In this Jubilee Year of St. Margaret Mary’s canonization, we celebrate today the anniversary of her Profession Day, when she took her final vows, November 6, 1672.
Ask this Saint today for help in your discernment of vocation, in reaching your Profession Day, in remembering the grace of your final vows or for any other blessing.
Bishop Bougaud writes of this day in the life of St. Margaret Mary :
“November 6, 1672, in the present chapel of the convent of Paray, at the grate still in existence, Margaret Mary pronounced her holy vows. The details left us of this ceremony are as meagre as those of her taking the habit. But better than these, we know perfectly the sentiments that filled her heart, and the graces with which she was inundated. The Lord appeared to her and said: “Up to this moment I have been only thy Fiancee. I shall henceforth be thy Spouse.” He promised never to leave her, but to treat her as His spouse, which promise He began at once to fulfill ” in a manner,” she says, ” that I feel incapable of expressing, and of which I shall only say that He spoke to me and treated me as a spouse of Tabor.”‘ Margaret, touched to the depths of her soul, in a transport of love wrote with her blood a total consecration of herself to the Lord. This act concludes in words that recall the sublime cry of St. Teresa or of St. Catharine of Siena:
“All in God, and nothing in self!
All to God, and nothing to self!
All for God, and nothing for self!”
She subscribed herself: “His unworthy spouse, Sister
Margaret Mary, dead to the world.'”
Source:
Life of Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque: From the French of Monseigneur Bougaud
By Emile Bougaud