ABSTRACT
On Monday 3 July 1876, Margarethe Kunz and two other young girls in the village of Marpingen, in the Saarland, returned home in a state of considerable agitation. Obviously frightened, they described having seen a woman in white in the meadows on their way back from gathering bilberries in the woods. On the following days, they described further encounters. The woman told them: ‘I am the Immaculately Conceived.’ Adults in the village confidently identified her as the Virgin Mary. News of the encounter spread rapidly. Soon there were hundreds of pilgrims at the scene, and miraculous cures were being reported at a nearby spring which the children said the Virgin had indicated as a source of healing. Within a week there were said to be 20,000 pilgrims in the village, and people were speaking of Marpingen as ‘the German Lourdes’.
