My brother David, who knows of my fascination with Montpellier’s St. Roch, sent me a little medal to this saint a few days ago which he had found in his house in Cork.
Now when I turned this over I found the above image which says Our Lady of Betharam, Pray for Us.
Now I know that I am not the greatest authority on the heavenly hierarchy, but I had never heard of this Notre Dame before.
Off to Google I go. There I discover that in the Pyrenees some shepherds were visited by an apparition of Our Lady by a stream . They then decided to build a shrine there and thereafter many miracles occurred. (Sound familiar ?)
This happened about 13 miles west of the town of Lourdes in Betharram and in the eleventh century.
I must confess to being a little gobsmacked. How come we have never heard tell of this apparition which happened so close to Lourdes and predated it by about 800 years?
Has it gone totally out of favour, been discredited, our simply replaced by the story of Bernadette ? Makes you wonder