Saint Germaine Cousin

Virgin
(1579–1601)

Saint Germaine Cousin was born in 1579 in the village of Pibrac near Toulouse in southern France. From her birth she was set apart by suffering: her right hand was withered and deformed from birth, and she suffered from scrofula, a tubercular disease of the lymph glands in the neck. Her mother died when she was very young, and her father Laurent Cousin remarried. Her stepmother treated her with great harshness, forbidding her to sleep in the house, making her live in the stable and later under the stairs, giving her meager rations of food, and driving her to work as a shepherdess from the earliest age.

Yet in these miserable conditions Germaine developed a life of extraordinary holiness. She attended daily Mass whenever possible, planting her shepherd's crook in the ground and entrusting her flock to her guardian angel while she went to church, and the sheep never strayed or were harmed. She shared her meager food with beggars poorer than herself. Her prayer was continuous, she was given to contemplation, and she was seen in ecstasy on several occasions.

Miracles were attributed to her: in winter, her apron was seen to be full of summer flowers when she was accused of stealing bread; the river swelled by floods was seen to part for her as she crossed to Mass. The village people, at first indifferent, came to revere her. Her stepmother eventually repented and offered her a place in the house, which Germaine declined.

She was found dead in her stable on June 15, 1601, at the age of twenty-two. Pope Pius IX canonized her in 1867. Her uncorrupted body was found forty-three years after her death. She is a patron of the abandoned and of shepherds.