OUR LADY OF THE FIELDS, PARIS, FRANCE.

The title of Our Lady of the Fields, or Notre-Dame des Champs, and the devotion to Mary as such, takes us back to the earliest days of Catholic life in France.

Our Lady des Champs, at Paris, was dedicated in ancient times to Ceres. Saint Denis, to whom we owe a great deal of our traditional devotion to Mary, was the first Bishop of Paris. According to legends he drove the demons from the Temple of Ceres, the pagan goddess of agriculture, and placed therein an image of the Madonna modelled after Saint Luke’s famous painting. The Temple was henceforth dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom Parisians have honoured for centuries under the title of Our Lady of the Fields. It is said that a picture of the Blessed Virgin is still to be seen there, on a small stone, a foot square, which was made after that which Saint Denis brought to France.

This house, which is a Benedictine priory, was afterwards occupied by the Carmelites, who were received there in the year 604, and founded by Catherine, Princess of Longueville. It was the first occupied by those nuns in France; the mother Ann of Jesus, the companion of Saint Teresa, was its first superior.