Today, November 27, We Celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal

That very year, a cholera pandemic was sweeping across much of Europe, killing tens of thousands. For instance, 20,000 reportedly died in Paris alone – over 3% of the city’s population. The toll throughout France was 100,000; it was over 6,500 in London. It also spread to the U.S., particularly hitting Washington D.C. 

When the inaugural batch of medals was minted, members of the Daughters of Charity began to wear the medals. The Catholic Sisters distributed them among the sick and elderly to wear. 

“Almost immediately, miraculous healings, cures, and conversions occurred; people began clamouring for the medal of the Immaculate Conception (as it was originally called),” records of the Central Association of the Miraculous Medal in Philadelphia indicate. 

The records further indicate that “the Medal quickly spread throughout France and then the world. Before long, people were calling it the Miraculous Medal; everyone wanted the medal Mary had brought from Heaven.”

From ordinary people to Church leaders asked for the medals. Archbishop Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen of Paris wanted one. Even Pope Gregory XVI received one. Over 2 million Miraculous Medals were minted and distributed between 1932 and 1836 to meet the ever-growing requests. 

Traditionally, the Miraculous Medal is worn around the neck. It has become a treasured sacramental of the Catholic Church.

Extract from National Catholic Register (NCR) of 30 November 2021

Today we see much discontent around the world. Economic, political and sociological turmoil. Movement away, not toward, the Lord. In France, fewer than 10% of Catholics attend Mass regularly. In the United States, two-thirds of Catholics don’t believe our Church’s teaching about the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Another pandemic has swept globally.

Vincentian Father Griffin helps us to see some parallels between these days and those 1830-32 events.

“What is clear from the period in which the Miraculous Medal was given is that it was a time of political upheaval (1830) and cholera outbreak (1832),” he notes.

“First of all, the unsettled character of the government has some relation to what’s going on now. There was difficulty between the different groups in France. What’s more, the cholera epidemic broke out in 1832. The Miraculous Medal was not minted until some months after the breakout. The first minting of the Miraculous Medal happened in June 1832” and then “immediately distributed. A lot of the people who had the Miraculous Medal recovered.” He saw the medal “associated with the cholera epidemic and also the deepening of the peoples’ faith. It brought the Blessed Mother strongly forward. It was a blessing for the Vincentian family itself. It formed the Vincentian community particularly around the Miraculous Medal.”

As a side note, he says that Victor Hugo memorialized the rebellion in his novel Les Misérables, set in 1830, and in it mentions the death of Fantine and the ministry of the Daughters of Charity: “The two nuns attending the infirmary, Lazarists as all these Sister of Charity are…”

Father Griffin, who lived in Paris for three years — his office was by the Rue de Bac shrine where he said Mass hundreds of times — continued, “The connection to today to the Blessed Mother and the medal is a reminder. It causes the person who wears it to remember the Blessed Mother and her love for us.”

He points out the way the medal influences the people seeking the graces from the Blessed Mother, who has beams coming from her hands.

“The point is, in the current pandemic one turns to the Blessed Mother and seeks her help to avoid the unnecessary sickness and bring healing into people’s lives. The connection is rather clear. The heart of it is not that a miracle happens when one wears the Miraculous Medal, but it changes peoples’ faith, it helps people put greater confidence in the Blessed Mother.” It was used as a religious symbol during the cholera epidemic.

(Story continues below)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Central Association of the Miraculous Medal distributed more than 3,500 Miraculous Medals to 18 hospitals and healthcare facilities as well as frontline workers.

Years ago, another Vincentian priest at a different Marian shrine found a key message of the medal and the devotion it generates an antidote to many of today's attitudes, especially in the strong American cultural emphasis on the self-made approach to life.

“But that rugged individualism,” he concluded, “sometimes gets in the way of allowing God and Our Lady to work in our lives. And her basic message is to cast your cares on her, to be dependent. That's where the sense of well-being comes from for so many of the people who pray to her.”

From 1830 to the present day, as billions of Miraculous Medals have been minted over these last 191 years, and people have worn them with proper devotion, our Blessed Mother continues to prove her love and help for us in billions of ways. What a heavenly gift, along with the Rosary, is the Miraculous Medal.

Sources: 

Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal | Marians of the Immaculate Conception

In a Time of Pandemic and Upheaval, Our Lady Gave Us the Miraculous Medal| National Catholic Register