The Beauraing Apparitions, Our Lady of the Golden Heart (1932-1933)

Beauraing was a small town in the province of Namur, home to about 2,000 people. At its edge stood the Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur boarding school, run by the Sisters of Christian Doctrine of Nancy. A railway viaduct ran beside it. In the garden stood a replica of the Lourdes grotto. Near the gate grew a hawthorn.

The children came from two working-class families. They were Fernande Voisin, 15, Gilberte Voisin, 13, Albert Voisin, 11, Andrée Degeimbre, 14, and Gilberte Degeimbre, 9. On the evening of 29 November 1932 they came to collect Gilberte Voisin, who boarded at the school.

It was around 6 p.m. Albert looked up and cried, "Look! the Virgin walking on that bridge!" The girls saw a lady dressed in white, walking a metre above the viaduct with her hands clasped together, seemingly bathed in a mysterious light. By one later account, Gilberte Voisin at first thought it was a man trying to frighten them. Sister Valéria, who opened the school door, did not believe them. Frightened, the children ran away.

They returned. She returned. A long white dress and a long white veil, with three rays of blue azure falling from her left shoulder to the hem. Rays of light rose from her head to form a crown. A small cloud hid her feet. Soon the hawthorn became her place. Each time, the children were thrown to their knees at once. On 2 December, Albert asked if she was the Immaculate Virgin. She nodded. Dogs set loose to hold back the crowd stopped barking and lay on the ground.

She asked for a chapel and for pilgrims. From 29 December the children saw a heart of gold on her chest. Then came 3 January 1933. Twenty thousand people by one count, thirty thousand by another.

To Fernande she said: "Do you love my Son? Do you love me? Then sacrifice yourself for me." Three of the children received a personal secret. None was ever revealed, and it was the last apparition.

Doctors came in growing numbers, reaching 160 on 31 December. Dr. Fernand Maistriaux published a favourable study. On 8 December, Dr. Lurquin held a lit match under Gilberte Voisin's left hand, but she showed no response or sign of injury. The children were also pinched, slapped and pricked, and torches were shone into their eyes. They retained no trace.

The Church moved slowly. Commissions in 1935 and 1938 found the supernatural character of the facts not established. Then, on 2 July 1949, Bishop André-Marie Charue declared the apparitions authentic and recognised two cures as miracles.

Doubt was there from the start. In 1933 the neurologist Paul Van Gehuchten proposed more or less unconscious simulation, complicated by autosuggestion, while Étienne De Greeff looked for a natural explanation. Herbert Thurston published a sceptical study in 1934. In 1957 Léonce Hallet argued that the story had been built up step by step. A wave of copycat visions swept Belgium in 1933, and the Church rejected all of them except Banneux, while the ufologist Patrick Gross, who lists the case in his catalogue, notes that no adult present ever saw the figure.

The shrine drew 1,700,000 visitors in its first ten months. Pope John Paul II came on 18 May 1985, and in 2013 the church became a minor basilica. Andrée Degeimbre visited the hawthorn daily for more than 44 years. Gilberte Degeimbre, the last of the five, died on 10 February 2015, aged 92. The hawthorn still stands.