fidelity to Rome of the Catholic Church. The bishop of the Marpingen diocese was imprisoned, then exiled, and had just died at the time of the apparitions. The announcement of these apparitions, of the

nuns who remained, appealed to her cousin, Mother St Michel Gensoul, an Ursuline nun who had been exiled in Montpellier, France, during the reign of terror. Mother St Michel was a remarkable woman of great

corpses rotting on crosses, the nearby capital city in flames, and fellow citizens either killed or exiled into slavery. The future of this family (of Joseph and Mary) and the Child that they carried was