The Song of Pierrette

Every day for weeks, pilgrims by the scores and hundreds have trudged to a grotto a few miles outside the gold-mining town of Val d'Or. Quebec There they hoped to see-- some professed to see-- a 13-year old girl work miracles.

Visiosn of Saint Francis. Pierrette Regimbal is a frail, pale child, seventh in a French Canadian family of twelve. Since early childhood she has been lame. One day about five years ago Pierette was playing near home when she believed she saw Saint Francis of Assisi. She touched the saint's hands. Then she saw that her own hands were bloodstained. Her lameness, she said, was momentarily cured. (She still uses crutchees.)

Her somewhat incredulous mother washed Pierrette's hands. Thereupon St. Francis reappeared. He told Pierrette that she should not have washed. So she touched St. Francis again. This time she simply wiped her hands on a cloth. Henceforth, the saint told her everything she touch would become a sacred relic. After that, said Pierrette, the vision of St. Francis appeared to her about twice a week, sometimes in her home and sometimes at a rock outside the town.

Just as Bernadette went to a hillside at Lourdes, Pierrette went to the rock every day ay 3 p.m. to pray and to help the sick and teh crippled. As they years passed by story spread that Pierrette was gifted with supernatural powers and could obtain the intercession of St. Francis in healing the ills of the faithful. Val d'Or's civic leaders contributed labor and material to build Pierrette a grotto.

Miracles of Val d'Or. As usual in such cases, there are skeptics. But many of Quebec's devout Roman Catholic people credit the child with performing miracles.

One hard-rock miner insists that he personally saw his mother-in-law, stone deaf for years, recover her hearing. Clermont Roy, who says he saw two crippled children fully cured by the girl, claims that his own eight-year-old son, mute since birth, began to talk after visiting Pierrette. Said Mme. Philippe Coulombe: "I have just taken 20 steps down the street, when for a long time I have not been able to take two steps in my kitchen without my crutches."

Pierrette's father, a Val d'Or clerk, has been fearful that his daughter's fame would spread too fast, that his family would incur the wrath of the Church.* The Church itself, sternly resolved to distinguish between truth and fraud, forbids recognition of any person's "miracles," no matter how well documented, as long as the person is alive. In Pierrette's case, the Church has been scrupulously uncommunicative.

Two miles east of St. Gregoire d'Iberville, Quebec, 30,000 persons gathered last week to watch Premier Maurice Duplessis unveil a 31-ft. granite cross. It was erected on the site of a log cabin where Alfred Bessette was born in 1846. Before Alfred Bessette died in 1937, he won a worldwide reputation for holiness and miracle-making.

A carpenter's unlettered son, he was a shoemaker and a farm hand before emigrating (as so many French Canadians have done) to the cotton mills of New England. Then, in 1870, he sought to enter the Congregation of the Holy Cross at Montreal. The fathers let him act as porter and unofficial barber of their college, and called him Brother Andre.

They soon noticed his ardent devotion to Saint Joseph, foster father of Christ. Soon, too, they noticed the throngs of visitors that he was attracting.

In time, thousands of devout Roman Catholics were calling daily on the college porter, praying with him and leaving gifts of money. In 1896 the first chapel was built on a plot opposite the college. Later a bigger one was built, still later a third. Today the $6,000,000 Oratory of Saint Joseph is a great, concrete-domed structure topped with a neon-lighted cross that towers over Canada's "City of Churches." Ecclesiastical tribunals are already at work in Montreal, Providence, R.I., Ottawa, and St. Hyacinthe, Quebec, checking evidence and proceeding with the first steps that may lead to Brother Andre's canonization.

* But an uncle of Pierrette was last week reportedly trying to interest a New York syndicate in buying exclusive rights to pictures of her and her grotto.

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