Benoîte Rencurel

Benoîte Rencurel was born in 1647 in the mountain village of Saint-Étienne-d'Avançon in the Dauphiné, in what is now the French department of Hautes-Alpes. She belonged to a poor rural household. Her father died while she was still a child, leaving her mother to raise the family in hardship, and Benoîte was put to work as a shepherdess in the surrounding Alpine pastures. She received little or no formal schooling and remained essentially illiterate, a fact repeatedly noted by later investigators of her life. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts present her as a devout but otherwise ordinary peasant girl whose daily occupation was watching livestock in the high valleys.

In May 1664, when she was about seventeen, she reported that the Virgin Mary appeared to her while she was tending sheep. Tradition associated with the shrine holds that the first encounters occurred near a grotto and at a place called Pindreau, after which the Virgin directed her to a secluded valley known as Le Laus (now in the commune of Saint-Étienne-le-Laus), where a small chapel dedicated to Notre-Dame de Bon Rencontre already stood. Rencurel said that the apparitions continued, with interruptions, for more than fifty years, until the end of her life. The message she attributed to the Virgin centered on conversion of heart, prayer, and frequent use of the sacrament of penance. She reported that Mary asked for a church to be built at Laus so that it might become a refuge where sinners would be reconciled with God. Pilgrims began to arrive in the later 1660s, and diocesan clergy were eventually assigned to hear confessions at the site.

Rencurel settled permanently at Laus and lived thereafter as a consecrated laywoman. She entered the Third Order of Saint Dominic and wore the tertiary habit. She never married and had no children. Supporters regarded her as a mystic who experienced visions and locutions and who underwent severe spiritual trials, including reported diabolical assaults; she was also said to receive lights concerning the state of penitents in order to assist confessors. Local ecclesiastical authorities examined her claims on several occasions in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Reception was mixed: some clergy and officials were skeptical or hostile, while others, including successive bishops of the region, gradually favored the shrine and the pastoral work of confession that grew up around it. The sanctuary of Notre-Dame du Laus developed into a lasting place of pilgrimage in the southern Alps.

She died at Laus on 28 December 1718 and was buried at the sanctuary. Devotion to Our Lady of Laus continued through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and the church there was later raised to the rank of a minor basilica. In the early twenty-first century the Diocese of Gap formally recognized the supernatural character of the apparitions associated with Rencurel. Pope Benedict XVI authorized her beatification, and she was beatified on 5 May 2008 at Notre-Dame du Laus, in a ceremony presided over by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins as papal legate. She has not been canonized and is venerated as Blessed Benoîte Rencurel. The historical record of her life rests chiefly on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century investigations, shrine traditions, and the later Roman process; precise day-to-day details of her childhood and of many of the reported visions cannot be independently corroborated beyond those sources.