Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"The fever club of Le Puy"

Le Puy-en-Velay, Auvergne (France)

Above the city of Le Puy-en-Velay in Auvergne stands the Notre-Dame du Puy Cathedral, home to a venerated Black Madonna. It is one of France's great Marian shrines and a historic gateway to the Camino de Santiago: many pilgrims began their journey by receiving a blessing before the Black Madonna.

Ancient tradition recounts that, around the 5th century, the Virgin Mary appeared to a widow suffering from a fever, asking her to go to the local bishop and indicating that a sanctuary should be built atop a rock—the "rock of fevers"—and that she would be healed. The woman climbed the rock and was cured. Some versions add that a blanket of snow in the middle of summer marked the outline of the future temple, recalling the Roman miracle of Santa Maria Maggiore.

Let us distinguish carefully. It is documented that since the High Middle Ages, Le Puy was a major center of Marian pilgrimage, that the cathedral was built upon an earlier cult, and that numerous pilgrims flocked there from the 11th and 12th centuries onward. The original medieval image of the Black Madonna was destroyed in 1794 during the Revolution; the current one dates from the 19th century, but the cult of the Black Madonna is much older. In contrast, the apparition to the widow, the miraculous snowfall, and the healing of fevers belong to hagiographic tradition: there is no record of a modern canonical process concerning a specific apparition, and the details of the healings are based on firsthand accounts.

The Rosary spread in Le Puy, especially during the Modern Age, through the Dominicans and confraternities, and forms part of the devotional life of the sanctuary; however, there is no record of an apparition with a specific message about the Rosary. The connection is devotional.