Mary Magdalene in Provence: The Tradition and the Shrines

What the Gospels say

The Gospels name Mary Magdalene, Mary of Magdala, among the women who followed Jesus. Saint Luke lists “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out” among the women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities (Luke 8:2). All four Gospels place her at the cross or at the tomb on Easter morning.

Saint John gives the fullest account. Mary finds the tomb empty, weeps in the garden and meets the risen Christ, whom she takes for the gardener until he calls her by name. He sends her to the disciples, and she goes to them saying, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). Saint Mark’s Gospel also says that the risen Jesus appeared first to her (Mark 16:9).

One woman or three

In the West, especially after Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Mary Magdalene was identified with two other women: the sinner who anointed Jesus in the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7) and Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. The Greek Fathers, on the whole, kept the three apart. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913, in an article by Hugh Pope, judged it impossible to demonstrate that they were one person, though the author thought it likely. The Provençal tradition rests on the Western identification, since it brings Mary Magdalene to France with Martha and Lazarus.

The modern liturgy stresses her place as the first witness of the Resurrection. By a decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship dated June 3, 2016, and published on June 10, Pope Francis had her memorial on July 22 raised to a feast, the rank given to the apostles. The Mass received a new preface titled apostolorum apostola, apostle of the apostles, a title used by Rabanus Maurus and by Saint Thomas Aquinas. In an article published with the decree, Archbishop Arthur Roche called her the first witness of the risen Christ.

The Provençal tradition

According to the Provençal tradition, Mary Magdalene, her sister Martha, their brother Lazarus, Mary Jacobe, Mary Salome, Sidonius and other disciples fled persecution in the Holy Land and crossed the Mediterranean in a boat without sails or oars. They came ashore near Arles, at the place now called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The legend then brings Mary Magdalene and Lazarus to Marseille to preach, and Martha to Tarascon, where she subdued a monster called the Tarasque with her faith and her girdle.

The tradition continues that Mary Magdalene withdrew to a cave in the mountain of La Sainte-Baume for some thirty years of prayer and penance, and that angels lifted her toward heaven at the height where the chapel of the Saint-Pilon now stands. Before her death, the story goes, she received viaticum from Saint Maximinus, and she was buried at the place later called Saint-Maximin. The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, compiled about 1260, gathered these accounts into one narrative.

Vézelay, Saint-Maximin and the historians

Historians trace the story to Burgundy. Around 1050 the monks of Vézelay began to claim that they held the relics of Mary Magdalene, brought by their ninth-century founder Badilo or his envoys. To explain how her body had reached them, they said it had been taken from a carved sarcophagus at Saint-Maximin in Provence. Vézelay drew great crowds, and its basilica still bears her name.

In 1279 Charles of Salerno, nephew of Saint Louis and the future Charles II of Anjou, count of Provence, had the crypt at Saint-Maximin excavated. According to the account kept by the Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon, the tomb was found on December 9, 1279, and the relics were solemnly raised on May 5, 1280. On April 6, 1295, Pope Boniface VIII issued a bull that recognized the relics and gave Saint-Maximin and La Sainte-Baume to the Dominicans, in place of the Benedictines of Saint-Victor of Marseille; the sanctuary’s own chronology dates the friars’ installation to June 21, 1295. Vézelay’s pilgrimage declined, and its relics were burned by Huguenots in the sixteenth century.

Historians judge the Provençal story to be legend. Louis Duchesne, the French historian of the early Church, concluded that Mary Magdalene’s link with Provence appears only in legends devised around the middle of the eleventh century by the monks of Vézelay, and that the claim that Maximinus was the first bishop of Aix also dates from that century. The earliest Latin life of Mary Magdalene as a hermit, from the ninth century, does not place her in Provence at all. The Gospels say nothing of her life after the Resurrection, and an Eastern tradition places her death at Ephesus.

The Dominicans and Lacordaire

The Dominicans kept both shrines from 1295 until the Revolution. Saint Louis had already climbed to the grotto in 1254, and from 1481 the kings of France came often as pilgrims. The basilica of Saint-Maximin was begun in 1295 to plans by Pierre le Français; work stopped for good in 1532, and the west front was never finished. During the Revolution the sanctuaries were looted and the friars left.

Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802–1861), who restored the Dominican Order in France, brought them back. In 1859 he bought the convent of Saint-Maximin and installed friars there, sent a community to La Sainte-Baume, and had the hôtellerie, the pilgrims’ guest house, built on the plain below the mountain. He called the basilica the third tomb of Christendom, after Jerusalem and Rome. In 2002, when the grotto reopened after work on the cliff, four Dominican friars settled there, and since 2008 the Dominicans have also run the hôtellerie.

The shrines

At Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue, the fortified church probably dates from the twelfth century. In 1448 King René found in its crypt relics venerated as those of Mary Jacobe, Mary Salome and Sarah. Their reliquaries are kept in the upper chapel above the choir. On May 24 the reliquaries are lowered into the choir, a rite unchanged since 1448, and the Roma and other travelers carry to the sea the statue of Sarah, whom they honor as their patron. On May 25, the feast of Mary Jacobe, the statues of the two Marys go in procession to the shore, escorted by gardians on horseback and women in the dress of Arles. A second pilgrimage, for Mary Salome, falls on the weekend nearest October 22.

The basilica of Saint-Maximin, the largest Gothic building in Provence, is about 240 feet long and 95 feet high. Its crypt holds four sarcophagi of the fourth century, found in 1279 in what had been a Roman mausoleum, and a gilded bronze reliquary of 1860 with the skull venerated as Mary Magdalene’s. The relics are carried through the town in procession at her feast in July.

At La Sainte-Baume a path climbs through an old forest of beech and oak, protected for centuries, to the grotto in about 40 minutes, ending in a stairway of some 150 steps. The Dominican friars receive pilgrims at the grotto, and Mass is celebrated there on her feast.

In Marseille the abbey of Saint-Victor, founded in the fifth century by John Cassian, keeps in its crypts the remains of a fifth-century basilica, sarcophagi of the fourth and fifth centuries, and a Black Virgin. On February 2, Candlemas, a procession goes from the Old Port to the abbey, and the archbishop blesses green candles and the navettes, boat-shaped biscuits that by one account recall the boat of the saints. Autun cathedral holds relics of Lazarus brought from Saint-Victor in the tenth century. At Tarascon the collegiate church of Sainte-Marthe, consecrated in 1197, keeps her relics in its Romanesque crypt, where a late Roman sarcophagus stands, and the town holds its Tarasque festival, recognized by UNESCO in 2005, on the last weekend of June.

Via Magdalenae visits Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Arles, Saint-Maximin, La Sainte-Baume, Le Thoronet, Sénanque and Avignon in seven days. Pilgrimage programs change from year to year; the sanctuary of La Sainte-Baume and the tourist office of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer publish them on their websites.

Our way that goes there

• Via MagdalenaeThe Magdalene Way, seven days

Holy places: Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Arles, Saint-Maximin, La Sainte-Baume, Vézelay, Autun. Saints: Saint Mary Magdalene, Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Louis.