Incorruptibility of Catherine Labouré

Body found intact after 56 years. Limbs supple, eyes retained shape and blue color. Transferred to glass reliquary at Rue du Bac chapel.

Catherine Labouré died on December 31, 1876, at the hospice at Reuilly, Paris, after forty years of service to elderly men in the care of the Daughters of Charity. She was buried in the vault beneath the chapel there. She died as she had lived — quietly. Her community knew her as a capable, devout, ordinary sister. Her identity as the visionary of the Miraculous Medal was known only to her confessor, Father Jean-Marie Aladel, who had died in 1865, and to her superior, to whom she had finally disclosed it in her last year.

Fifty-six years passed. In 1933, as the Vatican prepared to proceed with her beatification, the coffin was opened in the presence of Cardinal Jean Verdier, Archbishop of Paris, together with civil officials and physicians. Catherine’s body showed no significant decomposition. Her limbs remained supple. Her eyes were noted as retaining their shape and blue color. Her hands had taken on a wax-yellow tone but were otherwise intact. The physicians who examined the body recorded the unusual state of preservation.

Her remains were transferred to the chapel of the Daughters of Charity at Rue du Bac in the seventh arrondissement of Paris — the same chapel where, 103 years before, she had knelt before Our Lady and received the charge of the Miraculous Medal. She was placed in a glass reliquary beneath the side altar of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, where she remains today.

Pope Pius XI beatified her on May 28, 1933. Pope Pius XII canonized her on July 27, 1947. The Rue du Bac chapel draws an estimated two to three million pilgrims annually. Catherine’s body lies there in the Daughters of Charity habit — in the same chapel she entered as a young novice in 1830.