Gilberte Degeimbre

Life

Gilberte Degeimbre was born on 13 August 1923 in Beauraing, Belgium, the younger of the two Degeimbre sisters. She was just nine years old on the evening of 29 November 1932 when, accompanying her elder sister Andrée and the Voisin children to the boarding school of the Sisters of Christian Doctrine, she saw the Virgin Mary walking above the railway viaduct. Together with the four other children she would be a witness to the thirty-three Marian apparitions that followed over the next five weeks.

Gilberte was the youngest of the visionaries and her father had died shortly before the apparitions. Her mother initially refused to believe her, calling the children liars, which caused Gilberte great pain. She was nevertheless among those entrusted by the Virgin with a personal 'secret' which she kept until her death.

Gilberte later married André Philippe, an engineer, and the couple had two children. After living for a time in Italy she returned to Beauraing, where she prayed daily at the sanctuary. She published a memoir of the apparitions and her life under the title Le dernier coup de sonnette ('The Last Ring of the Bell'). As the last surviving visionary she received Belgian and international pilgrims at the shrine for decades, always with great simplicity and reserve, never speaking of her secret. She died on 10 February 2015 in Beauraing at the age of 91, the last living witness of the apparitions of Our Lady of the Golden Heart.