Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paray-le-Monial

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In a small Burgundian town stands one of the purest Romanesque churches of France, a priory raised in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the monks of Cluny as a scaled-down image of their immense mother abbey; since Cluny itself was destroyed, Paray's golden stone and octagonal tower are the closest we can come to seeing it. But pilgrims come above all for what happened a few streets away. In the chapel of the Visitation monastery, between 1673 and 1675, Christ showed His heart to a young nun, Margaret Mary Alacoque, whose feast is today: Behold this Heart which has so loved men, He told her, and asked for a feast of reparation and love. A Jesuit, Saint Claude La Colombière, believed her when almost no one did. From this quiet cloister the devotion to the Sacred Heart spread across the whole Church, all the way to the basilica crowning Montmartre. Margaret Mary died on October 17, 1690; her relics rest in the Chapel of the Apparitions, and Paray remains what pilgrims call it, the city of the Heart of Jesus.