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Germaine
was born in France in the sixteenth century. Her mother died
while she was still an infant and her father quickly remarried.
His new wife, Hortense, was cruel and abusive and had no sympathy
for her frail step-daughter who was born with a deformed hand.
Her father quietly stood by while Hortense starved his little
girl, forcing her to crawl on the floor to eat from the family
dog’s bowl. She once abandoned baby Germaine in a drain
for three days while she went off to do errands and, on another
occasion, poured boiling water on her legs. Her siblings, encouraged
by their mother, were also cruel, putting ash into their half-sister’s
food and tar in her clothes. Germaine contracted scofula, a
gland disease, that further deformed her and horrified her evil
step-mother. Concerned that she would infect her own children,
Hortense forced Germaine to sleep in a barn where she snuggled
with sheep to keep warm. When she was nine she began working
as a shepherdess. While left alone in the fields she to taught
herself the teachings of the Church and made a makeshift rosary
out of a knotted string. She went to Mass daily entrusting her
flock to a guardian angel. She befriended the poor village children
who would gather in her field to hear her simple teachings about
God with whom she would share the meager scraps of food her
step-mother begrudgingly gave her. She was found dead in her
straw bed at the age of twenty-two. Over forty years later her
body was accidentally dug up and she was found to be incorrupt.
Stories began to spring up about the good deeds of this lonely,
abused young woman and soon miracles were attributed to her
and she was eventually canonized. Germaine is also the patron
of abandoned people, the disabled, farm girls and unattractive people;
and she's invoked against poverty, illness and loss of parents.
Her feast day is June 15. |
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St.
Germaine
Patron St. of
Survivors of Child Abuse |
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