Saint Germaine Cousin

Germaine Cousin was born about 1579 at Pibrac, a village about ten miles from Toulouse, to a family of modest means. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia she came into the world with a deformed hand and scrofula. Her mother died when she was an infant, and her father married again. Her stepmother treated her harshly and, saying the girl would pass her illness to the other children, persuaded the father to keep her away from the house.

From childhood she kept the family’s sheep. She slept in the stable or on a bed of vine branches in a garret, lived on bread and water, and shared her bread with the poor. She went to Mass every day, planting her crook or her distaff in the ground and leaving the flock in the care of Providence, and the accounts of her life say that wolves never harmed it. They also tell that the stream on her way to the village church, sometimes too high to cross, was seen to open and let her pass. Her father later forbade his wife to mistreat her, and Germaine asked to keep her humble place.

In the early summer of 1601 her father found her dead on her bed of vine twigs, at about twenty-two. She was buried in the parish church of Pibrac, in front of the pulpit. In 1644, when the grave was opened, her body was found fresh and whole, and the vicars general of Toulouse found it intact again in 1661 and 1700. In 1793 a revolutionary tinsmith named Toulza and three others took the remains from their leaden casket and buried them in the sacristy with quicklime and water. The body was later found intact except where the lime had touched it.

Cures attributed to her were recorded from 1644 onward, and the cause, taken up again in 1850, gathered over 400 miracles and graces. Pope Pius IX beatified her on May 7, 1854, and canonized her on June 29, 1867. Her relics are kept in a reliquary in a chapel added to the church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine in 1854, the year of her beatification. The basilica of Saint Germaine, built in stages from 1901 to 1967, was made a minor basilica by a decree of October 12, 2010. The basilica and her house belong to the archdiocese of Toulouse and are run by the Association Pèlerinage Sainte-Germaine, which prepares the yearly pilgrimage held in June around her feast.

She is shown as a young shepherdess with a crook or a distaff, a sheep or a watchdog at her side, and flowers in her apron, which recall the “miracle of the roses” told at Pibrac. An oratory near her house marks the place of that miracle. The church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, of pink brick with a bell wall, dates from the thirteenth century and, though restored since her time, is the church she knew.

• Pibrac, church of Sainte-Marie-MadeleineThe thirteenth-century parish church where she heard Mass and where her body was found in 1644; her relics are kept in a reliquary in the chapel added in 1854.
• Pibrac, basilica of Saint GermaineThe minor basilica built in her honor between 1901 and 1967.
• Pibrac, her birthplaceThe family house, kept by the sanctuary, with the sheepfold where her bed stood in a narrow recess under the stairs, and an oratory outside marking the miracle of the roses.