Our Lady of La Salette

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 51. Chapters: Paul Claudel, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, Mélanie Calvat, Louis Massignon, Jacques Maritain, Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, Carlo Maria Martini, John Vianney, Annibale Maria di Francia, Maximin Giraud, Daniel Comboni, Luigi Orione, Missionaries of La Salette, Order of the Apostles of the Last Days, Léon Bloy, William Bernard Ullathorne, Sisto Riario Sforza, Peter Julian Eymard, Mieczyslaw Halka Ledóchowski, Adolphe Perraud, Jacques-Marie-Achille Ginoulhiac, Louis Veuillot, Louis Jacques Maurice de Bonald, Prospero Caterini, La Salette, Isère. Excerpt: La Salette is a small 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, Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, followed by numerous accounts of miraculous healings. The Catholic Church investigated the claims and found them to be basically credible and was approved under the name of Our Lady of La Salette. Devotion to Our Lady of La Salette was weakened in the late nineteenth century by the controversy surrounding the claims of one of the seers, Mélanie Calvat and the precarious situation of the Gallican church in a France hostile to religion. Recent release of the secrets from the Vatican Secret Archives have clarified the situation. Despite these events, the apparition of La Salette flourished in the twentieth century, and together with Our Lady of Lourdes (1858) and Our Lady of Fátima (1917) La Salette remains one of the most famous Marian apparitions of the modern age. Statue of Our Lady of La Salette, sitting crying (first part of apparition).Two shepherd children - Maximin Giraud and Mélanie Calvat - reported a vision of the Virgin Mary on a mountaintop near La Salette, France, on September 19, 1846 around 3.00 p.m. during their cowherding. They were eleven and fourteen years old at the time and had received only a very limited education. The apparition consisted of three different stages. Firstly, the children beheld in a resplendent light a beautiful lady clad in a strange costume. She was seated on a rock and in tears, with her face resting in her hands. This took place at the ravine called ravin de la Sezia Secondly, she stood upright and talked to the children, speaking alternately in French and in the regional patois. She charged them with a message which they were to deliver to all her people. This also took place in the ravin de la Sezia. After complaining of the impiety and sinfulness of men, and threatening them with dreadful chastisements in case they shou