(1902 – 1981)
WHO IS MARTHE ROBIN?
Marthe Robin (1902-1981) is one of the great French spiritual figures of the 20th century. Struck with illness from her youth on, this farmer’s daughter received in her house more than 100,000 people. Paralysed in her room for more than 50 years, she has nonetheless, more than thirty years after her death, gained an international influence.
A peasant girl of the Drôme region
Born on the 13th March 1902 at Châteauneuf-de-Galaure, a village in the Drôme region, Marthe Robin was a daughter of the soil. From farming stock, she lived by the rhythm of the seasons and the work of the farm, close to nature and animals. Despite fragile health, connected with the typhoid which she contracted at the age of one, she walked some distance to school, to catechism or to undertake farm work, like all the children of her age.
View the Home of Marthe Robin
A simple, joyful and pious childhood
Marthe received a Christian education. Baptised on the 5th April 1902, she made her first holy communion at the age of ten. She developed an intense personal relationship with God. Full of common sense, she joined a deep spirituality to a realistic attitude to all trials thanks to her rural upbringing. By nature she was playful and quick to enjoy a joke.
“As a little girl I loved God greatly”
Marthe Robin
Struck by sickness from her youth
As an adolescent, Marthe was struck by encephalitis. She suffered unbearable pains, fainting fits and paralytic episodes without any precise diagnosis being established. The illness developed gradually, one step forwards, two steps back. At the age of 17, her legs became paralysed; at the age of 28 a second attack led to total paralysis of her digestive tract; a third struck her ocular nerves in 1939, at the age of 37. Light gave her great suffering, and she had to live in darkness.
She wanted to give meaning to her life despite her suffering.
Marthe struggled to regain health. She did needlework in order to buy medicine. She took thermal cures, but in vain. After having hoped for a cure, Marthe experienced discouragement and loneliness. People in the area were taken aback by this unknown illness and stopped coming to see her. But in 1928, in the very midst of her suffering she underwent an interior change. In the course of a visit from two priests, she had an experience of the infinite love of God for her. This intimate spiritual experience changed her life profoundly.
Given to others till death
Right up to her death in 1981, Marthe would never again leave the darkness of her little room in the farmhouse of “La Plaine.” There she received more and more visitors, drawn by her ability to listen and to counsel, and her radiant spiritual influence. In fact Marthe had an intense mystical life. In her flesh and in her soul she experienced an ever greater union with God. In the course of her life she would receive visits from over 100,000 people, and her influence stretched beyond the borders of France and the Catholic Church.
MARTHE ROBIN: HER ENORMOUS INFLUENCE
Marthe Robin received over 100,000 people, including priests, bishops, intellectuals, and founders of communities. She had a profound influence on the Church and the world of her times, right up to the present moment.
A modern vision
In 1932, the Lord made known to Marthe that through her He wanted to create a new work in response to the needs of contemporary society. After beginning with the creation of a school in the village of Châteauneuf in 1934, she founded the first “Foyer of Charity” in 1936 with the help of Fr. Georges Finet, a priest of Lyon. These Foyers of Charity are a visionary work for our times: a place of prayer and welcome run by single people, couples and priests living in community. More than thirty years later, the Second Vatican Council would stress the dignity and responsibility of all the baptised in the mission of the Church, as well as the universal call to holiness.
A new inspiration for the Church.
After the Second World War, many initiatives sprang up in the French Church as it sought to connect with a world in transition. Marthe followed this movement and encouraged it by receiving, for example, Fr. Epagneul (founder of the rural missionary Brothers), Little Sister Madeleine of Jesus (foundress of the Little Sisters of Charles de Foucauld), or Fr. Talvas (founder of The Nest, to help prostitutes out of their predicament). Marthe was always there to listen and full of good advice.
New movements and communities appeared after Vatican Two. Several of their founders came to meet Marthe Robin, who supported this new springtime in the Church by her prayer. She played a very important role in the birth or development of some of them. She is recognised as an important prophetic figure in the renewal of the Church.
A spiritual figure of the twentieth century
In the course of her life, Marthe Robin received in her room over 100,000 people from all over the world. Her house was always a place of welcome and hospitality.
During the Second World War, Marthe began to give advice to several great theologians. Frs. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Paul Philippe and André Feuillet came to see this little peasant woman who couldn’t even pass her school leaving certificate because of her health problems. They came away greatly blessed by her, going so far as to modify or improve their theological positions.
Marthe Robin also had great friendships with others of the period such as Paul-Louis Couchoud, a literary figure of great stature, medical doctor and notorious unbeliever up till his conversion, or the philosopher Jean Guitton of the Académie Française.
MARTHE ROBIN: AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE IN THE MIDST OF THE ORDINARY
Marthe Robin had intense faith, and experienced numerous mystical phenomena which she was always very reticent about, but which contributed to her influence.
An intense mystical life
At the beginning of her sickness, Marthe Robin had a vision of Our Lady which supported and comforted her. It’s in her relationship with Mary, in her abandoning of herself into her hands, that Marthe drew the strength and patience she needed. It is said that she lived her life in the presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom she greatly loved and called her “darling Mama”.
“The Holy Virgin holds us by the hand but also by the heart. She walks along with us constantly in life. She leads us to a heart to heart with Jesus.”
In 1928, it was an apparition of Christ which would change her life. She then took the decision to “hand herself over completely to God” and to “offer her sufferings” in union with him by prayer and love. Her spirituality became more and more centered on the passion of Christ and the Eucharist, with a great closeness to Our Lady. She embarked on a veritable spiritual battle with the forces of evil.
From the 1930s onwards, every Friday Marthe Robin relived the Passion of Christ, first of all spiritually, later in her flesh. In fact she received the stigmata, that is, the wounds reproducing those of Jesus Christ on the Cross.
The Eucharist her only food
The progressive paralysis of her digestive tract prevented Marthe from eating and drinking. It is also recorded that she did not sleep for over 50 years. Each week, the only food she could swallow was the host she received. Holy Communion became her sole food. For Catholics, the “Body of Christ” received in Communion gives life to the soul and even affects the life of the body. Marthe Robin experienced the power of the sacrament of the Eucharist in a very special way.
“I want to cry out to those who ask me if I eat, that I eat more than them, for I am fed by the Eucharist of the blood and flesh of Jesus. I would like to tell them that it is they who arrest and block the effects of this food in themselves.”
Inspired words
Marthe was filled with compassion. She listened to people’s accounts of suffering to the point of crying sometimes. She had a wonderful gift of consoling people. She was entrusted with many prayer intentions and the power of her intercession was often perpectible. Seemingly desperate situations, in many different domains would be resolved, or sorted out after she prayed.
“I now know the purest joy, that of living for others and their happiness.”
Her numerous reflections on the future of the Church or of France have sometimes been taken as prophecies, but she always rejected this term, preferring a more spiritual vision of the future which always remains in God’s hands.
WHAT IS THE MESSAGE OF MARTHE ROBIN?
A witness of hope
The life of Marthe is a hymn of joy, precisely in the midst of a life full of trials and sufferings. Those who came to see her were often struck by the joy and serenity that they found in her. Her peals of spontaneous laughter sometimes filled her little room. When lived in God and offered in love, suffering is not necessarily a blockage. Marthe’s life united the cross and the joy. By placing her suffering in that of Christ, Marthe gave it meaning and transfigured it.
“Hope is to recognise the graces God gives us, while expecting the blessings He promises us”
Marthe Robin
Witness of faith
For Marthe, baptism is, in the life of every Christian, the beginning of what she called “intimate life with God.”. This sacrament brings with it everything that is necessary for a rich and intense Christian life, with the knowledge of the Faith and with prayer. This life is not reserved for a special category of Christians; it is available to all. Baptism is a springboard to holiness and intimacy with God.
“Our faith must be simple and transparent, pious and intelligent. We must study and reflect if we are to develop convictions and firm ideas, if we are to take the trouble to get to the bottom of ourselves and our beliefs.”
Marthe had a very close, concrete and affectionate personal relationship with Our Lady, who often showed herself to her. The motherhood of Our Lady in respect of each one is a reflection of the love of God the Father.
Witness of love
At the heart of Marthe Robin’s life there is this passion for the love of God, this ardent desire to make him known as he truly is. Marthe knows herself to be deeply loved by God. She believes it, in spite of everything, in spite of the development of her illness: He will never abandon her. That is the basis of her joy.
“I would like to be everywhere at once to tell the world over and over again how good is the good God, how much he loves us, and shows his tenderness and compassion to us all.”
Marthe has a very positive vision of the human being. She knew how much we are worth in God’s eyes: every person is a child of God, and Jesus has shed his blood for each one. Her own experience and the way she welcomed those who came to see her testify to the grandeur and the dignity of each human being, whatever their life consists of, whatever their weaknesses and limitations. This love and respect for every human being, because she knows them all to be loved by God, was apparent in her way of welcoming those who came to her.
“VENERABLE” – A STEP TOWARDS BEATIFICATION
Marthe Robin died on 6th February 1981 and was declared Venerable by Pope Francis on 7th November 2014.
PRAYERS BY MARTHE
Prayer of Abandonment
My God, take my memory and all it’s recollections; take my heart and all it’s affections; take my understanding and all it’s faculties; make them serve only for Your greater glory. Take my entire will, and I will merge it in Yours. No longer what I want, oh my sweet Jesus, but always whatever You want. Take me…receive me…direct me. Be my guide. I abandon myself entirely to You. I give myself to You, a little host of love, praise and thanksgiving, for the glory of Your Holy Name, for the enjoyment of Your Love, for the triumph of Your Sacred Heart, and for the perfect accomplishment of all Your designs in me and around me.
Oh Blessed Virgin!
My Mother; give me your eyes so pure that I may contemplate Jesus. Give me your heart that I may love Him. Engrave deeply in my soul the painful yet reassuring image of His Passion and glorious Resurrection, so that always having Jesus present in My mind and in my heart I may live until my death a life which is holy and pure, humble and hidden in God with Jesus and you my good Mother.
Prayer to obtain the beatification of Marthe Robin
Sacred Heart of Jesus, You revealed to Marthe Your great plan of love and of life, in order to draw to Yourself those who seek You or have forgotten You, and so that her unceasing self-offering of compassion and mercy may contribute to a new Pentecost.
We ask that her beatification by the Church may serve to make You known, You the living Word of love and peace, and that through the intercession of Mary we may follow her example in order to respond to the appeals of all our brothers and sisters.
Deign to grant our prayers we make You through Your servant Marthe so that Your joy and Your glory may be made known. Amen.
To learn more about Marthe Robin, visit martherobin.com