Chapelle Notre-Dame de la Médaille Miraculeuse

Church · Rue du Bac, Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin (7th)Paris,France

A shrine behind a plain courtyard door on a Paris shopping street, drawing two million pilgrims a year to walls of marble thank-yous.

The chapel of the Miraculous Medal is the busiest room on rue du Bac and the hardest to find. It sits at the back of a courtyard behind a plain doorway, between shopfronts and the side wall of a department store, with nothing on the street to announce it. The courtyard walls are covered in small marble tablets, most carrying a single word: merci, thank you. Inside, people come in, kneel, buy a medal at the counter and go back out to the street. Nothing is staged for visitors. In 1830 a young nun of the Daughters of Charity, Catherine Labouré, said the Virgin had appeared to her here and had asked for a medal to be struck. The Archbishop of Paris agreed to it, and the first fifteen hundred were struck in June 1832. Close to two million people a year now come through this courtyard, which places the chapel among the ten most visited sites in the city. Catherine Labouré's body lies beneath an altar here, and the shrine of Louise de Marillac, who founded the order in the seventeenth century, stands in the choir.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Finding the entrance is the hard part — There is no facade and no spire; look for the courtyard entrance at number 140 and walk through it, past the porter's window, to the far end.
Most people in the room are praying — Services run through the day and the pews are in use, so visitors keep to the back and the sides and do not walk down the centre during Mass.
It is full on ordinary weekday mornings — Most of the people here are pilgrims rather than tourists, so the busy times are not only summers and weekends, and coach groups arrive early.
Photograph the courtyard, not the congregation — The contrast between the shopping street and the chapel at the end of the passage makes the picture, and taking it does not mean pointing a lens at anyone at prayer.

Things to do

1
Find the door from the pavement first
Walk the block once without going in. From the street you see only a courtyard gate and a house number, with nothing to show that two million people a year pass through it. Then go through. It takes about thirty seconds to walk from the traffic of the street to the chapel at the back, and that short passage is what makes the place remarkable.
2
Read the wall of thank-you plaques
The walls of the courtyard and the passage are covered in small marble tablets, most of them carrying a single word: merci, meaning thank you. They are ex-votos, left by people who believe their prayers were answered, and each one is dated. Read down a single column and you pass through a century of private crises.
3
Find the two women the chapel is arranged around
Catherine Labouré, the nun who reported the apparitions, lies beneath an altar in the chapel. The shrine of Louise de Marillac, who founded the order in the seventeenth century, stands in the choir. Find both before you look at anything else, because the room is arranged around these two women rather than around its architecture.