How convenient that her memorial falls in the midst of my scattershot attempt to recount my trip to France.
Paray-le-Monial, where St. Margaret Mary lived and experienced her visions, was not at all on my original itinerary. It wasn’t on my radar, for I knew nothing much about St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. I’ll admit this and turn in my Catholic card right this minute as a consequence, but yes, it’s true. My Vatican II Baby True Colors rise up bright and clear in this area, as I acknowledge that I have gone most of my life with little knowledge and less interest in French devotional developments (except for Lourdes) and indeed, when I started seeing her name and “Sacred Heart” on the spiritual travel/pilgrimage radar this area, I definitely got confused. I thought, Wait, isn’t she in Paris? Didn’t I visit that church and see her relics?
No, idiot, that was St. Catherine Labouré – Miraculous Medal. Get it straight.
So yes, she entered my vision early on – the diocesan TLM parish, Saint-Georges had materials about a parish pilgrimage to Paray-le-Monial. Okay, let’s break open the map and see what’s up.
The most logical day to do it would be Monday, 9/30, which was to be get-the-car-Cluny-Taize-and-up-towards-DIjon day. But at that point, I was still thinking that Ars would be my extra destination that day – I was pretty fixated on getting to Ars, home of St. John Vianney, of course. But Ars is on the other side of Lyon and south, and while I did have a lot of time, it really made no sense to drive completely away from the direction in which I ultimately needed to go.
So, back to Paray-le-Monial.
Which I did, and here’s that report.
This is what I’ll add today:
We read a lot about the Bad Old Days of Catholicism, when supposedly all Catholics did was cower in fear under the sway of priestcraft, threatened with Hell at every turn, never knowing the love of God. Thank goodness that Spirit™ came along to straighten us all out, amiright?
There are even figures today who have reacted very strongly against Catholicism, saying that all they knew as a young person growing up Catholic – in the 80’s – was hellfire and paralyzing legalism. I don’t doubt those accounts, and is surely a reflection of a particular subculture rather than the general Catholic gestalt which most of us experienced as, well, the exact opposite of that.
And while legalism, control and fear have certainly been a feature of Catholic life, theology and spirituality since the beginning, and all of that has certainly done damage, when one looks at the Catholic spiritual impulses and movements that have lasted both as popular devotions and as those sanctioned by the institution, one finds, even as we enter a church building, invariably under an ominous Last Judgment tympanum, an overwhelming message of love.
As I wandered the near-empty, very quiet streets of Paray-le-Monial that Monday afternoon I was, at every turn, faced with a message, and that message was love.
Love of course is the heart of the Gospel, the heart of salvation history, but of course it gets obscured. It gets obscured by those entrusted with this Gospel, as they allow their mission to be transformed into one of institutional maintenance and control. As they do indeed redefine “love” to their own advantage. It gets obscured, more importantly, in our own hearts as we fixate on and are mired in our failures and our weaknesses, as we objectify other human beings and instrumentalize creation, as we simply forget who we are, why we are here at all, and who put us here: love.
And so the saints and mystics arise. They pour out their lives in the works of mercy through the centuries. They dwell in silence, often a painful, sacrificial silence, and they listen. Unburdened, stripped and free, they can hear, so clearly, what the rest of us either refuse or simply can’t hear, and, often at great cost, against obstacles within and without, they let us in, they let us know what they have heard, and if you listen to them across the centuries, what they have all heard is the same, and it all comes down to this:
picking this up. But if you do have an interest in such things – you might like this. Or you might tire of it, as I did. I liked Collins’
recouping what morality, if not the legal and social system owe her. The Woman in White‘s events are described in two stages: 1) what happened and 2) one character’s attempts to discover what happened and bring the perpetrators to some sort of justice. I found the narrative stage of the No Name more compelling.
Charlotte was Both 