Saint Germaine of Pibrac: God's little Cinderella

In 1644, as preparations were being made for a funeral in the church of Pibrac, near Toulouse, the gravedigger was digging under the flagstones when he came across a buried body whose freshness astounded him. Even the flowers held by the dead woman had barely wilted. He recognised Germaine Cousin, who had died in a state of poverty and neglect on 15 June 1601, aged twenty-two.

Reliquary of Saint Germaine, Sainte-Marie-Madeleine church in Pibrac / © Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Les raisons d'y croire :

The young female body was identified by the deformity of her hand and the scarring of the lymph nodes in her neck: she was Germaine Cousin. The oldest people in the village who had known her recognised her with certainty.

Forty-three years after her funeral, her buried body was found intact. Around her, in the humility of the earth, all the other bodies were reduced to skeletons.

Even her clothes (the wedding dress in which she had been buried) were intact, and the freshness of her complexion astonishing. This cannot be due to natural causes.

A human body can only be preserved intact in special circumstances: freezing or plastination (injection of an artificial resin into the circulatory system that transforms the flesh into a kind of plastic). The body of Saint Germaine did not undergo this type of treatment.

Embalming can also be used to preserve certain bodies, provided they are enclosed in an absolutely watertight lead coffin. The absence of oxygen and the preservatives (alcohol, formaldehyde, resin, etc.) prevent putrefaction. The face and hands are sometimes covered with a thin film of wax to give them the appearance of life. But this is not how Saint Germaine's body was preserved: we are dealing here with a supernatural phenomenon that has nothing to do with embalming or mummification. God manifested Germaine's holiness after her death by making her body incorruptible.

In 1700, the process for the canonisation of Germaine Cousin was opened, and many people visited her tomb, where miraculous favours multiplied. Several cures were considered for her beatification and canonisation: Jacquette Cathala, an eight-year-old girl suffering from rickets; Philippe Luc, a young boy suffering from an incurable fistula; and the cure of two paralysed girls, Lucie Noël from Revel and Françoise Huot from Langres.

A multiplication of bread and flour, which occurred through the intercession of Saint Germaine de Pibrac, was also attested to in 1845 in the religious community of the Bon-Pasteur, in Bourges, a miracle that was repeated twice.

Synthèse :

The story of Saint Germaine of Pibrac inspired the author of the fairy tale Cinderella. The lives of saints are sometimes more moving and speak more to the heart than anything the imagination can invent.

We know nothing about his inner life. All that is known about her is told by some old women from Pibrac forty-three years after her death, when they discovered her body "perfectly intact", not just mummified, but as if asleep "awaiting the resurrection". Unfortunately, her intact body was destroyed in 1793, during the French Revolution.

Once upon a time, in a village in the south-west of France, there was a young girl whom nobody ever noticed. Her hair was not golden and her eyes were not the deep green of the forest. Her body was thin and sickly and her right hand was deformed. At age three she lost her mother, and her father lost interest in her. A little later, her father remarried. Her stepmother took a dislike to her and demanded that she not remain useless. So she became a shepherdess during the day and a servant in the evening. Soon, when she was nine, she had half-sisters. Under pretence of saving the other children from the contagion of scrofula her stepmother sent Germaine away from the homestead, and thus Germaine was employed at a very young age as a shepherdess. At night, she slept in the stable or on a litter of vine branches in a garret. She was given a small amount of food, and was forbidden to speak to her sisters.

Germaine spent her time with the animals in the fields and in the stable. Every morning, the village priest noticed this young quiet girl, who discreetely slipped into the church and listened to the mass devoutly. She never took communion, having hardly attended catechism classes. At the end of mass, she would quickly disappear. She returned to her flock of sheep, which, left alone in the field, never caused any damage to the neighbours, nor were attacked by wolves. What characterises Saint Germaine de Pibrac is that no one saw anything else during her life other than the fact that she went to Mass.

Around the age of nineteen, because of her poor nutrition, she contracted tuberculosis.

On 15 June 1601, Germaine was twenty-one years old. That morning, she was not the first to rise. There was no sound of buckets in the stable. Angry and critical, her stepmother ordered her father to go and wake her up. He found her dead under the stairs.

When the village priest heard of it, he blamed himself for overlooking her while she was alive. But a woman in the village remarked that what she didn't have in life would be given to her in death. She gave her wedding dress to the deceased to be buried in it, and dressed the body of Germaine herself. The parishioners made her a wreath of flowers and golden ears of rye swollen with grain. The parish priest had a grave dug for her under the stone slabs of the church as she deserved this honour. She was laid to rest there and the priest had an altar boy and a few parishioners attend her funeral.

Forty-three years later, everyone had forgotten Germaine, the little shepherdess. That day, the gravedigger Guillaume Cassé set about lifting a slab in the church to bury a certain Germaine Andoine. No sooner had he started digging than he discovered the body of a young girl perfectly preserved. Her head was crowned with a garland whose flowers had lost their lustre, but whose ears were still golden and swollen with grain. The first blow from a pickaxe had hit the wing of the young girl's nose: the wound had all the appearance of living flesh. Soon the whole village flocked to the church to see the miracle. A few older people were able to identify Germaine Cousin.

From then on, Germaine's body was displayed in the church. People from the surrounding area came on pilgrimage and the miracles multiplied. On 5 May 1853, the authenticity of the miracles was solemnly recognised and on 7 May 1854, the decree of beatification was published in the Basilica of St John Lateran in Rome. Finally, on 29 June 1867, the eighteenth centenary of the martyrdom of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the canonisation of Saint Germaine Cousin was celebrated in Rome. The Church declared her a saint, recognising that if God had manifested his will in this way, it must have pleased Heaven.

Noting that the phenomenon of incorrupt bodies is often linked to particular sanctity, the Church's canonical procedure provides for verification of the state of the body of the servant of God and proceeds with its exhumation as part of the canonisation process. A preserved body is not absolute proof of sanctity, but it is considered a positive sign.

Arnaud Dumouch holds a degree in religious studies from Belgium. In 2015, he and Father Henri Ganty founded the Institut Docteur Angélique, which offers a full online course in Catholic philosophy and theology, in line with Benedict XVI's hermeneutics of continuity.

Au-delà des raisons d'y croire :

In the Orthodox Church, of which Pope John Paul II said that, along with the Catholic Church, it is the other lung of the one Church of Christ, there is a saint whose life is absolutely parallel to St Germaine of Pibrac: Saint Basil of Russia, who was born and died in the same years. They would never have been canonised if God had not willed that, almost fifty years after their deaths, their bodies should be found intact in the earth.

The Orthodox Church, Patriarchate of Moscow, commemorates Saint Basil of Russia (1579 - 1601), a native of Yaroslav, on 23 March. He went to work for a merchant in the north of Siberia, at Mangazéa. His master was greedy and brutal; Basil was pious, honest and hard-working. He liked to help the poor and the sick. Unjustly accused of theft, he was killed by his boss and thrown into a swamp. Fifty years later, his body was found intact and Saint Basil has since been honoured as the holy martyr of honesty.

The astonishing parallel of fates and dates with Saint Germaine of Pibrac is not a mere coincidence.

Aller plus loin :

Arnaud Dumouch's video: The life of Saint Germaine de Pibrac, God's little Cinderella (1579 - 1601).

En savoir plus :

The article on the Emmanuel Community blog: " Sainte Germaine de Pibrac, walking with the saints ".
Anne de Pindray, Sainte Germaine de Pibrac, Une couronne de garofanos, Siloë, 2001.
Miraculously saved from the ravages of the Revolution, the relics of Saint Germaine escaped fire in 1920, 1988 and 1999. An article in La Dépêche reports on these events.
Arnaud Dumouch's video on the martyrdom of Saint Basil of Russia, the saint of honesty, murdered by a greedy patron (1579 - 1601).