Marthe Robin fell ill at sixteen and was never well again. From 1928 her legs were paralysed, her eyes could not bear the light, and she spent the remaining fifty-three years of her life on a bed in a darkened room of her parents' farmhouse in the Drôme. In early October 1930 the stigmata appeared, and from the following year she was said to relive the Passion every Friday until she died. Almost everything else about her happened in that one room: something close to a hundred thousand people came to it, and she saw them one at a time.
In 1936, with the priest Georges Finet, she founded the Foyers de Charité — lay communities that keep a house of retreats under a priest, living as a family. She never visited one. There are now around seventy-five of them in more than forty countries, which is the plain, checkable fact about her life: a woman who could not sit up founded an international movement from her bed and governed it by conversation.
She is also said to have eaten nothing but the Eucharist, received weekly, for around half a century. The Church has never pronounced on that, no autopsy was performed, and the claim rests on the testimony of those who kept her house. The site records it as what was said of her, in the same way it records the like claim at Konnersreuth.
Pope Francis declared her Venerable on 7 November 2014. Six years later the case against her was published. Conrad De Meester, the Carmelite scholar whom the bishop of Valence had appointed in 1988 as theological censor for her cause, had read her four thousand typed pages and reported to Rome in 1989; the manuscript found after his death in December 2019 argued that large parts of those writings were copied, unattributed, from other mystics, and it appeared from Éditions du Cerf in October 2020 as <em>La fraude mystique de Marthe Robin</em>. The charge is about the writings, not about the Foyers, and it was made by the man the Church itself had asked to look. The decree of 2014 stands and the cause has not been closed; a reader should know both facts.