Marthe Robin

Marthe Robin was born on 13 March 1902 in the village of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme, in southeastern France. She was the sixth of seven children of Joseph Robin and Amélie-Célestine Chosson, small farmers whose household belonged to the rural Catholic world of the French Third Republic. Her childhood and adolescence were those of a peasant girl with little formal schooling. Around 1918 she contracted typhoid fever, after which her health never fully recovered. In the following decade she suffered further crises, described in contemporary accounts as encephalitis or a related neurological condition, and by 1928 she was completely paralyzed and confined to her bed in the family farmhouse. She remained in that room for more than half a century and never again walked or left the house under her own power.

From 1930, according to the testimony of her family, confessors, and numerous visitors, Robin exhibited phenomena that Catholic tradition associates with mysticism. She was reported to have received the stigmata and to have relived the Passion of Christ each week, typically from Thursday into Friday. It was also claimed that she took no ordinary nourishment and lived solely on Holy Communion, a reported state of inedia that, if taken at face value, lasted for decades. She spoke of visions of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and saints, and of a mission of prayer for the Church and for sinners. These claims were accepted by many clergy of the period, including her long-time spiritual director, the priest Georges Finet, but they were not established by independent scientific investigation, and later historians have treated them with caution.

In 1936 Robin and Finet established at Châteauneuf-de-Galaure the first Foyer de Charité, a house of spiritual retreats combining lay and priestly life. The Foyers de Charité subsequently spread in France and abroad as an association of the faithful rather than a traditional religious order. Robin herself remained a laywoman; she took no vows in a religious congregation and never entered a convent. From her bed she received a constant stream of visitors seeking prayer and advice, among them priests, religious, and lay people who later became prominent in twentieth-century French Catholicism. She never married and had no children.

Robin died on 6 February 1981 in Châteauneuf-de-Galaure and was buried in the communal cemetery of the village. A cause of beatification was opened in the Diocese of Valence in 1986, and on 7 November 2014 Pope Francis authorized the decree recognizing her heroic virtues, thereby declaring her Venerable. She has not been beatified or canonized and has no official feast day or patronages in the liturgical calendar. In the years after 2014, books and inquiries raised questions about the control of her public image by her entourage, about possible psychological or medical explanations for her condition, and about the reliability of some testimonies. The Holy See and the local diocese have continued to treat her cause with the reserve required by an unfinished process. Whatever the Church's final judgment, her life remains a significant episode in the history of popular Catholic mysticism in twentieth-century France.