Shriners
The other kind
The Roman Catholic Church has officially recognized a shrine in the French Alps at Saint-Étienne-le-Laus, where the Blessed Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a young shepherdess. This is the first such recognition in France in nearly 150 years – that is, since Lourdes kicked off as a leading miracle site and holy travel destination beginning in 1858.
The new shrine site is located in the Département des Hautes-Alpes, conveniently close to the Italian border and, from the religious tourism point of view, easily reachable by car from both the beaches of the Côte d’Azur and a range of world class Alpine ski resorts.
Lourdes, the older French miracle shrine now running at above full capacity, is in the Pyrenees, on the Spanish border. Between the two, the largest catchment basin of the faithful in “old” Catholic Europe – France, Italy and Spain – will be well covered.
The Saint-Étienne-le-Laus opening has been in preparation for roughly three years according to news reports. The decision to develop the new site was presumably triggered by the impossibility of further increasing traffic on the successul Lourdes location, already staggering under a load of five million visitors annually.
That is less than half the roughly 12 million visitors a year at Euro Disney, outside Paris, but it is a remarkable result for a small town with a stable population of just 15 thousand people tucked away on a mountainside far from other major tourist destinations. In spite of poor access, Lourdes has – after Paris – the second greatest concentration of hotels of any city in France, 278.
Though the new shrine’s business plan has not been made public, indications are that Vatican planners are projecting a capacity at full regime of about five million visitors annually, comparable with that of the existing Lourdes facility and on par with the highly successul recent opening of the San Giovanni Rotondo location in Southern Italy.
This last site has benefitted from an aggressive and innovative campaign of promotional activities that is likely to be a model for other new launches in the coming years. Though visitor figures had begun to soften recently, a decision to exhume and place on display the body of the Saint commemorated by the site – popularly know as “Padre Pio” – has piqued public curiosity and visits are said to be spiking. It was however found necessary to place a carefully constructed plastic mask on the face of the cadaver since, as a spokesman explained, there was some risk of alarming visiting children.
The only setback in the San Giovanni Rotondo promotion has come with the recent sale by a British auction house of Padre Pio’s 1959 Mercedes 190 D limousine, which, though did it not reach the million euro sales price – $1.57 million – originally expected, may have seemed to clash with his popular image as a humble and put-upon priest “of the little people.”
He was deeply unpopular with Vatican authorities until his death in 1968, in part because of the peculiar claims of the fashion in which he was taunted by the devil: “The Devil appeared as young girls that danced naked, as a crucifix, as a young friend of the monks, as the Spiritual Father or as the Provincial Father; as Pope Pius X, a Guardian Angel, as St. Francis and as Our Lady.”
Saint Pio’s tendency to identify his superiors in the Church hierarchy with Satan was not appreciated in Rome, but gained him a vast popularity throughout Italy, as did his recurring stigmata, personal replicas of the bleeding wounds of Christ.
The Marian apparitions at Saint-Étienne-le-Laus are both much older and much less alarming. The shepherd girl, Benôite “Benedicta” Rencurel, has been described as France’s “miracle champion” since she claimed to have witnessed divine apparitions of the Blessed Virgin on 2,500 different occasions over the course of her 54 years of activity between 1664 and 1718 – on average rather more than once a week.
Little is know of the content of these encounters, beyond the fact that “Mary asked Benedicta to admonish women and girls about living lives of scandal, especially those who commit abortion, the unjust wealthy and the perverse.” Rencurel at any rate was, several decades after her death, granted the title of Venerable Servant of God by Pope Pius IX.
The Catholic News Agency, in announcing the shrine project, had this to say about the initial apparitions:
“One day in May of 1664, Benedicta was caring for the animals of some neighbors and praying the rosary when she saw a dazzling lady standing on a rock, holding a beautiful child in her arms. “Beautiful Lady!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing up there? Do you want to eat with me? I have some good bread which we can soften up at the fountain.” The girl’s simplicity brought a smile to the Lady’s face, but she said nothing. “Beautiful Lady! Could you give us that child? He would make us so happy.” The Lady smiled again without responding. After remaining a few minutes with Benedicta, she took the child in her arms and disappeared into a cave.
“For four months, the Lady appeared to Benedicta every day, talking to her and preparing her for her future mission. Benedicta told the woman who owned the flock that she cared for about the visions, but she did not believe her. One day, however, the woman secretly followed her to the Fours valley. She didn’t see the vision, but she did hear Mary’s voice, who told Benedicta to warn her that her soul was in danger. “She has something on her conscience,” Mary said. “Tell her to do penance.” The woman was deeply moved by the message, returned to the sacraments and lived piously for the rest of her days.”
Though all of this is certainly taking place for the noblest of motives, the presence at the kick-off ceremony for the new shrine of the French Secretary of State for Territorial Development, M. Hubert Falco, was criticized both within France and abroad; in the first case because it was felt to represent “unacceptable confusion between the values of the Republic and religious practices that relate to the private sphere” and in the second because of the suggestion that the project had something to do with economic development.