Claude La Colombière

In February of sixteen seventy-five, a Jesuit priest of forty-three arrived in Paray-le-Monial to take charge of the small Jesuit house.

His name was Claude de La Colombière.

He was a Burgundian nobleman's son, a brilliant preacher, a gentle and educated man, and he had no idea that the most important appointment of his life was waiting for him in a convent parlor.

Within days, he was invited to preach to the Sisters of the Visitation and to hear their confessions.

They were not stories of a woman seeking glory.

They were stories of a woman who had decided that nothing in her was worth protecting.

Then, on the fifteenth of February, sixteen eighty-two, Father Claude de La Colombière died at Paray-le-Monial.

He was forty-one.

Many of the sisters doubted her also.

By God's providence, Jesuit father and future saint, Claude de la Colombière, became the sisters' confessor.

Upon listening to Margaret Mary, he believed her and helped to support the authenticity of these visions.

Toward the end of Margaret Mary's life, her community began to accept the revelations and observed the Feast of the Sacred Heart, building a chapel to the Sacred Heart three years before her death.

There are preserved especially the juridical attestations of two persons whose character leaves no doubt as to the truth of their deposition.

One is the Abbé de la Concourbert, brother of the Jesuit Father Claude de la Colombière, celebrated for his virtues and eloquence, Grand Archdeacon and Vicar General to Quebec, and Clerical Councillor to the Superior Council of New France.

The other is Monsieur de Louth, Captain of an Infantry Company, one of the bravest officers the King has had in the colony, and whose name is frequently cited in this history.

The former declares in writing under his own hand that having been sick from the month of January to that of June 1675 with a slow fever which had baffled all remedies and a dysentery that nothing could check, he was advised to bind himself by a vow that if it pleased God to restore his health, he would proceed to the mission of St. Francis Xavier at Sault St. Louis to pray at the tomb of Catherine Tekakwita, and he yielded to this advice, and that the fervor left him that very day, and that the dysentery diminished considerably.