Blessed Alan de la Roche and the Voice from the Host

Attribution: as Blessed Alan himself told it.

By the middle of the fifteenth century the Confraternity of the Rosary that St. Dominic had founded had fallen into neglect, and Our Lady chose Blessed Alan de la Roche, a Dominican in Brittany, to revive it. He had been a great sinner in his youth, and it was the Blessed Virgin Mary, he was told, who had won the grace of his conversion.

One morning, while he was offering Mass, our Lord spoke to him from the Sacred Host. "How can you crucify me again so soon?" Alan, horrified, asked what he meant. "You crucified me once by your sins," came the answer, "and I would willingly be crucified again rather than have my Father offended by the sins you used to commit. You are crucifying me now because you have all the learning you need to preach my Mother's Rosary, and you are not doing it. If you did, you could teach many souls the right path. Since you are not, you are guilty of the sins they commit."

This terrible reproach broke Alan's heart, and he vowed to preach the Rosary without ceasing. Our Lady later encouraged him, telling him that converted sinners are a glory to her, and that she would have suffered anything to save him. He went on to bring more than a hundred thousand people into the Confraternity before his death.

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Source:

Simplified retellings of the miracle and conversion stories that St. Louis de Montfort gathered in The Secret of the Rosary, written in the early eighteenth century. These are paraphrased in plain modern prose, faithful to the substance of the traditional English translation but not word for word. Montfort himself called them "ancient but authentic stories about the holy Rosary," collected from earlier authors such as Blessed Alan de la Roche, and offered on human authority, not as articles of faith.