Claude La Colombière was educated at the Jesuit college of Lyon, entered the Society of Jesus in 1658 at seventeen, and was ordained priest in 1675. He was assigned in February 1675 as superior of the small Jesuit house at Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy — at the time a town of about two thousand and an unlikely posting for a brilliant young Jesuit.
The reason for his appointment was the small Visitation convent of Paray-le-Monial across the town. There a young Visitandine, Margaret Mary Alacoque, had since 1673 been receiving the great Sacred Heart visions of Christ — visions that her successive superiors had refused to believe, attributing them to mental disorder and forbidding their reporting. Within weeks of his arrival Claude — who had no previous knowledge of Margaret Mary — recognized in her the authentic mystical phenomenon, became her formal spiritual director, and committed himself to the propagation of the Sacred Heart devotion she was being commissioned to spread. The great vision of June 1675 — in which Christ appeared to Margaret Mary holding His Heart and asking that the Sacred Heart be made known to the world — was reported first to Claude.
He served briefly as chaplain to Mary of Modena, Duchess of York (the wife of the future James II of England) at the English court 1676–78; betrayed in the anti-Catholic frenzy of the 'Popish Plot' of 1678, he was arrested, imprisoned briefly in the Tower of London, and expelled. He returned, his health permanently broken, to Paray-le-Monial as confessor and assistant — confirming and supporting Margaret Mary's continuing visions until his death in February 1682. The Sacred Heart devotion, validated by Claude's authority as her director and propagated by the post-1682 Jesuits, became one of the major devotional movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. Canonized 1992.