Home › Apparitions › La Salette
At a glance
| Place | Mont Planeau, a high pasture (about 6,000 feet) above the village of La Salette, in the Diocese of Grenoble, France |
|---|
| Date | A single apparition, on the afternoon of Saturday, September 19, 1846 |
|---|
| Seers | Mélanie Calvat, just under 15, and Maximin Giraud, 11, poor children from the nearby town of Corps, hired out to watch cattle. Maximin died at Corps on March 1, 1875; Mélanie died at Altamura, Italy, on December 15, 1904. |
|---|
| Church judgment | Recognized by the Bishop of Grenoble, Philibert de Bruillard, in a doctrinal pastoral letter dated September 19, 1851, the fifth anniversary. He judged that the apparition “bears within itself all the characteristics of truth,” and that the faithful have grounds to believe it “indubitable and certain,” and he authorized its cult. The recognition was given before the 2024 norms and stands. It concerns the apparition and its public message, not any later version of the “secrets” (see below). |
|---|
| Afterward | On May 1, 1852 the bishop announced the building of the sanctuary, whose first stone was laid on May 25, and founded the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette. On August 21, 1879 the statue received a canonical coronation granted by Pope Leo XIII. The church on the mountain is a minor basilica. |
|---|
| Feast | September 19, kept at the shrine and by the La Salette Missionaries (not in the universal calendar) |
|---|
| Weight | Private revelation, approved: Catholics may accept it with prudent devotion but are not bound to believe it (CCC 67). |
|---|
What happened
After their midday meal the two children fell asleep on the mountainside. Waking, they ran to find their cows, and on the way back they saw what they described as a globe of fire. Inside it a woman was seated, as the Missionaries' account puts it, “her elbows resting on her knees and her face buried in her hands.” She stood and called them: “Come closer, my children; don't be afraid. I am here to tell you great news.”
She was tall and shone with light, with a long dress, an apron, a shawl crossed over her breast, and a close-fitting bonnet crowned with roses. Roses also edged her shawl and lay about her feet. A chain ran along the hem of her shawl, and on her breast hung a crucifix; beside the figure of Christ were a hammer on one side and pincers on the other, the tools that nail and unnail. “The Beautiful Lady wept all the time she spoke.” She spoke first in French and then, when Mélanie was puzzled by the words pommes de terre (potatoes), in the children's own dialect. Then she climbed the steep path up the slope, rose into the air, and “melted into light.”
That evening the children told their employers, and the next morning, Sunday, the parish priest of La Salette repeated their account from the pulpit. The children were questioned again and again, by clergy, magistrates and skeptics, for five years. The bishop's commission found that two uneducated children, who could barely repeat a catechism lesson, told the same long message without contradicting each other or themselves. That consistency, and the conversions that followed in the region, weighed heavily in his judgment.
What Our Lady asked
The quotations below are from the English text published by the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette. The message is short and plain. It is about sin against God that ordinary people commit without thinking, and about the mercy that still holds back its consequences.
“If my people refuse to submit, I will be forced to let go the arm of my Son.… How long a time I have suffered for you!”
Keep the Lord's Day
“I gave you six days to work; I kept the seventh for myself, and no one will give it to me.” She noted that in summer only a few elderly women went to Mass. This is the third commandment (Exodus 20:8–10; CCC 2184–2185).
Honor the Name of her Son
“Those who drive the carts cannot swear without throwing in my Son's name.” Careless and blasphemous use of the holy Name is what she wept over, not only great crimes (Exodus 20:7; CCC 2142, 2148).
Pray, morning and evening
“Do you say your prayers well, my children?” “Hardly ever, Madam,” they answered. She asked for prayer at night and in the morning, and said that even “an Our Father and a Hail Mary” is worthwhile “when you can't do better.”
Return, and the earth will bear
“If they are converted, rocks and stones will turn into heaps of wheat, and potatoes will be self-sown in the fields.” The last word of the message is not a threat but an image of abundance.
She ended with a charge, which she gave twice: “Well, my children, you will make this known to all my people.”
The warning of famineWarning
“A great famine is coming.”
- Content
- She spoke of spoiled potatoes and failing wheat, and of suffering that would fall even on little children. She tied these trials to the people's neglect of God, and said that conversion would turn them back.
- Context
- The children's hearers knew what she meant. The potato blight had already struck Europe in 1845, and the poor harvests of 1846 and 1847 brought scarcity and hunger to France and much of Europe. Many devout writers saw the warning confirmed in those years. The Church's recognition, however, did not rest on reading the message as a forecast.
- Reading
- Like the prophets, the Lady speaks of hardship as the fruit of turning from God, and always with a door left open: “If they are converted.” The point is not the calendar but the heart.
The tears
La Salette is the apparition of a mother in tears. She is not angry with her children; she is grieved for them, and she has been carrying their burden: “However much you pray, however much you do,” she said, “you will never be able to recompense the pains I have taken for you.” Her tears recall her Son, who “drew near” Jerusalem, “saw the city and wept over it” (Luke 19:41), and they recall the sword that Simeon foretold would pierce her own heart (Luke 2:35).
For the 150th anniversary in 1996, St. John Paul II wrote to the Bishop of Grenoble that “La Salette is a message of hope.” By her tears, he wrote, Mary “helps us to grasp more fully the painful gravity of sin, of the rejection of God,” and also the faithful love her Son keeps for his children. He recalled her call to penance, to perseverance in prayer and “particularly to fidelity in Sunday practice,” and her sorrow at seeing people forget or reject God's presence in their lives “and the holiness of his Name” (Letter to Bishop Louis Dufaux, May 6, 1996; the translation here is ours from the French). The La Salette Missionaries invoke her as Reconciler of Sinners.
The secrets, and what the Church said about them
During the apparition the Lady spoke to each child separately, and each said they had received a secret that the other did not hear. Here the history becomes complicated, and it is important to keep three different things apart.
1. The secrets sent to Pius IX (1851)Private
- What happened
- At Bishop de Bruillard's request, the children wrote out their secrets for Pope Pius IX in July 1851 (Maximin's text is dated July 3, Mélanie's July 6), and the texts were carried to Rome before the bishop's pastoral letter.
- Later discovery
- In 1999 Fr. Michel Corteville found what he identified as these original manuscripts in the Vatican archives, and he published them with Fr. René Laurentin in 2002 (Découverte du secret de La Salette, Fayard).
- Status
- The Holy See has never published or judged these texts. They are historical documents, not part of the approved message.
2. Mélanie's long version (1879)Not approved
- What happened
- Decades later Mélanie, then living in Italy, published a much longer text as her secret: printed at Lecce on November 15, 1879 with the imprimatur of the local bishop, Salvatore Luigi Zola. It is full of sweeping denunciations and apocalyptic predictions, and it has circulated widely ever since, especially among those looking for prophecies of the end times.
- Status
- The Church never approved this text as a message of Our Lady. An imprimatur says only that a bishop found nothing in a book to prevent its printing; it is not a judgment that a private revelation is authentic. This site does not quote it.
3. The Roman decisionsChurch acts
- 1880
- A letter of August 14, 1880 from Cardinal Prospero Caterini, secretary of the Holy Office, to the Bishop of Troyes conveyed the Holy See's displeasure at the publication and asked that copies be withdrawn from the faithful where possible. Its exact canonical weight is disputed.
- 1915
- A decree of the Holy Office dated December 21, 1915 forbade the faithful of every country to discuss or treat the matter of the so-called secret of La Salette, under any pretext or in any form, and added that the decree does not forbid devotion to the Blessed Virgin under this title (Acta Apostolicae Sedis 7 [1915], 594).
- 1923
- A decree of the Holy Office, decided on May 9 and dated May 10, 1923, and approved by Pius XI, “proscribed and condemned” (proscripserunt atque damnaverunt) a 1922 Paris edition of Mélanie's text and ordered copies withdrawn from the faithful (Acta Apostolicae Sedis 15 [1923], 287–288). This is the act usually summarized as putting the secret “on the Index.”
- Fairly stated
- Defenders of Mélanie's text argue that the 1923 decree struck one edition, not the secret as such, and that the 1915 decree forbade commentary rather than reading. Those arguments exist, and readers will meet them. What is beyond dispute is this: no Church authority has ever recognized any version of the secrets as a message of Our Lady, Rome intervened more than once to discourage their spread, and the 1851 recognition rests on the public message alone.
The children themselves deserve justice too. Neither found an easy path afterward. Maximin drifted from one attempt at a vocation to another, served for a time as a nurse with the Papal Zouaves in Rome, and died at 39 in Corps, having received the last sacraments. Mélanie tried religious life in several communities, in France, in England and in Italy, and spent most of her later years in Italy. Their human weaknesses do not cancel what they reported as children, and the bishop judged the event, not their later lives.
La Salette and the Book of Revelation
La Salette does not interpret the Book of Revelation, but its images echo it.
- A woman of light. The children saw the Lady inside a globe of fire, shining with light and crowned with roses. The great sign of Revelation 12:1 is “a woman clothed with the sun.”
- A mother in anguish. The woman of Revelation “wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth” (Revelation 12:2). At La Salette the Mother weeps for children who have forgotten her Son.
- The commandments. The dragon makes war on “those who keep God's commandments and bear witness to Jesus” (Revelation 12:17). The Lady's message is about keeping two of them, the Lord's Day and the Lord's Name.
- The arm of the Son. The child of Revelation 12:5 is “destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod.” The Lady speaks of holding back her Son's arm, the image of an intercessor standing between justice and her people.
- Tears wiped away. Revelation promises that “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17). The tears of La Salette are not the last word.
Read with careLa Salette is often presented through the long 1879 “secret,” with its dramatic predictions about Rome, the clergy and the end of the world. That text is not the approved message, and the Church discouraged its spread. The approved message is short and close to home: keep Sunday, honor the Name of Jesus, pray morning and evening, and return to God, who will make the earth fruitful again. It sets no dates. Private revelation never adds to the faith (CCC 67).
For reflection
What made her weep?
Not distant evils, but ordinary neglect: a skipped Mass, a careless oath, prayers forgotten. Is there one of these I could set right this week, as a way of drying her tears?
Sources
- Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette, “The Apparition”, with the English text of the message and the words of Bishop de Bruillard's pastoral letter
- Philibert de Bruillard, Bishop of Grenoble, doctrinal pastoral letter on the apparition of La Salette (dated September 19, 1851)
- St. John Paul II, Lettre à Mgr Louis Dufaux, évêque de Grenoble, for the 150th anniversary (May 6, 1996)
- Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, decree of December 21, 1915, AAS 7 (1915), 594; decree of May 10, 1923, AAS 15 (1923), 287–288
- Michel Corteville and René Laurentin, Découverte du secret de La Salette (Paris: Fayard, 2002)
- Catechism of the Catholic Church 67, 2142–2149, 2174–2188
Continue