Not many Catholics today know of Germaine Cousin (+1601), which is likely how the saint would have liked it. Amare nesciri, as Saint Philip, her Italian near-contemporary, would have said. For Germaine lived an obscure, solitary life, tending sheep in the fields, ‘hidden with God’ – but like all such holy and hidden lives, she did more to change history than the great and the powerful. She was slightly deformed, with a withered hand of some sort, and suffered from scrofula, an infection of the lymph nodes causing unsightly blisters and pustules. Her mother died when she was young; her father married again, and the step-mother banished Germaine, fearful that the disease was contagious to the other children. She slept in the barn, on a bed of vines and twigs, but never complained – rather, she increased her practice of prayer and penance for the conversion of hearts, and the sacrileges of the new-founded ‘Protestants’ – mainly Calvinists – in the region. Germaine would attend Mass daily, leaving her flock to the care of God’s angels at the sound of the bell, and she was faithful to this practice to the end. Although hungry wolves prowled about the woods, her sheep were never harmed.
Her father finally manned-up to his shrewish wife, and demanded that Germaine be treated as all the other children, but the saint demurred, having become used to her solitary and penitential life, alone with God, sleeping in the attic. One day, he noticed she did not come down at her usual early hour, and he found that she had died during the night. Germaine was 22 years old.
Miracles abounded during her life. Besides her protected sheep, raging rivers opened in Biblical manner to let her through dry-shod. But even more did they abound after her early death at 22 years old, when her father – who with many others had begun to realize her holiness – found her body in the fields. Her body has remained so for centuries, even after its desecration with quicklime by rabid atheists during the French Revolution. Thousands of cures and prayers answered, hundreds of them attested by rigorous examination.
Pope Pius IX beatified her on May 7th, 1854, the same year,, fittingly, he would later declare the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The same Pope canonized her on June 29th, 1867, 1800 years to the day after Saint Peter’s crucifixion (and a few days before the official ‘founding’ of the Dominion of Canada), with her feast kept on the middle day of June, the 15th, around the time she died. Her body now resides in a magnificent sarcophagus, in the Church of Mary Magdalene of Pibrac, in Haute-Garonne France.
Saint Germaine’s life parallels the fairy tale of Cinderella, even if there was no glass slippers and earthly princelings. As Our Lady said to Saint Bernadette, her happiness was not to be fulfilled in this life, but the next – which is really what Cinderella is about, that persevering in virtue will have its reward one day. And what better prince, than the Son of God Himself? Miracles through her intercession continue into our own day, for those who find this pearl of great price. Just try asking her.
Saint Germaine Cousin, prier pour nous! +
(Source, in partibus, Wikipedia.org)
