Chêne de Saint-Joseph-du-Chêne de Villedieu-la-Blouère

Beaupréau-en-Mauges

The tree cannot be glimpsed from the road: the chapel of Saint-Joseph-du-Chêne was built around it, and one has to go in to find, at the back of a small octagonal pavilion of brick and timber, the monumental trunk of a pedunculate oak hollowed out by time, in whose cavity a statue of Saint Joseph carrying the Child, in white stone, is set on a granite altar. The tree is a relic of the dense forest that once covered the Mauges; it is given nine hundred years by Krapo arboricole, two thousand years in the sanctuary's brochures, figures that no measurement supports. Its history begins in 1856: the parish priest of Villedieu, Abbé Peltier, receives an image of Saint Joseph, and Father Louis Lamoureux suggests to him that a statue be lodged in the hollow of the oak, to which a description of the time, cited by Aleteia, gives a girth of nine metres thirty. On Sunday 24 August 1856, the tree is blessed, the statue installed, and the pilgrimage is born at once; from 1857, Pius IX grants indulgences to those who go there. The niche is sheltered by a brick oratory, then by a chapel inaugurated on 26 August 1859, by a second consecrated in 1871, and finally by a great chapel the size of a country church, raised with the parishioners and consecrated on 30 August 1899. The statue was crowned on 29 August 1906 before twenty-five thousand people. No source consulted describes the present state of the oak inside its brick envelope: it is a trunk that one visits. The pilgrimage is held every last Sunday of August.

Ôsez Mauges — La chapelle Saint-Joseph-du-Chêne ↗

Getting there : Rue Saint-Joseph, in Villedieu-la-Blouère (Beaupréau-en-Mauges), some fifteen kilometres north-west of Cholet and two kilometres from the N 249 Nantes–Cholet; parking on site. The chapel is freely accessible and free of charge all year round, and the oak can be seen inside, in the small octagonal pavilion attached to the great chapel. The annual pilgrimage takes place on the last Sunday of August.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound