15 June - Daughter of Laurent Cousin, a modest ploughman, and his wife Marie Laroche, Germaine was born in Pibrac, a small village 15 km west of Toulouse, in 1579. Afflicted with scrofula, she also had an atrophied hand. Her mother died when she was still very young.
Later, his father remarried a nagging woman who subjected him to all kinds of humiliation and abuse. Germaine was relegated to a lean-to, far from family life.
She persuaded her father to send her to tend the flock of sheep in the wilderness, where she could recite her rosary and find comfort in prayer. She went to Mass every day. To go to church, she had to cross a big stream. One day when the stream was flooding, peasants who saw her coming wondered, in a mocking tone, how she would get across. The waters opened up in front of her and she crossed it without even wetting her dress. While she was at Mass, she planted her cattail in the ground and the cattail kept the sheep; never did a sheep go astray, nor did the wolves, which were numerous in the region at that time, attack the flock.
Germaine gave the poor the little bread she had. One day, her stepmother accused her of stealing bread. She chased after her in order to hit her and confuse her, despite the insistence of neighbors who wanted to hold her back. When the stepmother caught up with Germaine and had her open her apron, instead of the bread she thought she had found, there was an armful of roses. 1 Her father was then shaken, forbade his wife to hit Germaine and asked her to return to the house in a place other than the grabat she was occupying.
On the night of her death in 1601, it is said that two religious men on their way to Pibrac at nightfall saw two young girls dressed in white pass by in the direction of Laurent Cousin's house. The next morning, as they set out again, they saw three girls emerge, one of whom, flanked by the other two, was crowned with flowers. Her father found her dead in the shed where she had been forced to sleep. She was 22 years old. She was buried in the church of Pibrac, and little by little everyone forgot the existence of this grave.
In 1644, while the sacristan was preparing to organize a funeral by digging a grave, he came upon a buried body whose freshness stunned him. Even the flowers the dead woman was holding were barely wilted. From the deformity of her hand, the scars of the ganglions in her neck, Germaine Cousin was recognizable. Then her body was placed in a lead coffin, offered by a parishioner healed through the intercession of the saint, and placed in the sacristy where it remained, once again forgotten, for another sixteen years.
On September 22, 1661, Jean Dufour, vicar general of the archbishop of Toulouse, Pierre de Marca, came to Pibrac. He was astonished to see the coffin still in the sacristy, had it opened, and discovered that the saint was still in the same fresh state. He dug all around where the body had been found, and all the dead buried in the same place were only skeletons. Shaken by this miracle, the vicar general asked for the opening of the canonization process of Germaine in 1700.
Her remains still underwent many peregrinations accompanied by several miracles; in 1793, during the Revolution, the commune of Toulouse decided to destroy the remains by soaking them in quicklime. Two years later, in 1795, the constitutional priest of Pibrac recovered the remains, now in bone form, and re-burned them in the church.
Four main miracles were certified, discussed by the Sacred Congregation of Rites, and approved for the beatification of Germaine by Pius IX on 7 May 1854. Germaine was canonized in 1867. In Pibrac, on June 15, 1901, Bishop Germain laid the foundation stone of a new church dedicated to Saint Germaine . The basilica was consecrated on June 15, 1967 by Bishop Saint-Gaudens and in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI officially gave it the title of minor basilica.
