St Catherine Labouré

28^th November is the saint’s day of Catherine Labouré, a French nun who lived from 1806 to 1876. She was devoutly religious from an early age and had no desire other than to join a religious order. In 1830 she was admitted to the Sisters of Charity.

Almost immediately after her admittance she began to see visions of the Virgin Mary, which developed into a symbol in which a large letter M was surmounted by a cross accompanied by two hearts, that of Jesus surrounded by a crown of thorns and Mary’s pierced with a sword. She also heard Mary’s voice telling her that these symbols would benefit anyone who wore them.

The end result was the “Miraculous Medal”, of which an initial batch of 150 was struck. The other side of the medal, oval in shape, was an image of Mary surrounded by the words: "O Mary! conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee". The medal became highly popular among Roman Catholics who believed that wearing one would confer “great graces” on them.

Although one can admire people who have been accorded sainthood because of their noble deeds or personal sacrifice, there are some saints whom it is much more difficult to accept as deserving such status. For me, Catherine Labouré falls into this category.

For one thing, she advocated a practice that seems to confuse religion with magic, namely the wearing of a special symbol that will confer benefits not available to non-wearers. This is surely not far from the medieval practice of selling odd bits of wood that were supposed to be pieces of Christ’s cross, thus playing tricks on gullible people. One might think that a modern-day Chaucer would have had something to say about “miraculous medals”.

Also, surely we need to be far more careful about how we regard people who claim to have had miraculous visions or heard voices telling them to do certain things. Modern psychology knows far more about hallucinations than people did in past times, and it is now accepted that such things are common symptoms of conditions including paranoid schizophrenia.

Should we really be accepting as saints people who are simply suffering from a deep-seated mental illness?

© John Welford