Holly Grelichon

We find this regional Saint in a lane of Bourbon Archambault, represented in bust and vêtu of sacerdotal clothes, sheltered in a niche of a frontage of house.
It is one of the most popular characters and most enigmatic of the city. It had the capacity to cure the sterile women according to the legend. A certainty, it is that he was never a bishop and was never canonized. Worse, the church fought its worship.
In the olden days, the names carried revealed the personality and one assigned with the healers a capacity in connection with their name: Would Grelichon come from “grelicher”, to tickle, or “grelot”, testicles? Was he an healer, a monk, wise and scholar, belonging to the capuchins installed with Bourbon since 1622?

The ritual of the worship is known: the patients were going to request in the vault guided by a father capuchin before going to scrape peg fixed on the stomach of the statue. After one night spent in prayers (always accompanied by the capuchin), they drank the miraculous powder macerated in white wine.

Although the diocese of Bourges prohibited the exercise of the worship of Grelichon Saint about 1820, the women did not continue any less to rely on the statue to fill their desire of maternity. In the middle of the XIXème century, the exasperated priest made replace the wood statue by one out of painted stone, that one even as one finds with the museum Augustin Bernard. The statue reappeared in an attic and was given in the niche of the house. For more information on Grelichon Saint, to ask the tourist bureau of Bourbon Archambault the plate of Mrs Paulette Overflow.

http://www.coldev.org/sanctuaires/index.php?r=cons&sr=cons&id=211