Antique Reliquary Theca, Saint Germaine of Pibrac, Gilded Ormolu Case With Spanish Wax Seal Circa 1880 1st Class Relic

Antique Reliquary Theca, Saint Germain of Pibrac, Gilded Ormolu Case With Spanish Wax Seal Circa 1880 1st Class Relic

It is quite easy to date this beautiful reliquary as it contains relics of both Saint Germaine of Boudrac and Saint Therese of Avila.

Saint Germaine was made blessed in 1864 and made a Saint by Pope Pious IX in 1867 and this theca was made around 1880.

It has a fully intact Spanish wax seal that has the seal of a Cardinal of Rome as it has 5 tassles on either side. It would be the seal of Julien Florian Félix Desprez . He spent 36 years of his ecclesiastical career as archbishop of Toulouse from 1859 to 1895. He pressed the case for the canonization of the recently beatified Saint Germaine of Pibrac, a 17th-century shepherd girl abused by her step-mother in a village just west of Toulouse. Pope Pius XI declared her a saint on 29 June 1867 before a vast assembly of clerics who on that day celebrated the 18th centenary of the martyrdom of Saint Peter and the pope congratulated Desprez in person on 1 July.

I have a great affinity with Saint Germaine. Firstly because she was born not far from where I live and more importantly because of the touching nature of the story of her life.

Saint Germaine Cousin (1579–1601) is a French saint. She was born in 1579 of humble parents at Pibrac, a village 15 km from Toulouse.

"From her birth she seemed marked out for suffering; she came into the world with a deformed hand and the disease of scrofula, and, while yet an infant, lost her mother. Her father soon married again, but his second wife treated Germaine with much cruelty. Under pretence of saving the other children from the contagion of scrofula she persuaded the father to keep Germaine away from the homestead, and thus the child was employed almost from infancy as a shepherdess. When she returned at night, her bed was in the stable or on a litter of vine branches in a garret. In this hard school Germaine learned early to practise humility and patience.

Notwithstanding her poverty she found means to help the poor by sharing with them her allowance of bread. Her father at last came to a sense of his duty, forbade her stepmother henceforth to treat her harshly, and wished to give her a place in the home with his other children, but Germaine begged to be allowed to remain in the humbler position. At this point, when men were beginning to realize the beauty of her life, she died. One morning in the early summer of 1601, her father found that she had not risen at the usual hour and went to call her, finding her dead on her pallet of vine-twigs. She was 22 years old at the time.

This wonderful reliquary venerating this remarkable woman is in extremely good condition and the wax seal across the strings which hold the relics in place is still intact.

The setting is of gilded ormolu which is solid silver that has been gold washed.

It measures 3 x 2 x 1 centimetres and has a bail at the top so that it can be worn as a pendant.