Louise Lateau

Anne-Louise Lateau was born on 29 January 1850 at Bois-d'Haine, near La Louvière in Belgium, the third and youngest daughter of the laborer Grégoire Lateau and his wife Adèle. The family was poor. Her mother nearly died giving birth and remained bedridden for a long time; her father died of smallpox only ten weeks after Louise's birth. The infant herself contracted the disease and was saved with great difficulty. Hunger and hardship marked her childhood. Her mother eventually returned to work as a farm servant, and the elder sister was placed as a sewing assistant. At about eleven Louise was sent out as a housemaid, then brought home again to work as a dressmaker with her mother and sisters.

In 1866 a cholera epidemic struck Bois-d'Haine. At the request of the parish priest, the sixteen-year-old Louise nursed the sick with courage and without fear of contagion, even helping to bury the dead. In December 1867 she was received into the Franciscan Third Order. Soon afterward, while making the Way of the Cross in church, she was seized by a great interior light and sharp pains. Her health collapsed. On 15 April 1868 she received the last sacraments.

From 24 April 1868 pain returned every Friday and blood began to flow from her left side and feet. On 8 May blood issued from both hands as from nail wounds. On 25 September the stigmata were completed by four small spots of blood on the breast (or, according to some accounts, the forehead), as from pinpricks. In April 1882 traces resembling flagellation appeared on her body. The wounds appeared without visible cause from Thursday night into Friday and vanished the following night. They recurred every Friday until her death in 1883. Through the rest of the week she continued hard work for her family.

On 17 July 1868 the bleeding was joined by ecstasy, which returned each Friday in trance-like states lasting in all some eight hours—first after Communion about six in the morning, then again toward two in the afternoon. In ecstasy she seemed unaware of her surroundings yet changed posture and moved about the room; her face expressed joy, fear, and the sorrow of the Passion. She was insensitive to ordinary pain and noise, though she could briefly leave the state at the request of her parish priest or certain clergy. She said she beheld the Passion of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. The ecstasy commonly ended after a mime of the Crucifixion and Agony held in the parish church.

From the end of 1868 the Bishop of Tournai opened a canonical inquiry. Clerics, a statesman, and the Louvain physician Dr. Ferdinand Lefebvre examined her; the commission acknowledged her sincerity and found no natural explanation then available for the facts. Later the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium also investigated; its 1875 report found no conscious fraud in the stigmata and ecstasies, while medical and skeptical observers proposed natural or psychogenic accounts and disputed claims of total abstinence from food and sleep. Crowds and distinguished visitors came to the little house; Louise remained with her mother and sisters, working when she could.

She died at Bois-d'Haine on 25 August 1883, aged thirty-three, in the place of her birth. After her death the local ordinary closed the matter for a time. A century later the Bishop of Tournai opened a diocesan cause for beatification (1991). In 2009 the Congregation for the Causes of Saints declined to advance it. She is remembered as a Servant of God and as one of the most closely observed stigmatists of the nineteenth century.

May Louise Lateau obtain for us the grace to unite our daily labors and sufferings to the Passion of Christ with humble charity.