Our Lady of La Salette

La Salette in 1846 was a poor mountain parish of eight or nine scattered hamlets, with about 800 people, mostly small farmers. It lies in the French Alps, in the hills above the small town of Corps. France had been through revolution and war within living memory. The harvests of those years were bad. The Missionaries of La Salette record that a famine, begun in 1845, was by the winter of 1846 raging through Europe.

Mélanie Calvat was born on 7 November 1831 at Corps, the fourth of ten children of a stonemason and sawyer. The family was so poor that the children sometimes begged. She was hired out young to mind cows. In 1846 she worked for Jean-Baptiste Pra at Les Ablandins, a hamlet of La Salette. She had no schooling and little religious teaching, and could not read or write.

Maximin Giraud was born on 26 August 1835, also at Corps, the son of a wheelwright. His mother died when he was 17 months old. His stepmother reportedly took little interest in him. He spent his days in the streets with a dog and a goat, had not gone to school, and had hardly any catechism. He was at La Salette for only a few days in September 1846, lent to a farmer, Pierre Selme, to mind his cows.

Both children spoke the local dialect and very little French. They had barely met before that week.

The children took their cows up to the high pasture. In the afternoon they slept for a while. When they woke they went to look for the animals. Coming back down, they saw a globe of light in the hollow by a dry spring. Inside the light a woman was sitting on a stone with her face in her hands, weeping.

She stood up and spoke. The shrine's own account says she was first seated and in tears, and that she spoke to them for a long time, in French and in the dialect. She said: "Come near, my children, do not be afraid. I am here to tell you great news." The children went to her.

The light that surrounded all three, according to the shrine, came from a large crucifix on her breast, with a hammer on one side of the cross and pincers on the other. She had a heavy chain on her shoulders and roses beside it. Roses also circled her head, her waist and her feet. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls her dress "a strange costume"; the children called her only "a beautiful lady".

She kept weeping as she spoke. When she had finished she told them to make the message known to all her people. She then climbed a short steep slope and disappeared into the light.

Each child later said that she had also told them a secret, which the other could not hear. The earliest accounts of the event do not mention this. Documents from 12 October 1846 onward do.

That evening the children told their employers. Mélanie's mistress, the widow Pra, believed they had seen the Blessed Virgin and told them to go to the parish priest. They went the next morning, a Sunday. The priest, Father Perrin, wept, took notes and spoke about it in his sermon.

The same Sunday evening, with Mélanie present and Maximin already taken back to Corps, three men (Baptiste Pra, Pierre Selme and Jean Moussier) wrote down the words. This "Pra report" survives only in a copy made in February 1847, but it agrees with other very early documents. Father Jean Stern, the historian of La Salette, has published these papers in full. He points out that the two children each remembered part of the message better than the other, and that their accounts came to agree more closely as they told them together.

Word spread fast. On the first anniversary, 19 September 1847, at least 30,000 pilgrims climbed the mountain, according to the Missionaries' history. People spoke of healings and of a spring that now ran where it had been dry.

Bishop Philibert de Bruillard of Grenoble was personally convinced by about November 1846, but he wanted firm evidence before judging. He asked for reports in late 1846 from professors of the major seminary and from canons of his cathedral. The canons asked for a wider study. So two men, Canon Orcel and Canon Rousselot, carried out a new inquiry on the spot from July to September 1847.

In November and December 1847 sixteen senior priests met at the bishop's house to study their report. Most concluded that the apparition was authentic. A cure at Avallon on 21 November 1847 was examined by the local archbishop, Mellon Jolly of Sens, who on 4 May 1849 recognised it as miraculous, according to the sources on Mélanie's life. The bishop allowed Rousselot's report to be published, with his own letter of approval.

La Salette was attacked from the start. Anticlerical papers mocked it. More painful was the opposition among priests, especially in the dioceses of Grenoble and Lyon. Cardinal de Bonald of Lyon, the bishop's own metropolitan, was unconvinced and favoured the critics.

The hardest blow came in September 1850. Maximin, then 15, was taken to Ars by two supporters, against the bishop's wishes, to ask St John Vianney about his vocation. After the meeting the holy Curé told several people that the boy had admitted he had seen nothing. Maximin denied this in writing that November. He said there had been a misunderstanding, and his explanations did not always match. The Curé stood by what he had heard, though he wrote that if the fact was the work of God, man would not destroy it. Father Stern, who favours the apparition, thinks the boy, fond of teasing people, may simply have tried to fool him. For years the Curé's doubt troubled him. According to those who knew him, including his helper Catherine Lassagne, he later came to believe in La Salette again. Historians still weigh this episode.

Bishop de Bruillard, for his part, did not think the children could have made up the whole event. He went ahead.

The bishop's doctrinal letter carries the date 19 September 1851, the fifth anniversary. It seems to have been adjusted after remarks from Cardinal Lambruschini in Rome, and it was published in November, which is why some reference books, including the Catholic Encyclopedia, give 16 November 1851. Its words are given under "How the Church sees it".

In 1852 de Bruillard resigned. On 1 May 1852 he announced a shrine on the mountain and a body of priests to serve it, the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette. The first stone of the church was laid on 25 May 1852. The critics took the arrival of a new bishop, Jacques Ginoulhiac, as their chance to renew their attacks. He instead held a new inquiry and confirmed the decision. The shrine dates this confirmation to 1855, and the Missionaries' history records a statement of 1853. He is remembered for saying that the mission of the shepherds was finished, and that of the Church was beginning.

Two priests, Abbé Deléon and Abbé Cartellier, went on to claim that the "beautiful lady" was really a former nun, Mademoiselle de La Merlière, who had played a trick on the children. She sued for defamation and lost, on 2 May 1855 and again on appeal on 6 May 1857. The story has no serious support.

The bishop's judgment did not depend on the later lives of the children, and those lives were not easy. Fame came to them young. They were questioned, flattered and used by people with causes of their own.

Maximin never settled. He tried the seminary at Grenoble and elsewhere, worked in a nursing home, studied medicine without finishing, and worked in a pharmacy. In 1865 he went to Rome and joined the Papal Zouaves, the Pope's volunteer soldiers. In 1866 he published a short profession of faith in the apparition. He lost money in a business that used his name to sell liqueur. He returned at last to Corps, poor and helped by the priests of the shrine. He made a final pilgrimage up the mountain in November 1874 and died at Corps on 1 March 1875, aged 39. The Catholic Encyclopedia says he died "a holy death". He never denied the apparition in public.

Mélanie entered the Sisters of Providence at Corenc and took the veil in October 1851. Bishop Ginoulhiac did not admit her to profession, judging her not ready. She went to the Carmel at Darlington in England in 1855 and took temporary vows in 1856. In 1860 she was released and returned to the continent. She lived with the Sisters of Compassion at Marseille and in Greece, then for about seventeen years at Castellammare near Naples. She moved between Italy and France, kept writing, and tried to found a new religious order with its own rule, which she said had come from the apparition. Bishops did not accept this. She spent her last months unknown at Altamura in southern Italy, going daily to Mass in the cathedral, and was found dead in her home in December 1904. Sources give the 14th or the 15th. She has not been beatified. An often repeated report that St Pius X spoke warmly of her is not a judgment of the Church, which has made none on her holiness.

This is the most disputed part of La Salette, and it needs plain words.

1851. On Bishop de Bruillard's advice, and after pressure from Cardinal de Bonald, each child wrote down their secret. Both were sent to Pius IX and were handed over in July 1851. The Catholic Encyclopedia reports two opposite accounts of how the Pope reacted, and it is not known which is right. In 1999 Father Michel Corteville reported finding texts of 1851 in the Vatican archives. The Church has not given any judgment on them.

1879. Mélanie published a much longer "secret" at Lecce in Italy, with the imprimatur of its bishop, Salvatore Zola. It had harsh attacks on clergy and frightening predictions. A bitter quarrel followed about whether this was the same text she had sent in 1851. The Catholic Encyclopedia reports the view of "wise and prudent persons" that the later text was a work of imagination, shaped by her reading of apocalyptic books. In 1880 the cardinal secretary of the Holy Office wrote to a French bishop that the Holy Office was displeased and wished copies withdrawn, though it is not clear that this was a formal condemnation. Most defenders of the text were censured by their bishops.

1915. The Holy Office, under Benedict XV, forbade all the faithful to write about or discuss the so-called "Secret of La Salette", in any of its forms or its application to present or future times, with penalties. In the same decree it protected the devotion itself.

1923. By decree of 9 May 1923, approved by Pius XI, the Holy Office condemned a 1922 reprint of Mélanie's text and told bishops to take copies out of the hands of the faithful (Acta Apostolicae Sedis 15, pages 287 to 288). The Index of Forbidden Books was later abolished, but that did not turn this text into an approved one.

What this means for us. The Church approved the public message of 1846. She has never approved the published "secret". Nobody should build fear, dates or predictions, or attacks on the Pope and the clergy, on it. Groups of prophecy enthusiasts, some with political aims, used Mélanie's name in her lifetime and after. They do not speak for La Salette.

The words of the message. In 1928 the Jesuit scholar Hippolyte Delehaye argued that the message resembles the old "letters from heaven", popular pamphlets about Sunday. He pointed to the words about "six days" and "the seventh", which sound strange on Mary's lips. The Church's approval does not make every phrase a dictated word: the message reaches us through two unschooled children and the first people who wrote it down. Such questions are one reason the Church binds no one to believe in an apparition.

The "arm of my Son". This is an image, not a teaching that Mary holds back an angry Christ. Jesus is the one Saviour and his love does not need persuading. St John Paul II reads the image the right way: for the one who walks humbly, her Son's arm will not press down to condemn, but will take the outstretched hand. Mary, in this reading, is a mother who prays and weeps with us.