Hearts To Heart Ministries

 Virgin Of the Globe Statue

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The Rest of the Story Concerning St.

Catherine Laboure and the Miraculous Medal

Preamble:

The Miraculous Medal given to her children by the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of all the earth’s children is, without a doubt, one of the most popular Sacramentals given by Mother Church to her Faithful. It is not surprising! The Blessed Virgin promised and continues to promise that all who wear it with reverence bind themselves to her in a filial way as children to a loving, caring, gentle, and generous mother. In the last century continuing in our own very day, the individual and personal loneliness experienced first in the machine age and now in the cold dominance of technology, at a time when our mentalized soul clamors for warmth and loving acceptance, there is the silent craving for the touch, the caress, and the concern of a mother. Making use of the Miraculous Medal that she offers to her children seems to fulfill all of those needs, for in wearing it, at her request; she is able to make herself known and accepted, making life in this vale of tears more tolerable and bearable.

Granted the above, there is more, much more. In their craving on earth, her children reach out to her, but consideration should also be given to how lovingly, persistently, and even desperately she reaches out to them. She had and continues to want to make herself known, recognized for whom she really is, and what it is that she is asking for. In our very own day, she goes beyond presenting herself as a mother normal in every motherly quality, she is pleading urgently for our attention, shedding tears, even tears of blood. She comes forth indeed as our Sorrowful Mother longing to be consoled.

Our Blessed Mother certainly has a long and living history, one that has filled volumes and presents her in every single aspect of her Motherhood. It all began when the Archangel Gabriel, as he appeared to her, and let her know that she was to become the Virginal Mother of the Savior of mankind, and so it happened with her Fiat. So many of us first met her as little children introduced to her at possibly our first, and for sure, our second Christmas, as she was holding the Baby Jesus or kneeling at the side of the crib in which Jesus was sleeping. We heard of her again when she and her spouse Joseph were looking for Jesus Who when He was twelve years old had remained in the temple. We met her again when she asked Jesus to perform His first miracle in the making of wine out of water at the wedding feast at Cana. We found her at the fourth station of the cross and then at the foot of the cross suffering along with Him and even in the depth of it, He gave us Mary to be our mother too.

We had heard and/or read that she was with the apostles when the Holy Spirit descended upon them. After then she seemed to have vanished, though we know about her being at La Panto and Guadeloupe. Then came her appearance at Rue du Bac to Catherine of Laboure which seemed that the door between heaven and earth was left open to her to come and go amongst her children to be with them in every need of theirs.

Looking back from our present time to Mother Mary’s appearance at Rue du Bac, it seemed that Jesus began to present her to the world for the world to get to know her so as to have her help her children to return to Him for they appeared to be drifting away from Him and from His Church. It was the Father Who made it possible for the Virgin to become the Mother of His Son by allowing her to be conceived immaculately, that is conceived in the womb of her mother, St. Ann. It means that she became the only woman on earth born free of Original Sin and all sin so as to be able to become a very special connector between human beings and the Trinity. She became by the Father’s choice, His fairest daughter, the mother of His Son, and the spouse of the Holy Spirit, all because of the fact that she was and is the Immaculate Conception.


Introducing Our Lady as the Virgin of the Globe

The apparition of Our Lady to Catherine Laboure, as one would consider the past, was in a small way to prepare the Church to define her Immaculate Conception, that is, to make it a dogma, a truth to be believed by all the Faithful. It was the apparition of the Blessed Virgin to Catherine on November 27th of 1830 that she presented herself as the Virgin of the Globe. To her dying day, Catherine insisted that she saw the Virgin holding a globe looking up to heaven. Our Lady instructed her at that time to have a medal struck of how she saw her. The vision was given her as to what was to be put also on the backside.

Catherine went to her spiritual director to share with him what the Blessed Virgin was asking for. He disfavored her and would not encourage her in anyway to speak to him of what he called were her “illusions”. She was put under obedience not to continue promoting or even sharing anymore of what she thought was an apparition. He would not accept her as one seeing the Virgin and for sure would not, from the beginning, move an inch to satisfy her wish that a medal should be struck. 

Catherine’s mouth was sealed; her hands were tied. Nonetheless, she insisted that the Virgin wanted a medal of what she showed her. When she insisted that she saw the Blessed Virgin was standing on the earth, holding a globe in her hands and looking up to heaven, he pointed out to her that she was foolish. He retorted: “Here you say that she was standing on the earth and yet, was holding up the earth.. It is nonsense.” Her spiritual director nonetheless, to quiet her, went forth and had a medal struck, not as she instructed, but took an existing statue of the Virgin, had put rays coming out of her hands as they aimed downward. It was this form that became known as the Miraculous Medal. It was struck in 1832. At the end of May of that year, the first supply of 1500 medals were delivered to her spiritual director. By the end of 1834, as many as 8 million medals were in circulation, being as far spread as China.

Bringing up her courage and saying to her spiritual director that she did not see the Virgin as he had her on the medal, he responded that the Virgin went along with it because of the many miracles that were being performed through it as it was. He chose not to make any changes. The same medal that was struck is what the world knows as the Miraculous Medal and it is worn by millions upon millions of people.

In the year 1992, a certain Mary Kathryn Johnson heard a voice within her that she knew was not her own, that she was to complete the mission of St. Catherine Laboure. With the blessing of her bishop who told her to go ahead and do what she was instructed to do, and with the guidance of her spiritual director, in 1994 she had the first several thousand medals struck of the Virgin of the Globe according to the description given her by St. Catherine in her later days.

Within the year 2000, conducted by her spiritual director, a deeper research was made of the issue to the degree that the entire history of St. Catherine’s state of affairs was drawn out of the archives of her canonization process by a mandate given to Fr. Rene Laurentin, the famed marialigist, by the Sisters at Rue du Bac. There have been four large volumes written in French, the third of which has already been translated into English. Few of these are still available. All of the researched material had been sent in 2002 to the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith under Cardinal Ratsinger by bishop Scarpone of Honduras. Archbishop Hannan of New Orleans had conducted an interview and found that all was in order. Several months back, His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI gave the Virgin of the Globe a warm welcome.

With Our Lady coming forth to her own rescue, there is a resolving of a problem that has existed for some 175 years The completed Miraculous Medal presents to her children the three qualities that flow from her Immaculate Conception, namely; She is the Mediatrix, Co-redemptrix, and the ADVOCATE. It was her quality of Advocacy that was left out because of the lack of understanding on the part of the first spiritual director that St. Catherine had.

One might ask, why did Mother Mary allow this to happen? It was because she would not interfere between the obedience of the spiritual directee and the spiritual director. Secondly, it might just be that she knew that, we in our day would need her much more than did the people of earlier years because our days are much more of an evil nature. That makes her, as our Mother Advocate, more needful. Her archenemy is presently blazing away at her children with a ferocity not known in any of the previous centuries.

Now to be practical; what is one to do with the first Miraculous Medal? It may still be worn of course together with the completed medal, though the completed medal has all the three qualities that flow from her Immaculate Conception. The first medal has only the two. Incidentally, through some of her closer friends, Our Lady has complained that many have been using her medal as a good-luck charm without any connection to her. “There are those who have thought more of the medal than of me,” she was known to mention.

Ninety-thousand medals have already been distributed within Africa. Some sixty-five thousand have been given to the poorest of the poor by Mother Teresa’s Sisters who are stationed throughout the world. Forty-five thousand have been handed to the youngsters during the Youth World Days in Cologne. Centers for the Virgin of the Globe are being set up in various parts of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, with a super thrust coming forth from Mission Canyon, in Arizona. England, Ireland, Belgium, Holland and the Philippines are catching the excitement. All of this has taken place in just a few years with Our Lady opening both doors and windows.

There is now a new freshness given to the Miraculous Medal. It is like the New Testament fulfilling the Old Testament; like a “mini-resurrection” giving new life to the Miraculous Medal, a new life so needed in our day of urgency to go deeper into the spiritual life not only to survive, but to thrive in a closer relationship with Jesus through Mary. In these days when the power of Satan is so evident, it is hopeful that the Triune God offers mankind new and exciting forms of spiritual assistance. This world has never known of so many prayer groups studded throughout the world. It has never felt the life of reverence that has been generated by hundreds of parishes that have opened up for perpetual adoration by way of adoration chapels.

The Virgin as Advocate takes our needs and petitions to the Father through Jesus. She asks for the sufferings of her children so that she can offer them through Jesus to the Father pleading for an extended mercy, pleading with Him not to punish the world just yet. As with Saint Faustina, Our Lady of All Nations, the Virgin of the Globe takes its place in giving a new emphasis on the need to pray for mercy for a world that has gone haywire and is doomed to be punished for its many acts of disobedience, irreverence, outright arrogance, and hatred.

There are presently Virgin of the Globe Prayer Groups in existence. An Association of the Virgin of the Globe has been established with the permission and care of Bishop Gerald Scarpone now retired bishop of Honduras. A number of miracles have already been reported through the intercession of the Virgin of the Globe.

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