Apparitions of Our Lady of La Salette

La Salette 

(Diocese of Grenoble, France)

The apparition of September 19, 1846, was the only one, and it was relatively brief: perhaps less than half an hour. It nevertheless left a deep mark on the entire lives of the visionaries, however tormented and persecuted they were. The message they received consists above all in the silent tears of the Virgin over the sin with which the world destroys itself: a fundamental message that had a wide echo, reaching the summit of the Church (Pius IX and Leo XIII), and was upheld by great converted intellectuals who gave Christian vigor to French intellectual life and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century: Huysmans, Léon Bloy and his godson Jacques Maritain, Verlaine, Péguy, Claudel, Massignon, Bernanos. 

It was also a sign of contradiction, above all because of the secrets, whose disclosure the Holy Office forbade in order to calm the waters and the visionaries. The bishop of Grenoble, Msgr. de Bruillard, esteemed them, but his successor, a man of power with great political sense, appointed by the entourage of the future Napoleon III right after his coup d’état, excluded and persecuted the visionaries, whose secret stigmatized the emperor (“plucked eagle,” said Maximin), who would later be an ally of Garibaldi in the struggle against the Pope.

From then on, the official tradition oppressed the visionaries until the centenary. The standard historical book declared Melanie hysterical, in a climate that the future John XXIII, then apostolic nuncio in France, pacified when he came to celebrate the centenary. It was a long controversy, blocked by the decree that imposed silence, between the defenders of the secret, whose authentic text would remain unknown until the threshold of the third millennium, and those who considered it a digression on the part of the visionaries. The official text of the secret was recorded with every juridical formality by Msgr. Genouillac as early as 1851 and brought to Pope Pius XII.

It was recently rediscovered by Michel Corteville, which made it possible to clarify this problem. This research demonstrates above all the sincerity of the visionaries, who are unequal in their depth, but whose lives were entirely spent in the commitment to respond to the mission entrusted to them by the Virgin: “Make it known to my people.” Maximin, who died young, was unable to fulfill his priestly and later medical vocation. Melanie, after being excluded from La Salette and exiled to England, went to Greece and Italy, where she found a wide hearing. She was adopted by Hannibal Mary Di Francia (1851-1927), now a saint, as co-foundress of his Order; for this reason he wished her to be buried in the chapel of the sisters he had founded with her. The volumes demonstrate, on the basis of indisputable documents, that Melanie was a true mystic and that the two visionaries had the rare merit of remaining humbly faithful to faith, obedience, and discretion, avoiding controversies.

Melanie became the object of the same negative actions also experienced by all those who, with far weaker historical proofs and foundations, defended the visionaries and their consistency amid inconsistent persecutions. This short introduction is based on unpublished documents, on historical foundations that re-establish the basic and essentially definitive proofs of the message of La Salette, the truthfulness of the visionaries, and the reasons that have led to their defamation up to now. This historical study has withstood every challenge. Its adversaries have limited themselves to concealing its content and reducing it to a rearguard battle of fanaticism. Bloy and Maritain, the latter also French ambassador to the Vatican, and despite Paul VI’s great esteem for him, were unable to obtain the publication of the carefully researched volumes that he had written without yet having the essential documents for the defense of La Salette and the visionaries.

Recalling the single apparition 

On September 19, 1846, Melanie Calvat (fourteen years old) and Maximin Giraud (eleven years old), two shepherds from Corps, went up together to the pastures of the village of La Salette. They pick some flowers, build a little house of stones, eat bread and cheese, and fall asleep, contrary to rule and habit. Around three in the afternoon Melanie suddenly wakes up: where is the herd? Coming out of the valley, they see two cows lying down higher up. Then they return to their resting place. Melanie then notices a brilliant light and calls Maximin. He comes to her and in turn sees the light: little by little both make out a lady. 

She was seated, with her head in her hands. Then she raises her head, her face all in tears, and looks at them:

“Come closer, she says, do not be afraid! I am here to tell you great news.”

She stands up; her attire is unusual: a crucifix shines on her breast. Then comes the message, of which these are the essential points: 

“You peasants work on Sundays, your carters blaspheme the name of God. And you, and the others, go to the butcher shop during Lent like dogs. Your sin will cause the loss of your harvests: the wheat is already rotting, the potatoes are rotting… I warn you beforehand as your mother: do not sow your wheat this year; it would be lost and you would have nothing left. Famine is coming, accompanied by diseases: it will kill your children. Hence my tears. How long I have been suffering for you […], and you pay no heed […]. That is what weighs so heavily on the arm of my Son.”

The future depends on men. The Lady says so in imaginative language:

“If they are converted, stones and rocks will turn into wheat, and the potatoes will already be sown.”

At the center of this public message she entrusts to the children the secret, which they must keep until further notice. And she concludes:

“Well, my children, you will make it known to my people.”

That same evening, the children tell their employers about the apparition. The next day, the employers send them to speak with the parish priest, Father Perrin, and he announces it in his sermon. The pilgrimage begins in the afternoon. And the message will be debated. 

The bishop of Grenoble, Msgr. de Bruillard, waits cautiously. His metropolitan, Cardinal de Bonald, archbishop of Lyon, is opposed. After sending the secret to Pius IX, who received it favorably, Msgr. de Bruillard recognized the apparition in 1851. 

Msgr. Genouillac, promoted by the entourage of the future Napoleon III, who was already in power, soon learned that the visionaries’ secret was severe toward the emperor, calling him the plucked eagle destined for a decline, which came in 1870. It was a delicate situation, since Pope Pius IX firmly supported La Salette and asked him to act against its detractors. With his political genius, Archbishop Genouillac found the appropriate solution and confirmed the authenticity of La Salette, despite the doubts he had confided to Cardinal Donnet on May 23, 1855—doubts that he denied when the cardinal revealed them. 

He supported the pilgrimage founded by the La Salette Fathers, but distanced himself from the visionaries, whom he separated, excluding Maximin from the diocesan seminary, rejecting the decision of the sisters who had admitted Melanie into their order at the end of her novitiate, and then exiling her and setting every condition to keep her away. A fine formula was found to express his intention before the crowd of pilgrims on September 19, 1855: “The mission of the shepherds ends; that of the Church begins.” This formula then became the official rule of action to this day. The message of La Salette is the tears of the Virgin and the call to conversion. Since the secret was an ineffable message given in a vision and not in words, the visionaries always had great difficulty in translating it into communicable terms, given their limited cultural resources. 

Each time they wrote it down without referring to the previous version, they started from what had penetrated their hearts and said what was essential, according to the question put to them and the principle of the association of ideas, which varied with the circumstances.

Doing justice to the visionaries, each at his or her own level, is a simple matter of historical truth, since the discrimination exercised against them made them the objects of a priori calumnies. Maximin was called stupid and petty. He loved drinking with his friends, but no one accused him of being drunk. As for his intelligence, it allowed him to pursue secondary studies, thanks to a priest, and to carry them as far as the major seminary, from which he was dismissed for being a visionary and not for intellectual inadequacy. He also did two years of medicine to become a health officer, but was turned away by his most prestigious professor, not for intellectual inadequacy, but for the following reason: “as a doctor, you will always be in a delicate situation, because people will come to you as a visionary, not as a doctor.”

Following that advice in good faith, he gave up, which prevented him from obtaining financial support for his future. Maximin was fond of the good life and impulsive. He loved telling lies and was reprimanded for it. But this was part of his good humor. Despite and against everything, he showed his intelligence and his ability to write by publishing his memoirs with dignity. 

Melanie was presented as an aberration. It was repeatedly said that her stigmata were self-mutilation or an effect of her hysteria. In fact, these stigmata are attested throughout her life by more than twenty witnesses. The younger sister, who could not explain her bleeding wounds, interpreted them in her own way, thinking that she had cut herself with a knife. But it is only a matter of interpretation, and dozens of witnesses, including Saint Hannibal Mary Di Francia, recognized their authenticity. 

The series of testimonies is irrefutable, and it is purely by artifice that the sister’s free interpretation is re-examined so as to avoid examining the other testimonies. While Father Jaouen, in the centenary book, applies psychological and psychoanalytic frameworks to Melanie, his disciple and admirer, Father Stern, has honestly acknowledged that this term is unjustified. 

What made it possible to point to Melanie’s balanced, calm, and meditative nature, happily endowed with great prudence, was the fact that in her youth she had suffered multiple attacks and torments from the devil, especially during the novitiate, where the sisters identified the phenomenon perfectly, thanks to their authentic spiritual experience, valued through close collaboration with numerous exorcists.

What allows her to be defamed as an unstable and unbalanced person is the fact that, as in Maximin’s case, and more radically, she was torn from her environment, La Salette, and from the sisters who had formed her and accepted her into their community. She was sent by force to the sisters of Valence and accused of having thrown some papers over the convent wall to ask to be released from this forced imprisonment. In reality, she ended up protesting in the name of the most basic of human rights. So too in England, where she was exiled still farther away to deprive her of any hope of return, and so on. When she managed to return to France, as if from a shipwreck, La Salette was forbidden to her. She managed to find work as a teacher with some sisters in Marseille, although she had been illiterate until the age of seventeen, and she did this work for two years. Then, with another sister, she was sent to Greece without any preparation to revive the fortunes of a school, which she successfully restored. In Italy she was well received and esteemed by several priests who have since been beatified. She was received in private audience by Pope Leo XIII, who wanted to send her to La Salette to build up the religious order that she believed she had received the mission to found. 

More prudent, and clarifying matters for the Pope, she objected: “but the bishop will not want to receive me.” Leo XIII summoned the bishop, who confirmed this opposition. The Pope sent Melanie to the cardinals of his Congregations to help her carry out her own project, already realized in some way with Father Hannibal through her collaboration as co-foundress, and better than Maximin had done. In reality, the visionary, although she had not pursued secondary studies, knew how to write and express herself with her own limited vocabulary, even reaching the heights of mysticism.

The apparitions of Our Lady of La Salette and their message of conversion belong within the theological horizon traced by John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Mater, which presents Mary as the intercessor and merciful mother who accompanies humanity on its journey back to God.

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