From Michael Brown’s Seven Days With Mary:

Wearing the Miraculous Medal grants a special protection against evil. By doing so we are both requesting the protection of Mary and expressing confidence in her. As a result, graces are unleashed.

It’s crucial to remember this in our own time. I have rarely felt the graces I did while visiting the Paris chapel. It is a reminder that when God wants to move, there is nothing—and no one—who can get in His way. He can cause any miracle He wants to. He can erase any evil. Every force in the universe must obey Him. If He chose to—it was in His plan—God could extinguish all forces of evil with a flick of His finger. He can even make our enemies our friends.

We should remember this as we walk through a world of antagonism. And we should remember the Miraculous Medal as we seek to change our relatives and friends.

When we wish to convert someone, there are few better tools than the Miraculous Medal. In 1842, after wearing a Miraculous Medal on a bet, a wealthy Jewish atheist named Alphonse Ratisbonne saw an apparition of Mary and was not only converted but also became a Jesuit!

By that time, the medal was everywhere. It had become the rage of Christian Europe. Catherine had quietly confided the apparitions to her spiritual director (and no one else, not even her Mother Superior or fellow nuns), and the priest had then taken the medal’s design to companies that manufactured the medals by the millions. As one bishop noted, except for the Holy Cross, no other Christian symbol was so quickly and widely multiplied. Indeed, in one ten-year period, 20 million medals were pressed by one Paris firm alone.

Yet Catherine wanted no glory. She told no one else that she was the seer. And she kept this secret for 46 years, laboring as a lowly laundress for the aged and infirm.

When we work for God, we have peace. We have success. We have security. On the other hand, when we do something for ourselves, when we labor for our own gains, such labor loses a great deal of value, no matter how noble or even “religious” our labor may appear on the surface.

If it is our ego we feed–our ego we seek–then we are obscuring the Face of God.

The statue was indeed molded, and the Miraculous Medals continued to spread around the world, numbering today in the hundreds of millions. It is one of only three sacramentals in the history of the Church to be honored with a Mass and an Office, sharing that distinction with the Rosary and Scapular.

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