Another cure occurred on the Tuesday of Easter Week. Monsieur Dupont writes that he had intended to remove the lamp at the end of Holy Week. “But as often as I was about to remove it, my feelings prevented me, and so I left it. Then came the month of Mary. This furnished an additional motive to keep up my little devotion, which I knew was not opposed to the spirit of the Church, Then came the months consecrated to the Sacred Heart and the Precious Blood. From that time, consolations super abounded. More than twenty persons had been relieved in serious illness. The news of the cures spread rapidly.
“Then we began to recite before the picture the Litany of the Holy Face, composed by the poor workwoman of Brittany known as Sister Marie de Saint-Pierre. Prodigies were multiplied. I cannot undertake to tell in detail the cures obtained by the use of the oil: cancers, internal and external ulcers, cataracts, deafness, etc. From the second of December to the present time, May third, I have given away more than eight thousand small phials of oil. Day by day the crowd of pilgrims increases in number. Sometimes on Saturdays, more than three hundred persons arrive; on the other days of the week, there are not so many. The proof that grace is acting on souls may be seen from the fact that the novenas of prayers and the use of the oil conclude with confession and Communion.”
Monsieur Dupont’s idea of anointing the sick with oil was inspired by an incident of 1840. On hearing that the oil used before the Madonna in the Church of St. Augustine in Rome had miraculous power, he asked himself: "Is not the Blessed Virgin as powerful in France as in Italy?” Though it was raining, he went straightway to the extreme end of the city to procure some oil from the lamp kept lighted before Notre Dame des Miracles. Finding the lamp extinguished for want of oil, he purchased some and had the lamp lighted. He then took some of this oil home with him and gave it to a woman with consumption. Within a fortnight her doctor, an unbeliever, attested her complete cure. It is computed that the Holy Man of Tours sent at least two million little bottles of oil from his lamp before the Holy Face to various places and persons, and each bottle was accompanied by a letter.
In the work of propagating this devotion, Monsieur Dupont humbly styled himself "the servant of Sister Saint-Pierre and the executor of her thoughts.” This holy Carmelite nun was the daughter of a poor workman and was born at Rennes in Brittany on October 4, 1816. She was attracted to Tours by an act of noteworthy protection from St. Martin. Shortly after her clothing in the religious habit, God began to manifest special designs in her regard. Her revelations were in obedience communicated to her superior in the form of letters. On November 11, 1845, she wrote:
"Our Lord transported me in spirit to the route leading to Calvary, and portrayed vividly before me the pious office rendered Him by St. Veronica, when with her veil she wiped His sacred Face, defiled with spittle, dust, sweat, and blood. Afterwards, the divine Saviour gave me to understand that the impious actually renew by their blasphemies the outrages inflicted upon His Holy Face, and I comprehended that all these blasphemies hurled by the impious against the Divinity, whom they cannot reach, fall, like the spittle of the Jews, upon the Holy Face of Our Lord, who has made Himself the victim for sinners. Next Our Lord taught me that, in performing exercises for the reparation of blasphemy, we render to Him the same service as was rendered Him by the pious Veronica, and that He regards the persons who honor Him in that manner with the same favor as He did that holy woman at the time of His Passion.”
Again she wrote: "Our Lord made me know that His august Face, offered to our adoration, is the ineffable mirror of the divine perfections—perfections contained and expressed in the Most Holy Name of God. I understood that, as the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the sensible object offered to our adoration to represent His immense love in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, so in like manner the Holy Face of Our Lord is the sensible object offered to our adoration to repair the outrages committed by blasphemers against the majesty and sovereignty of God, of which the Holy Face is the figure, the mirror, and the expression; and that by virtue of this Holy Face, offered to the Eternal Father, we may appease His anger and obtain the conversion of the impious and of blasphemers. . . . Our Lord pointed out to me in the apostle St. Peter an example of the virtue residing in His Holy Face. . . .
