The Miraculous Medal

The medal’s official name is the Medal of the Immaculate Conception. In 1830 St. Catherine Labouré (1806–1876), a young novice of the Daughters of Charity (the sisters founded by St. Vincent de Paul), reported visions of Mary in the chapel of their mother house at 140 Rue du Bac in Paris: on the night of 18–19 July and on 27 November 1830.

She said Mary showed her a design: Mary standing on a globe with rays from her hands and the words “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee,” and on the back an M with a cross and two hearts. With the approval of the Archbishop of Paris, the first medals were struck in 1832. During a cholera epidemic people reported graces and cures, and it was soon nicknamed “miraculous.” The nickname records what people reported; we make no claim about cures.

Catherine told almost no one except her confessor; her identity was revealed only near her death. She was canonized in 1947. The prayer on the medal anticipates the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (that Mary was conceived without original sin), defined by Pius IX in 1854.

1. Have the medal blessed by a priest or deacon.
2. Wear it, or keep it with you, as a reminder of Mary’s care and of her Son.
3. Pray the short prayer on the medal often, especially when tempted or worried.
4. Let it lead you to the sacraments; the medal is not a charm.

The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (2001) §206 says the Church blesses Marian medals because “they help to remind the faithful of the love of God, and to increase trust in the Blessed Virgin Mary,” and adds that devotion must be matched by a coherent Christian life. Sacramentals are “sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments” (CCC 1667). They “do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (CCC 1670). The Church is clear that they are not charms: to attribute power to prayers or sacramental signs by “their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (CCC 2111). Popular devotions “extend the liturgical life of the Church, but do not replace it” (CCC 1675).