary state in life but this is what the Blessed Mother hopes for all who follow Her and it is to help us be better wives, mothers, fathers and husbands, sons and daughters that She bestows the graces at Her command.
Catherine came from a fairly well off middle class French family but somehow Catherine's family skipped over her education despite her brothers and sisters being well-schooled. After her mother died, like many great saints before her, Catherine adopted the Blessed Mother as her mother. She also longed to enter the Religious Life but her father would hear none of it. Instead, she had to take over the running of his household. Each day, she walked six-miles to Mass in the pre-dawn, then returned home to cook and take the midday meal out to the fields to their fifteen farm-hands and look after her father and brothers and sisters.
She received a vision of St. Vincent de Paul which guided her to her vocation in the Sisters of Charity which was part of the great dual order founded by St. Vincent and St. Louise de Merrilac. However, her father withheld his permission and such was Catherine's obedience that she would not enter without his permission even though she had reached the age when she did not require his permission. Eventually, he did give permission but withheld her dowry--this her brother and sister-in-law finally provided.
The superior did not want to accept her because of her poor education but the Assistant sister discerned her deep spirituality and promised to teach her and so she was accepted.
It was shortly after her entrance into the novitiate that Catherine was granted, in a vision, the favor of seeing St. Vincent de Paul's Heart. Shortly after this she was granted the vision of Jesus truly present in the Holy Eucharist, and it is thought that this gift from the Lord was repeated throughout St. Catherine's life.
After the great apparitions of the Blessed Mother in 1830 which allowed St. Catherine more intimacy with the great Mother of God than most visionaries are permitted, Catherine spent her life in obscurity working as a housekeeper and finally looking after the old men who lived in the Hospice d'Enghien outside Paris.
Catherine had prayed for the great grace of seeing the Mother of God. One night, she was called from her bed by a young boy whom she later identified as her guardian angel. Miraculously, doors opened and lights went on to help her on her way to the chapel. Shortly after she arrived, her guardian angel told her that the Blessed Mother was near. With a rustle of fabric, She arrived. Catherine fell to her knees at the feet of the Virgin, resting her hands in Our Lady's lap. She was told much of what would happen to Paris and France and her Order. In yet another visitation, Mary manifested to her the Miraculous Medal, telling her to speak of the happenings only to her confessor.
There was much conjecture over who was the visionary behind the Miraculous Medal request but, although one or two of her Sisters guessed it might be her, she never talked to anyone but her confessor about it. It was only six months before her death that she divulged her identity and she only did this because one of the Blessed Mother's requests had not been fulfilled. The Holy Mother had asked for a statue to be made of Herself as She appeared on the Miraculous Medal. This had not been done and, knowing she was soon to die, Catherine asked the Blessed Mother's permission to tell her superior her story in the hope that it would facilitate the making of the statue. Before she died, Catherine was indeed able to see a plaster model of the statue at the artist's studio. Now, her incorrupt body lies beneath the statue that she was so anxious should be sculpted.
Americans will be particularly interested that included in the Miraculous Medal messages was one about the Order that our first American born saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton, founded in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Catherine was told: "When the rule will have been restored in vigor, a community will ask to be united to your Community. Such is not customary, but I love them; God will bless those who take them in; they will enjoy great peace." This indeed happened and, in 1849, Mother Seton's Sisters were joined to St. Vincent's community.
The Miraculous Medal
Most Catholics know about the Miraculous Medal. Catherine was told to have the medal struck. "All who wear it will receive great graces; they should wear it around the neck. Graces will abound for those who wear it with confidence."
Stories about people who have been converted by Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal abound. One of the most famous is that of Alphonse Ratisbonne, a French Jew with no belief in God, whose brother, a Catholic convert, gave him a Miraculous Medal to wear and extracted a promise from him to pray daily--probably the Memorare--asking for the Virgin's help.
Within five days, his life had changed dramatically. He visited a church with his brother and was later found in deep ecstasy. He told his friends that "I have seen Her as I see you." Without speaking, Mary conveyed to him the truth of Jesus Incarnate and His death and resurrection. He also understood that the light that streamed from Mary's open hands was indeed the grace of God. When he came out of his ecstasy, he demanded baptism and was baptized by a cardinal who had no doubt about his belief, through Mary's miraculous intervention in the Risen Christ. Alphonse Ratisbonne went on to found the Institutes of Our Lady of Sion and the Fathers of Sion. He died in the Holy Land and is buried at Ein Karem, believed to be the "hill country of Judea" where Elizabeth gave birth to John the Baptist.
The streams of light coming from Mary's hands are explained by St. Catherine as light streaming from the gems of rings on the Blessed Virgin's fingers. "..I saw rings on Her fingers, three rings to each finger, the largest one near the base of the finger, one of medium size in the middle, the smallest one at the tip. Each ring was set with gems, some more beautiful than others; the larger gems emitted greater rays and the smaller gems, smaller rays; the rays bursting from all sides flooded the base, so that I could no longer see the feet of the Blessed Virgin... The gems from which rays do not fall are the graces for which souls forget to ask."
Within months of the medal being struck and distributed, the stories of miracles proliferated and soon it became known as the Miraculous Medal. And the stories, even today, are never-ending.
The Miraculous Medal is a simple pictorial version of God's plan for our salvation. On the front of the medal, we are shown the Virgin Mary pouring graces out over the whole world. She is crowned with stars — a crown that Catherine identified to her confessor as the crown of stars described in the Book of Revelation. The words, 'O Mary conceived without sin pray for us who have recourse to thee' are a reminder that She is there for all Her children. On the reverse side of the medal there are twelve stars representing the Twelve Patriarchs and the Twelve Apostles. The great 'M' representing the Blessed Virgin is entwined with the Cross on which Her Son died and redeemed us. Then there are the twin hearts
— the Immaculate Heart with the sword and the Sacred Heart crowned with thorns.
Devotion to the Miraculous Medal was not specifically asked for yet, as miracles proliferated, more and more people wore the medal and became devoted to Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. The Perpetual Novena in Her honor was established at Mary's Central Shrine in Germantown, Pa. by Father Joseph A. Skelly, C.M. on Monday December 8, 1930 and has continued there ever since. Now the Novena is held in many parishes throughout the world including the Chapel of Apparitions on the rue du Bac in Paris.
A replica of the "Virgin of the Globe", the statue St. Catherine was so anxious about, can be seen in the Basilica Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Emmitsburg, Md.
A FREE Miraculous Medal is available from
Love and Mercy Publications
*For more information on the miraculous medal and St, Catherine Laboure, please go to the web site of the association of the miraculous medal at: www.amm.org/medal