On the sixth of February, 1981, a Catholic peasant woman died in her shuttered upstairs bedroom in the village of Châteauneuf-de-Galaure in the Drôme department of south-eastern France. She was seventy-eight years old and had not walked in fifty-three years. Her doctor signed the death certificate. He had attended her for over four decades. In all of that time, by his medical record, she had eaten no food and drunk no water.

Her name was Marthe Louise Robin. She was born on the thirteenth of March, 1902, the youngest of six children of a poor peasant family at La Plaine in Châteauneuf-de-Galaure. In late 1918, at sixteen, she contracted a severe encephalitis-like illness in the wake of the great influenza pandemic. The illness recurred for ten years. By 1928 her body was fully paralysed from the neck down. By 1929 she could no longer swallow. From that date, by the testimony of her family, her parish priest, and her physician Dr André Ricard, she took no food and no water.

In 1930 the stigmata appeared. Five wounds in the pattern of Christ's Passion. They reportedly bled every Friday for the next fifty years. From 1940 she wore a black cloth blindfold day and night, unable to bear light. Pilgrims began arriving in the early 1930s. By her death the visitors' register at La Plaine recorded over one hundred thousand names, including the philosopher Jean Guitton, the founder of L'Arche Jean Vanier, Cardinal Pierre Veuillot of Paris, and the French statesman Robert Schuman. In 1936, from her bed, with the priest Father Georges Finet, she co-founded the Foyers de Charité, a Catholic lay retreat movement that today operates in more than seventy countries on five continents.

She was examined repeatedly by independent medical doctors over five decades. Her family physician Dr André Ricard attended her for over forty years. A continuous hospital observation at Crest in 1942 recorded no food intake, no water intake, stable body weight, and stable vital signs, and the stigmata wounds bleeding only on Fridays. The Catholic Church opened her cause for beatification in 1986. The Vatican confirmed the heroic virtue of her life on the seventh of November, 2014, declaring Marthe Robin Venerable. The medical inedia of fifty-three years remains, in the formal records of the diocese of Valence and the Foyers de Charité archive, unexplained.

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