PARIS, FRANCE — Arriving here late last Friday evening, I had essentially a full Saturday with my family to see as much of this historic city as we could muster. I had never visited before. The weather was hardly ideal — mid-90s, nasty hot. The week preceding likewise had not been exactly ideal for a visit. Rioting had broken out over the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy. For several consecutive days, protests raged. Fortunately, the street fires had cooled by the time we got there.
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“Has the rioting stopped?” I asked our cab driver. “Yes,” he replied. “It is finished.”
The driver took us past the main square that served as a flashpoint of the protests. “See,” he said, “it’s all cleaned up. But last week? Very bad.”
It did appear to be cleaned up. For now.
Of course, chaos and corruption in Paris is hardly new. Today, July 14, the French celebrate their independence. Our Independence Day, July 4, marks something grand — the Declaration of Independence. For the French, theirs marks something vulgarly violent, the deadly 1789 Storming of the Bastille and the launch of the French Revolution.
Despite its promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution was a bloody mess. From 1793–94, some 40,000 people were beheaded in Paris alone. The Jacobins (celebrated today by obscene American leftists who moronically have a magazine called Jacobin) went on a rampage. Their targets were everything from religion to human nature itself. They even went to war with the Christian calendar, seeking to create a 10-day week and thus erasing the prominence of the Lord’s Day. They tried to make the year 1794 the year 0.
It was a fundamental transformation, and it was disastrous.
“The difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution,” observed historian Paul Johnson, longtime close friend of The American Spectator. “Is that the American Revolution was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event.” That key difference, noted Johnson, defined and shaped the two revolutions from start to finish. (READ MORE: Paul Johnson: The Best Chronicler of Modern Times)
Eventually, the corrupt Jacobins ate their own, gobbling up Maximilien Robespierre, who had his own denouement with the “National Razor.”
Remnants of these signs of corruption remain throughout France to this day. Tourists can visit them. But for me personally, I was on a mission to see something else entirely, an extraordinary sign of incorruption. I wanted to see Saint Catherine Labouré.
Catherine Labouré was a nun who lived in 19th-century Paris. She was born on May 2, 1806, the ninth of 11 children in a farming family in the village of Fain-lès-Moutiers. Her mother died when Catherine was 9, and the little girl thereafter committed herself to the Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, as her protector. Her father and brothers attempted to marry her off, including with two marriage proposals, but Catherine deeply desired religious life. She eventually entered the Daughters of Charity convent at Rue du Bac in Paris.
What happened to her at the convent was extraordinary.
Catherine is known among Catholics for instituting the Miraculous Medal. This medal (if you’re not Catholic, please bear with me) came as a result of what Sister Catherine claimed were a series of apparitions from the Virgin Mary, starting with a first during the night of July 18–19, 1830. During one of these apparitions, on Nov. 27, 1830, the Mother of Christ asked the nun to have special devotional medals made according to a specific design. With help from others, she proceeded to do just that, and the people of Paris were abuzz with talk of the powers of this Medal of Mary Immaculate, which they began calling the Miraculous Medal.
Of course, non-Catholics, and even many Catholics, will find these claims incredulous. Even the Daughters of Charity that run the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Paris and carry on the devotion to Saint Catherine Labouré insist in their informational literature that the medal is not to be construed as “an amulet nor a good-luck charm. It has no supernatural, magic or guaranteed effect. The Medal is not what saves.” Still, it has been associated with alleged miracles.
If you haven’t witnessed such a miracle with your own eyes, well, one can understand the caution. But again, please stick with me.
There is something else miraculous about Saint Catherine Labouré that you can actually see with your own eyes: her incorrupt body. And that’s what I wanted to see in Paris.
The notion of incorruptibility will likewise leave many readers dubious, but it is a phenomenon observably real — and most certainly rare. It has occurred with a small number of religious figures in history, usually saints or deceased figures on their way to sainthood. Saint Padre Pio is renowned for numerous reasons, including his visibly incorrupt body on display since his death in September 1968. Remarkably, even the New York Times recently ran a photo of Pio’s body (click here).
Right now in America, there’s a striking case of a nun named Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster who died in 2019 and whose face looks as if she died yesterday. The American Spectator’s Aubrey Gulick wrote about Wilhelmina. (Perhaps Providentially, Sister Wilhelmina hit the news at the same time as did the grotesque “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” — the LA Dodgers’ favorite group of “nuns.”) (READ MORE: Don’t Just Blame the Dodgers: Blame the Collapse of Catholic Fidelity)
What’s particularly extraordinary about the case of Saint Catherine Labouré, however, is that she died nearly 150 years ago, and she is visibly incorrupt. Her body is encased in a glass tomb to the right of the main altar in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal at 140 Rue du Bac, run by the sisters of her Daughters of Charity congregation. This is the exact location where the Virgin Mary appeared to Sister Catherine.
On March 21, 1933, a medical and ecclesiastical delegation were present for the exhumation of Sister Catherine’s body from the church crypt. They and the sisters were astonished to find a corpse that did not resemble the skeletal remains of someone who died over half a century earlier. Quite the contrary — they found a body unchanged in physical appearance since it was first entombed after her death on Dec. 31, 1876.
Having now seen the body myself, adorned in the habit worn by the Daughters until 1964, I can attest that the face of the long-deceased nun looks as fresh as yesterday. In fact, it surely looks healthier than when she died. It has color. It has not been touched up with makeup or wax. I talked to the staff for added confirmation.
Also striking are the eyes of the saint. The eyes remain intact. Joan Carroll Cruz in her seminal book on the subject, The Incorruptibles, quotes Dr. Robert Didier, who was among those examining the corpse in March 1933: “The eyes were in the orbits; the eyelids half closed; we were able to state that the ball though fallen and shrunken existed in its entirety, and even the color, bluish gray, of the iris still remained.”
What I’ve described can be seen in photos of Saint Catherine Labouré, including the one that leads this column. Photos are available online, which is a good thing because you’re not permitted to take photos inside the church. I saw people taking them regardless. How could one resist? What you’re viewing there is miraculous. You want a picture for evidence and to show others.
That church, the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, was packed last Saturday afternoon. The weather out on the street was brutal, but a throng had lined up late afternoon to get inside. Once inside, they were in no hurry to leave. The pews were filled with the young and old, male and female, black and white — people from America, Africa, Asia. The overweight, infirm, and elderly, battling the heat, nonetheless made the pilgrimage.
Faith, of course, is believing in things unseen. Yet, to see the incorrupt Saint Catherine Labouré can only strengthen one’s faith.
My advice for those who visit Paris: Forget the damned Bastille. It was an ugly scene of death, as was the sick French Revolution that it spawned. Go for something pure and holy. Go see the blessed body of Saint Catherine Labouré. I’ll take that example of French incorruption over French corruption anytime.
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