Our Lady of Laus

Nothing about Le Laus can be understood if we forget who the witness was. As at Lourdes two centuries later, the Virgin did not choose a theologian or a learned nun, but a child who bore every mark of Gospel littleness: poor, uneducated, a keeper of flocks. This disproportion between the messenger and the message is, in the eyes of the Church, one of the first indications of the event's credibility.

A Poor Childhood

Benoîte Rencurel was born on 16 September 1647 at Saint-Étienne-d'Avançon, a village of the Hautes-Alpes that would later take the name of Saint-Étienne-le-Laus^[8]. The family was very poor. Her father, Guillaume Rencurel, died when she was seven, and the little girl was sent to watch the flocks from her earliest years. At seventeen, at the time of the apparitions, she still knew neither how to read nor how to write^[9]. She would remain illiterate all her life; the accounts of her conversations with the Virgin have come down to us because the priests of the shrine wrote them down at her dictation.

This poverty was not only material: it was also spiritual in the Gospel sense. Benoîte said her rosary while watching her beasts, fasted, and gave to the poorest the little she had. The chaplains who knew her stress her uprightness and her good sense — a peasant woman without guile, incapable of inventing a mystical staging, who always answered interrogations with the same simplicity.

Spiritual Warfare and a Lifetime of Holiness

Where most great visionaries received only a few apparitions over a few months, Benoîte lived more than half a century in almost continuous commerce with Heaven. Such a span has a price. From the 1680s onward, the accounts describe an intense spiritual warfare: temptations against faith and purity, nocturnal torments, attacks attributed to the demon, which she said she faced almost every night until her death^[10]. Tradition reports the fury of the evil spirit toward her, complaining of losing so many souls because of her^[11].

Benoîte died at Le Laus on 28 December 1718, the feast of the Holy Innocents, at seventy-one years of age^[12]. Her body rests today in the basilica. Her cause for beatification, opened in the nineteenth century, culminated in 2009 with the recognition of the heroicity of her virtues: it is a whole life, and not only the apparitions, that the Church judged holy.

The story of the apparitions of Le Laus unfolds in several stages during the year 1664: a preparation in the Vallon des Fours, the revelation of the Lady's name, then the transfer to the hamlet of Le Laus, where the Virgin asks for a church to be built for her.

Saint Maurice and the Preparation

In May 1664, Benoîte was watching her flock in the Vallon des Fours, above Saint-Étienne. There she first saw an elderly man of great dignity, who presented himself as Saint Maurice — patron of the ruined chapel of the valley. He prepared her and announced that she would soon see the Mother of God^[13]. Soon after began the apparitions of the Virgin, renewed almost daily throughout the summer, in a peaceful intimacy: the Lady instructed the child, taught her to pray, listened to her.

The Virgin Reveals Her Name

For weeks, Benoîte did not know the identity of the "beautiful Lady". It was only on 29 August 1664, in the Vallon des Fours, that she revealed her name: she presented herself as Lady Mary, the Mother of her most dear Son^[14].

The sobriety of the formula is characteristic of Le Laus. Nothing spectacular, no abstract theological revelation like the "I am the Immaculate Conception" of Lourdes: the Virgin simply names herself as Mother — and it is as a mother that she will act at Le Laus, drawing sinners to reconcile them with her Son.

Sent to Le Laus and the Chapel of Bon-Rencontre

At the end of September 1664, in a place called Pindreau, the Virgin directed Benoîte toward the hamlet of Le Laus, where stood a humble chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Bon-Rencontre: she sent her there, telling her she would recognize the place by a fragrance of sweet odours and that she would speak to her there very often^[15].

Benoîte went down to Le Laus and recognized the place by a supernatural fragrance, a constant sign of the Marian presence in the accounts of the shrine. The poor chapel of Bon-Rencontre henceforth became the heart of the apparitions: it is there that, until the end of her life, the visionary would come to speak with the Virgin.

The Conversion of Sinners

In this chapel, the Virgin unveiled the meaning of the whole event. She asked for the shrine to be enlarged and explained why she had chosen this remote valley: she said she had asked her Son for this place for the conversion of sinners, and had obtained it^[16].

The whole of Le Laus is contained in that sentence. The shrine is not first and foremost a place of spectacular miracles, but a house of mercy: a place that Mary obtained from God in order to bring stray souls back there. Conversions flowed from the very first years — to the point that the chaplains, overwhelmed, spoke of crowds of pilgrims coming to confess.

Le Laus delivered no great "secret" like La Salette or Fátima, nor any call for a universal devotion like the Miraculous Medal. Its message is humbler and more continuous: for fifty-four years, the Virgin formed Benoîte into a messenger of reconciliation, and made the valley a place where sinners return to God.

The Sacrament of Reconciliation

The most constant feature of Le Laus is the central place of confession. Mary constantly sent Benoîte to sinners, sometimes revealing the state of souls to her, urging her to lead them to the priest. From the very first years, conversions were so numerous that priests had to settle there permanently to hear the pilgrims' confessions. The diocese of Gap sums up this continuity: since 1664, welcome and the sacrament have never ceased to be offered at Le Laus^[17]. That is why the shrine is still presented above all as the "Refuge of Sinners", a name borrowed from the litanies of the Virgin, which the history of Le Laus has filled with concrete meaning.

The Oil of Le Laus

The second sign proper to the shrine is the oil of the lamp burning before the altar of the chapel of Bon-Rencontre. The tradition of Le Laus reports that the Virgin promised, from the earliest years, that this oil would heal the sick who anointed themselves with it with faith and by recourse to her intercession^[18]. The oil of Le Laus is still distributed to pilgrims by the shrine today, which takes care to explain its meaning: it is neither a remedy nor a magical object, but a gesture of prayer and trust in Mary's intercession. Healing of the body, when it is granted, is ordered to the salvation of the soul — the oil remains at the service of the conversion that is the heart of Le Laus.

Le Laus is not only a gentle Marian shrine. From 1673 onward, and for some ten years, Benoîte received a series of apparitions of Christ crucified and covered in blood, granted chiefly on Fridays, and more intensely during Lent^[19]. According to the accounts, she then relived the Lord's Passion, remaining as though rigid in the posture of the crucified, from Thursday to Saturday, and saying she was flooded with his blood^[20].

The words received shed light on the meaning of these sufferings: Christ showed himself to her in this state in order to unite her with the pains of his Passion^[21].

These visions place Le Laus within the great mystical tradition of compassion: the visionary of mercy is bodily united with the sufferings of the Saviour, for the salvation of the sinners she is charged with bringing back. The shrine of Marian gentleness is also, secretly, a shrine of the Cross.

Like every supernatural event, Le Laus had to pass through the sieve of ecclesial discernment. That discernment came early — in the very year after the apparitions — but it was also exceptionally long, since solemn recognition came only in 2008.

The First Inquiry (1665) and the Healing of Catherine Vial

As early as 1665, the diocesan authority took notice of the crowds. Antoine Lambert, vicar general of the archdiocese of Embrun, was sent to investigate at Le Laus^[22]. The inquiry proved all the more decisive in that it coincided with a spectacular healing: that of Catherine Vial, paralysed for several years, who recovered the use of her limbs at the shrine. Faced with this fact, Lambert, at first wary, is said to have recognized there the work of God^[23].

A few years later, the archbishop of Embrun himself, Charles de Genlis, long sceptical, came to question Benoîte at length and was in turn convinced of the shepherdess's sincerity and of the reality of the graces^[24].

The Chaplains and the Manuscripts

The credibility of Le Laus also rests on the quality of the priests who settled there. From 1665 onward, remarkable ecclesiastics established themselves at the shrine to supervise the pilgrimage and record the facts — the first-hand sources of all we know:

It is thanks to their manuscripts — Benoîte being illiterate — that the Virgin's words and the details of the apparitions have come down to us^[25]. These accounts, written by direct witnesses and cross-checked with one another, form the documentary foundation on which, three centuries later, the recognition commission would rely.

From the Basilica (1892) to the 2008 Recognition

Devotion never wavered over the centuries. In 1855, the statue of Our Lady of Laus was solemnly crowned before tens of thousands of pilgrims; in 1892, Pope Leo XIII raised the church to the rank of minor basilica^[26]. But the formal recognition of the apparitions, long deferred, came only in the twenty-first century.

In 2005, Bishop Jean-Michel di Falco Léandri, Bishop of Gap and Embrun, consulted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the procedure to follow; three commissions — theological, historical and scientific — were set up to study the case^[27]. At the end of this work, on 4 May 2008, during a Mass at the basilica, in the presence of the apostolic nuncio and many bishops, Bishop di Falco promulgated the decree of recognition:

"I recognize the supernatural origin of the apparitions and of the events experienced and recounted by the young shepherdess, Benoîte Rencurel, which occurred between 1664 and 1718."^[28]

It came more than a century after the great French recognitions of the nineteenth century — Lourdes in 1862, then Pontmain by the mandement of 2 February 1872^[29] — a considerable event for a shrine long overshadowed by the great pilgrimages.

The Venerability of Benoîte Rencurel (2009)

The recognition of the apparitions was followed by a decisive step for the visionary herself. On 3 April 2009, Pope Benedict XVI authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to promulgate the decree recognizing the heroicity of the virtues of Benoîte Rencurel, who received the title of venerable^[30]. Her cause, opened as early as the nineteenth century — Pius IX had declared Benoîte a "Servant of God" in 1871^[31] — now awaits, for beatification, the recognition of a miracle obtained through her intercession. The Church thus honours not the fact of having seen the Virgin, but the holiness of a life wholly given to mercy.

The Shrine of Our Lady of Laus stands in the commune of Saint-Étienne-le-Laus, in the diocese of Gap and Embrun. Around the minor basilica have grown pilgrim welcome buildings, chapels and paths leading to the places of the apparitions. Pastoral care is entrusted to priests of the diocese, assisted by religious sisters and lay people.

Le Laus welcomes between 120,000 and 200,000 visitors and pilgrims each year^[32]. People come above all for what has defined its identity since 1664: confession, Marian prayer, the oil of Le Laus, and the silence of a valley kept apart. Discreet in comparison with Lourdes or Fátima, the shrine keeps its own vocation — that of a "Refuge of Sinners" where one comes less to seek a miracle than a pardon.

Le Laus holds a singular position in the geography of recognized Marian apparitions. By its date, it belongs to the long series stretching from sixteenth-century Mexico to the great French shrines of the nineteenth century and twentieth-century Portugal; but it stands apart by the duration of the apparitions and by its emphasis on forgiveness rather than on a spectacular public message.

Le Laus thus appears as the oldest and longest of these great French Marian encounters, and as their humblest common denominator: before dogmas and secrets, mercy offered to the sinner who returns.

Le Laus belongs to the family of recognized Marian apparitions. For the other great shrines in this series, see Our Lady of Lourdes (1858), Our Lady of La Salette (1846), Our Lady of Pontmain (1871), the Miraculous Medal (rue du Bac, 1830), Our Lady of Fátima (1917) and Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531).