MARTHE ROBIN STIGMATIST OR FRAUD?

A Carmelite religious, Koen De Meester, wrote a hefty tome to be published in 2020, showing us that we should take saints with a pinch of salt for if the woman the book is about is a fake that shows there have to be undetected fakes too.  The subject of the book is the French woman, Marthe Robin.  Founder of Foyers de Charité, she was a popular mystic.  She still is.  And was considered a living saint in her day. As convincing as she was, she was in fact a trickster.  She died in 1981.

Her prolific supernatural visions and encounters were just categorised as fake.  Simple. 

A terrible and fatal problem was how she stole the narrative of her mystical experiences from the accounts of other mystics.  Plagiarism is a serious matter.  Texts that saints and angels gave her were found to be her own invention for they even had her style.  Nothing beyond her capacity was never detected.

She was caught out for being able to see when she pretended to be blind.  She was not truly paralysed either.

This priest, a former believer in her, was scathing.  The book has the loaded title, Marthe Robin. Mystic or Hysteric?  It can be summarised in his line, “Nothing of my years of positive judgement on the mystic Marthe Robin remains”.

Her priest who gave her spiritual guidance was guilty of sexual abuse and her apparitions seem unaware of that.  Maybe their approval of his guidance and role model status indicates approval of the 26 minimum female children and teenagers he sexually violated.

Needless to say, Pope Francis has no plans to apologise for declaring her Venerable, a religious role model.