Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"The graces of Cotignac and the fountain of Saint Joseph"

Cotignac, Provence (France) (1519-1660)

On the hill of Bessillon, near Cotignac, in the heart of Provence, stands the sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Grâces, Our Lady of Grace. It is a beloved place, a destination for families who make pilgrimages to entrust their homes and their desire for children to the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph.

The sanctuary's tradition recounts that on August 10, 1519, a woodcutter named Jean de la Baume saw the Virgin Mary with the Child Jesus, surrounded by angels. She introduced herself as Our Lady of Grace and asked that a church be built there to bestow graces upon pilgrims. More than a century later, on June 7, 1660, a young shepherd named Gaspard Ricard, parched with thirst under the Bessillon sun, saw a man who identified himself as Saint Joseph and pointed to a rock: "I am Joseph; lift this rock and you will find water to drink." The shepherd, too weak to move it, lifted it, and a spring gushed forth, which remains a place of pilgrimage to this day.

Let us distinguish. It is documented that a Marian devotion under the title of Notre-Dame de Grâces, with a sanctuary and pilgrimages, existed in Cotignac since the 16th century, and that Louis XIII and Anne of Austria linked the birth of the future Louis XIV to this place. The name of the 1519 visionary and the details of the dialogue come from later devotional chronicles: there is no canonical process from that period as in Lourdes. The Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon recognizes and promotes the devotion to Saint Joseph and the apparition to Gaspard Ricard; but the common phrase that it is "the only apparition of Saint Joseph approved by the Church" is more of a devotional cliché: there is no record of a decree from the Holy See that defines it as such in a universal sense.

The connection with the Rosary is devotional and pastoral. The sanctuary promotes rosaries, vigils, and Marian pilgrimages; however, there is no record of the 1519 apparition containing an explicit message about the Rosary, unlike those of Fatima or Lourdes.