Faire avec la rétractation d’une voyante : le cas de l’apparition de la Vierge Marie à Pontmain (Mayenne)

Abstract

On January 17, 1871, some children say they see the Virgin Mary in the sky of Pontmain, a small village in the north-west of the Mayenne department. On February 2, 1872, at the end of a canonical trial, the bishop of Laval appoints four official seers and authentificates the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Pontmain. A basilic is erected, a railway station is built and a pilgrimage grows. In December 1920, during a second canonical trial, one of the four officiel seers, who became a nun in Bordeaux, Jeanne-Marie Lebossé, retracts and says that she didn’t see anything fifty years earlier.Because of this shameful development, the faithful could question Pontmain in comparison with the others Marian shrines, especially Lourdes. That’s why the ecclesiastical authorities of the diocese of Laval adopt successively several strategies of memory.For half a century, they don’t reveal the event and the official narrative, written in 1871, remains unchanged. Then, on the occasion of the centenary of the apparition, with the agreement of the bishop of Laval, an attempt to explain and assimilate the retraction, is advanced through a very documented work. Since then, however, the commemorative policy of the local ecclesiastical authorities hesitates, between a return to the occultation of the retraction of Jeanne-Marie Lebossé and an reasoning of diversion, engaged in promoting the role played by the parish priest of Pontmain, Michel Guérin

Keywords

• Memory
• apparition
• Pontmain
• France
• Mayenne
• 19th-21st century