Burgundy, France
Paray-le-Monial
What is there today
The basilica of the Sacred Heart is twelfth century Romanesque and works as a scale model of the abbey of Cluny, which was destroyed. Beside it is the chapel of the Apparitions, where the urn with the remains of Margaret Mary Alacoque is kept. The town receives hundreds of thousands of pilgrims a year and still has fewer than ten thousand inhabitants.
Why this image comes from here
It is one of the very few Christian devotions with an exact birth date: 1673, in the parlour of a Visitation convent. From here comes an image that within two centuries hangs in millions of homes across Europe and Latin America, and which remains the most recognisable domestic image in the Catholic world.
Pieces from this place
- Sacred Heart of Jesus
- The devotion is born in a Burgundian convent in 1673 and spreads from there across half of Europe and all of Latin America. Few images have so precise a date of birth.