Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal
In Paris, there is a Catholic chapel whose fame didn’t begin with architecture at all, but with a small, portable object: the Miraculous Medal. From this room, a message attached to a particular image of the Virgin of Miracles traveled outward—through apparitions in 1830, through a cholera crisis in 1832, and later through church ceremonies that turned local devotion into something fully international.
A shrine built around an apparition
The place you’re visiting is the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal (French: Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Médaille-Miraculeuse), a Roman Catholic Marian shrine in Paris. It is dedicated to the Virgin Mary under the title the Virgin of Miracles, and it is administered locally as part of the Maison des Filles de la charité—the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul—with the municipality of Paris as the owner and operator. The chapel’s story starts in the reign of King Louis XVIII. An imperial decree dated 25 March 1813 authorized the chapel’s construction on the site of the former Hotel de Châtillon, where the Daughters of Charity established their motherhouse. The chapel was completed and blessed and dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on 6 August 1815.
