La Salette

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La Salette is a mountaintop village near Grenoble, France. It is most noted for an apparition of the Virgin Mary that was reported in 1846 by two shepherd children, followed by numerous accounts of miraculous healings. The Roman Catholic Church investigated the claims and found them to be basically credible. Devotion to "Our Lady of La Salette" was weakened in the late nineteenth century by the increasingly extravagant and heterodox claims of one of the seers, Melanie Calvat. Her later publication of the supposed "Secret" of La Salette was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. Recent release of the secrets from the Vatican archive by Fathers René Laurentin and Michel Corteville have clarified the situation. Despite this tainted history, the cult of La Salette flourished in the twentieth century, and with Fatima and Lourdes, remains one of the most famous Marian apparitions of the modern age.

[La Salette Basilica:[1],[2],[3]

Contents

[edit] Apparitions

Two shepherd children - Maximin Giraud and Melanie Calvat - reported a vision of the Virgin Mary near La Salette on September 19, 1846. This apparition was approved by the Bishop of Grenoble in that year under the title of Our Lady of La Salette.

Similar to the 1858 apparition at Lourdes and the Fatima apparitions in 1917, the Virgin appeared short-statured and dressed in strange clothes to peasant children. As at Fatima, the Blessed Virgin reportedly warned that humanity would be severely chastised if they did not repent. Some sceptics allege that the knowledge of the visions of La Salette influenced later child-seers at Lourdes and Fatima. However, all the children concerned were illiterate and apparently chosen as such to make their assertions all the more credible, as they would not have the ability to create and maintain the truth of such elaborate fantasies.

Very little was known with certainty about the content of the Blessed Virgin's message to the two children until recent release of the secrets from Vatican archives by Fathers René Laurentin and Michel Corteville. Pope Pius IX insisted on being provided a copy of her message, but he never published these documents, and there are conflicting reports about his reaction to them. Nonetheless, the Pope continued to approve the cult of Our Lady of La Salette even after reading the message. Contrary to later speculation, the apparition did not ask to have a secret message delivered to the Pope, but it was the Pope who initiated the request for details of what the children had heard. Like the Third Secret of Fatima, the La Salette secret has generated much controversy and wild speculation, with many believing that the true secret is too frightening to be revealed. The recent release of the secret by Fathers René Laurentin and Michel Corteville means that now the secret can be analyzed.

[edit] Controversy

In her later life, Melanie Calvat became a controversial figure. The new bishop of Grenoble,Mgr. Philibert de Bruillard, who suffered successive embarrassments while trying to defend Melanie, found her to be "willful" and defiant of authority.

Melanie's later reputation was harmed by her credulity in listening to conspiracy theorists, Bourbon Royalists, occultists and Protestants, as well as reading apocalyptic visionary literature. She made increasingly extravagant predictions of impending apocalyptic wars among the great powers that would occur in the 1860s.

The next Bishop of Grenoble, Mgr. Ginoulhiac, was forced to declare publicly in 1851 that the mission of the shepherd children had ended and that the matter was now in the hands of the Church. He did this to end Melanie's pretensions to further and continuous revelations. The Bishop made it clear that the approval of the Church was only for the original revelation of 1846 and not for any subsequent claims.

After the Council of the Vatican, Melanie publicly contradicted in 1873 the Council's Decree Pastor Aeternus by claiming that Our Lady had confided in her that "Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist", a line, according to Unity Publishing and other sources, most likely was borrowed from Martin Luther who first uttered it in opposition to the Catholic Church in 1540. Following this, the Church privately warned her and banned this new message, forbidding Catholics from entertaining or discussing it. In the recently released original copies of the secrets, it is clear that this line was not present in the original secrets sent to Pius IX.

In 1878, she wrote this prohibited new message of 1873 as her original "Secret" of 1846 with the "Imprimatur" of Bishop Zola of Lecce in Italy in a 33 paragraph work published on the 33rd anniversary of the original apparition, on November 15, 1879, under the title, "Apparition of the Blessed Virgin on the Mountain of La Salette". The Vatican promptly put this on the Index of Prohibited Books.

In 1880 the Bishop of Troyes denounced the Lecce-imprimatured book to the Holy Office, and in turn Cardinal Caterini, Secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office, publicly wrote back to him, the Bishop of Castellammare and the other members of the hierarchy that, "The Holy Office is displeased by the publication of this book. Its express will is that every copy which has been put into circulation be withdrawn, as far as is possible, from the hands of the faithful."

In 1901 Abbe Gilbert Combe published his version of Melanie's latter (1873) prohibited "secret" under the title "The Great Coup and Its Probable Dates", which was anti-Bonaparte and pro-Bourbon. It too was promptly put on the Index.

Again in 1906 another of Combe's publications on this 1873 "secret" titled "The Secret of Melanie and the Actual Crisis" was promptly placed on the Index.

These actions of the Church caused a great deal of confusion in Catholic minds, so that it was compelled to clarify that the original message confided to Maximin and Melanie in 1846 remained approved, and it was only the latter messages, and particularly the 1873 message, contradicting Vatican I, saying "Rome will lose the faith, and become the seat of the Antichrist" that was banned. In October 1912, Albert Lepidi, Master of the Sacred Palace in a public statement in reply to a query by Cardinal Lucon affirmed that the original message of 1846 remained approved.

Once again, during the Pontificate of Pope Benedict XV, the Church was compelled to address the issue. Benedict XV issued an Admonitum (formal Papal warning) recognizing the many different versions of the 1873 secret "in all its diverse forms," and forbidding the faithful or the clergy to investigate or discuss them without permission from their bishops. The Admonitum further affirmed that the Church's prohibition issued under Pope Leo XIII issued in 1879 remained binding.

From the beginning, the 1873 message was exploited by anti-clericals and Freemasons to attack Catholics. In 1916, a Dr. Gremillion of Montpelier, France, published a commentary on the 1873 text under the pseudonym of Maraive, which was put on the Index.

Again, in 1923, a group taking the name "Society of St. Augustine" re-published Gremillion's 1916 commentary. Gremillion distributed a thousand copies of this edition with an anticlerical tract pasted into it. This work too was put on the Index.

The intense confusion deliberately spread by anti-Catholics caused a reaction that caused La Salette to lose its glory and fall back into the slumber of a minor site of Catholic pilgrimage.

The unseemly behavior of Melanie Calvet was to be repeated by the Mariavites who sent a delegation to Pope Pius X demanding that he submit to them, leading to their excommunication and schism.

[edit] Colinites

In 1950, Frenchman Jean Colin claimed to receive revelations and to continue and to fulfil the 1873 message of Melanie Calvet. Subsequently, Pope Pius XII publicly declared him by name a "vitandus" excommunicate (one who should be avoided).

Colin claimed to have been made Pope (even while Pope Pius XII was alive) as "Pope Clement XV", and in 1963 founded the ultra-liberal, ultra-modernist "The Renewed Church of Christ" or "Church of the Magnificat", based first in Lyons, then at St. Jovite, Quebec,Canada.

The Colinites have since disintegrated into several factions, with one successor "Pope" in France.

Another, larger, faction is led by Jean-Gaston Tremblay, one of Colin's disciples, who declared himself constituted "Pope" by apparition even before Colin had died and who calls himself "Pope John-Gregory XVII". He is now based in St. Jovite, as head of the "Order of the Magnificat" and "The Apostles of the Latter Days".

The 1873 "secret" of Melanie Calvet, which called for the constitution of these "Apostles of the Latter Days" is central to his claims and mission.

[edit] Official position of the Church

Catholics are not required to believe in a miraculous origin for the events at La Salette: as with other Church-approved visions, it is designated "worthy of belief". This approval extends only to the 1846 apparition itself, and some of the miraculous healings. The authentic secrets of La Salette have now been published, and the widely circulated 1873 "secret" is under suspicion.

[edit] References

  • Michel Foucault interrogates the problem of the vision of the Virgin at La Salette in Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975 (Picador, New York, 2003) pages 225-7.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Against

[edit] Others

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