S
Did Mary
appear on the
La Salette is a
mountain near
They saw a
bright light which opened to show a Lady sitting inside weeping. She wore white shoes with different colours
of roses on them and a gold apron. A
white cap with a crown and roses reposed upon her head. Her face was pale and she shone like a
bright light. The Catholic
encyclopaedia says that the sun was shining at the time.
The real Virgin
would not have had white skin for in the New Testament, Mary is a
Jewess. Christians claim that she is
the mother of God for Jesus her son was not only man but was God as well.
Melanie said
that the apparition said, “If my people do not submit, I shall be forced to
let go the hand of my Son. It is so
strong and heavy, that I can no longer withhold it. For how long a time do I suffer for
you! If I would not have my Son
abandon you, I am compelled to pray to Him without ceasing. As to you, you take no heed of it.”
She is saying
she cannot stop him as if she could stop him.
This is blasphemy. God is his
own boss.
And how could
the Virgin suffer when she is with God?
To see God is to be perfectly happy for it is possessing infinite
goodness and love. She will also see
the outcomes of sin and suffering out of which God brings good so how could
she be so sad?
The apparitions
plainly infer that the Virgin is the real god and better than God for he
cannot even fill her heart with joy.
The Virgin
complained about people breaking the Sabbath day. Next she said that they could do nothing
without using the holy name of Jesus in a rude way. “These are the two things which make the
hand of my Son so heavy”. She said
that the failure of the potatoes of the previous year was a warning but one
which was ignored. That was
silly. If God is so mysterious then
how can you tell if it is a warning or just a way to do some good? The Lady predicted a famine for the region
which actually did happen. The Lady
said that if the people converted “the rocks will change into loads of wheat,
and the potatoes will be self-sown on the lands.” So this Lady knows the non-existent future
so well that she is sure that God will be able to do such miracles! How ludicrous! The miracles are silly as well considering
how God likes to be fairly secretive.
They are really super-miracles.
Believers don’t take her literally here. They take her metaphorically. But should they? No- they only take her that way because the
rocks didn’t turn into wheat and angels didn’t come to sow the potatoes. If
an ordinary person said that I might take her metaphorically but if a being
from Heaven says it I would take it literally. Remember the rule, if it can be literal
then it must be taken literally.
The Lady told
the children to say at least an Our Father and Hail Mary well morning and
evening and more if they had the time.
The real Virgin would have told them they could pray anytime even
while washing themselves in the stream for prayer is a wilful desire for God.
Many say that
the Virgin’s prophecies were fulfilled and that it is difficult to deny
this. “There is no doubt that the
content of the La Salette messages was made known publicly before these
prophecies were fulfilled” (The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary,
page 139). But the prophecies were
understandable considering that the crops went bad the previous year. They could have been good guesses helped
along by good luck. But if the Virgin
promised miracle crops if the people repented then why didn’t this happen
those who did turn back to God? But
with so many apparitions making predictions and many of them being wrong this
is hardly impressive. It is only
natural that some apparitions will get it right. It only means their guesses came true.
The Virgin told
Melanie a secret and Melanie said later that she was permitted to tell it in
1858. Keeping something a secret like
that and then telling it seems silly.
There was no reason for it.
Plainly, Melanie concocted the secret.
The Church believes that the secret Melanie revealed was made up by
her. That is the Church’s excuse for
believing in the apparitions but not in the secret for the secret is
silly. We must remember that the
church didn’t want to look foolish by rescinding its decree that the apparitions
were real when Melanie started making outrageous claims about what the Vision
had said. To accept the apparition as
real is to break the law of God given in Deuteronomy 18 that if a prophet
claiming to be inspired by God gets it all right and then makes one blunder
that the prophet is to be rejected entirely as a fraud. The miracle of correct prophecy then must
be attributed to some other source but not God for God never inspires error
or makes mistakes. To accept Melanie’s
account of the apparition then is heretical and sinful. The lady she saw was not the Virgin
Mary. The real Virgin would choose the
right messenger.
The secret
says, “There is no one left worthy of offering a stainless sacrifice to the
Eternal God for the sake of the world”.
This is frankly impossible for some Catholics will always do penance.
The Devil will
be unloosed from Hell in 1864 to chip away at the faith bit by bit. He could do this from Hell so his getting
out is impossibly ridiculous. “People
will be transported from one place to another by these evil spirits”. This is the miracle of teleportation. This harks back to the Middle Ages when
people believed that miracles were all over the place.
The Virgin even
said that the dead will be brought back to life!
If the Devil
hates the Church then he wrote this prophecy in order to make people
suspicious of the Church and accuse it of apostasy so that it develops an
uncontrollable tendency to schism.
Catholics will say it has not but that is not the point for it should
still be doing that. You don’t say
that because a murder turned out to save lives in unexpected ways that the
murder was right.
Melanie
certainly invented her secret for she could not remember it all for she was
not bright and it was very long. If
she made that up it is most likely that she made up the vision too.
La Salette was
recognised by the Catholic Church because a spring appeared and there were
cures. But medicine makes mistakes
today and so it would have been worse in those days so the cures could have
been natural. The fulfilled prophecy
was not sufficient proof.
The pope
granted a plenary indulgence to all who came on pilgrimage to the site of the
apparition.
In the
interesting booklet, The Exaltation of the Virgin Mary, by Rev S.G.
Poyntz, M.A., B.D. we read, “Clergy of nearby dioceses stated that the vision
was an imposture by a lunatic nun named Constance Lamerliere, who had
purchased the alleged dress in which the Virgin appeared. The followers of La Salette argued that this
was simply the story of a jealous party who were annoyed because their own
shrines were doing bad business due to the decrease in pilgrims. This story persisted so much that the said
Constance Lamerliere took the matter to a Court of Justice. The Court decided the case against her and
threw out the appeal. This vision must
be pronounced a fake and a scandal” (page 25). So the civil court decided that the
apparition was indeed a hoax and that this woman had indeed pretended to be
the apparition. We should believe it
rather than the Church court which declared that Mary had appeared. There were more witnesses to the evidence
for fraud than witnesses to the vision.
And the Church court was prejudiced for there was no real evidence
that the visionaries saw Mary apart from a good guess as to her identity and
the light surrounding the Lady.
Fantasy and excitement can pollute the memory and add in exaggerated
elements later. Moreover, the lies and
fanaticism and the occasional insanity and hallucinations of Melanie are
against the Church judgement that the visions were authentic.
Mc Clure states
that the children called the vision, “The Lady”, rather than giving her any
kind of religious title” (The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary,
page 34). This proves that the
children had doubts about the Lady’s identity and had suspicions. Maximin said he believed it was Our Lady
but added that he never said it was Our Lady.
Melanie said
that when she first saw the light the apparition was inside and sitting down
in it and Maximin said, “Keep your stick; if it does anything I will give it
a good knock”. Obviously he was not
sure if it was a woman so Melanie told a little lie for they had no idea what
if anything was inside the light. The
vision occurred in the sunny afternoon so the light could have been a
reflection on the golden apron. Or
perhaps the Lady had not come in the light at all but they in their
bewilderment they thought she had.
Perhaps there was somebody shining the sun from a mirror unto the lady
to make her seem bright and the children said they found her hard to look at
for she dazzled them. That is why we
cannot believe this was the Virgin Mary.
In other apparitions, the vision is encased in light but nobody is
dazzled. The Catholic objection to the
apparition being Constance Lamerliere is that this lady was in her fifties
and heavy. But with pale makeup she would
have looked younger and she was wearing robes that could have made her look
slimmer. Light reflecting from bright
clothes will also make a person look younger. However The Sceptical Occultist indicates that the lady wasn’t very youthful
when Melanie said she was a mad mother who would kill her children. Maximin indicated the same thing when he
said the lady was beaten by her son.
These clues have been ignored by researchers as to the identity of the
apparition. Melanie must have been
terrified of the apparition which makes it hard to believe her account of
what the lady did and said. It is more
likely that she got Maximin to run with her when she and he saw it and later
they started embellishing what had happened.
After all, an apparition that might kill her children would kill
Maximin and Melanie as well.
The Lady wore a
lot of shiny stuff so that could be why she dazzled the children. The children could not look at her for very
long they said for that reason. If she
was that bright they would not have been able to look at her at all. If she was brighter at times, the
reflection of the sun could have been the reason. The children had been asleep before they
saw the light and tiredness could account for their imagining lights and/or
mistakenly mixing what is real with imagination (The Evidence for Visions
of the Virgin Mary, page 30).
Melanie had
problems understanding the vision which was talking in French. When she asked Maximin to help her
understand the vision the Lady realised she should have been talking in the
local dialect to make them understand and this was what she did (page 120, The
Sceptical Occultist). The real
Virgin would have known not to talk in French. The Lady could not even read minds so she
was not a supernatural being.
After the Lady
disappeared Maximin tried to grab the remaining brightness which shows how
easily fooled he would have been. The
way the Lady disappeared – the head vanishing first, then the abdomen and
then the feet suggest that she climbed up into something - a tree? With a light shining on her mistakes could
have been made by the witnesses.
Perhaps she just jumped behind a stone or something and the children
thought the light was her abdomen and then assumed that her feet were the
last to vanish.
The way the
lady disappeared is so comical that it is unworthy of the Virgin Mary to
vanish like that. It is grotesque for
the head to vanish first and then the middle and leaving only the feet left
to disappear!
Then Maximin
said, “Perhaps it is a great saint”.
After they had claimed to have listened to the Lady saying she was the
mother of Christ! They did not know
who she was at all! They were not even
sure if she was a saint! This surely
suggests that there was a lot of exaggeration in their original story though
they stuck to the public version of it and that Our Lady of La Salette was
none other than poor mad Sister Constance Lamerliere in fancy dress! Nobody denies that after the apparition the
children did embellish their story but it is the original story that the
Church believes.
The children came
down the hill and Melanie said she was sure the Lady was a mad woman who
would kill her children but she was less sure because she rose up into the
air. Maximin said he would have
thought that she was a woman beaten by her son and who was wandering about. This tells us that the woman was thought to
be mad and evil and had bruises and was older than Mary looked in her
apparitions. This shows that the
children lied about the holiness of the vision. Maximin only told the story when he got
back to his employer who wanted to know why he was late. Was the story made up as an excuse? Remember they were stupid children. The children were emotionally isolated
(page 121, The Sceptical Occultist) and they might have convinced
themselves that they saw someone who cared about them. Maximin’s employer questioned him severely
which would have proven to the children that they needed to stick to the same
story. The Sceptical Occultist
says that the vision may be supernatural because it fits patterns from
previous apparitions that the children never knew about. But the clothes of the Virgin were
completely different from her usual fashion.
She goes walking with the visionaries instead of standing in one place
to be admired. She tells the children
things they must have already known.
The spring that appeared has nothing to do with the springs tradition
for it was already there (page 120, The Sceptical Occultist). The request for prayers and the making of
threats would have been thought of anyway without any knowledge of previous
apparitions. And so we must disagree
with The Sceptical Occultist.
Psychologists
have said that Maximin hallucinated the vision to come to terms with his
horrible and lonely past that triggered the same in Melanie whose mind saw what
Maximin was describing to her (page 120-121, The Sceptical Occultist). It is possible that Melanie did not see
what he saw but saw something in her mind and later Maximin told her of his
experience and she subconsciously manipulated her imagination and memory so
that she thought she had experienced exactly what he experienced. It was false memory and there is no
evidence that it was not. It is
certain that with eccentric Melanie, false memory would have been the least
of her mental afflictions.
It was unfair
for the Virgin to expect two children who had suffered enough to suffer the
sneers and scorn of the neighbours by telling them they saw a Lady from
Heaven with a frightening message. It
would have been different if it could have been discreetly investigated and
verified first. The Devil, if he
exists, would be a plausible explanation.
The Lady never said that she should be listened to not because of the
threats but because she was right. The
Lady advocated false spirituality based on fear and selfishness.
Beauraing and
Other Apparitions, Fr Herbert Thurston, Burns, Oates & Washbourne,
Biblical
Exegesis and Church Doctrine, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press,
Catholic
Prophecy, The Coming Chastisement Yves Dupont, TAN,
Introduction to
the Devout Life, St Francis de Sales, Burns Oates and Washbourne Limited,
Looking for a
Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books,
Mother of
Nations, Joan Ashton, Veritas,
New Catholic
Encyclopedia, The Catholic University of America and the McGraw-Hill Book
Company, Inc., Washington, District of Columbia, 1967
The Book of
Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline,
The Cult of the
Virgin Mary, Michael P Carroll,
The Evidence
for Visions of the Virgin Mary, Kevin McClure Aquarian Press, Wellingborough,
Northamptonshire, 1985
The Exaltation
of the Virgin Mary, by Rev S.G. Poyntz, M.A., B.D., Association for Promoting
Christian Knowledge, Dublin, 1955
The Physical
Phenomena of Mysticism, Fr Herbert Thurston, Burns, Oates & Washbourne,
The Sceptical
Occultist, Terry White, Century,
The
Supernatural A-Z, James Randi, Headline Books,
The Thunder of
Justice, Ted and Maureen Flynn, MAXCOL,