Beauraing, Belgium · 1932–1933
In a small Belgian town near the French border, in the bitter winter of 1932, the Mother of God appeared thirty-three times to five children — three of one family, two of another. She came not with messages of catastrophe, but with a quiet, golden tenderness. She showed them, in the end, her own heart of gold. Beauraing has been ever since the shrine of the Virgin with the Golden Heart — a Mother for the children that the world overlooks.
The Virgin with the Golden Heart
On November 29, 1932, two of the Voisin sisters and three of the Degeimbre sisters and brothers — children aged nine to fifteen — were waiting at the gate of a convent school to fetch one of their number when they saw, by the light of an electric streetlamp, a glowing woman walking on the air above the railway bridge. They told the nuns; the nuns dismissed it. The Lady appeared again the next evening, and the next.
Over the next five weeks, until January 3, 1933, she appeared thirty-three times. She was always under a hawthorn tree at the same spot. She wore white. She prayed the Rosary with the children, kneeling on the air. She asked them to pray for the conversion of sinners and for those who had given up. On the second-to-last apparition, she opened her mantle and revealed her own heart, brilliantly golden. “Pray, pray very much,” she said. “I am the Immaculate Virgin. I will convert sinners.”
Beauraing was investigated by the Church for fifteen years before approval. The five children — Andrée, Gilberte, and Albert Voisin and Fernande and Gilberte Degeimbre — lived ordinary lives afterward. The shrine that grew at Beauraing has been called by some the most welcoming of the great Marian sanctuaries, perhaps because it began with five very ordinary children, in a very small town, on a very cold night.
The Sanctuary Today
The shrine of Our Lady of Beauraing is built around the hawthorn tree where the Lady appeared. A great esplanade gathers pilgrims; small chapels remember the apparitions one by one. The image at the center shows Mary opening her mantle, her Golden Heart visible — the gesture by which she ended her conversation with the five children.
Beauraing is a quiet sanctuary. The Mass is celebrated daily. Pilgrims walk the gravel paths beneath the trees. The shrine has been particularly cherished by Belgian families, by children, and by those who carry the small ordinary disappointments that no headline ever reports.
A Prayer at Beauraing
Virgin with the Golden Heart,
you who showed your own love
as a heart of light in the cold —
let us see your love as the children of Beauraing saw it:
ordinary, near, and gold.
We have ordinary lives.
We have ordinary disappointments.
Let your golden heart be near our small ones.
Pray, pray very much, for us. Amen.
Live from Beauraing
The Sanctuary of Beauraing celebrates daily Mass and the Rosary at the hawthorn tree where Our Lady appeared. Pilgrims gather particularly each summer for the great novena of the Assumption.
Visit & Learn More
- Sanctuaries of Beauraing (official): www.sanctuairesdebeauraing.be
- Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Beauraing
Journey with Mary: A Path to Jesus 