In 1846, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared before two children, Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, in the mountains above the small French village of La Salette-Fallavaux. Mary warned the villagers, and the whole world, of a coming chastisement through famine, should they not turn their hearts towards Christ and abandon certain sins, namely the profanation of God’s name and laboring in disobedience to the Sunday rest. Tragically, the warnings were not heeded and, months later, famine struck the European continent, with the potato crop failing and the decade becoming known as the ‘hungry forties’. Mary did not appear, however, to punish the European people out of sadism or vengeance. Instead, she was calling them to reconcile their minds and actions with the will of God, so they might love more fully. Very likely, Mary recognized that the abolition of the day of rest was only a prelude to the countless profit-motivated abuses to come as market economies swept the world at the same time that European governments underwent mass-secularization. Our Lady knew that she had to get people’s attention in a serious, dramatic way if her calls for reconciliation between people and our Creator were to be heeded.
One remarkable facet of the miracle at La Salette, often overlooked in all the discussions about chastisement and prophecy, is Our Lady’s choice of messengers. Mélanie and Maximin were not particularly religious children. Being shepherds in impoverished families, in a remote village of no particular note before the apparition, they were already at a disadvantage with little access to formal religious education. Further, their personalities did not naturally draw them to piety until they met the weeping Mother of Christ in the mountains. When Mary asked the children if they said their prayers well, they responded that they did not. Our Lady, always seeking ways to bring people closer to God, encouraged them to begin forming their prayer lives by saying at least one Our Father and one Hail Mary a day. Even after the apparition, when both shepherds tried their best to spread the good news of Mary’s message to the rest of the Church, successfully resulting in the Vatican’s recognition of the apparition and the formation of a missionary order to take the La Salette story across the world, Mélanie and Maximin did not live what would we would consider particularly successful lives. Mélanie took the vows and entered the convent, but conflicts with her superiors and the stress of fame led to her frequently moving between the different nunneries of Europe, a legacy not aided by the fact that some of her writings were banned by the Roman Inquisition. Maximin considered the seminary but eventually left, joining the Zouaves, the foreign volunteer battalion of the Papacy, to defend the Church from the armies of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and King Victor Emmanuel II, a war which the Holy Father would lose. After this, Maximin wandered across Europe without accomplishing much of note, impoverished and reliant on the charity of others for moments of stability. While both visionaries were certainly fine, decent people from a moral perspective, neither saw success in their careers or exceptional sanctity.
A few years ago, just after the coronavirus pandemic, I was talking to a friend of mine at an event for our high school marching band, as I often did, and the conversation turned to religion, as it often did. Half-jokingly, but curiously, I asked my friend if she thought she’d “make it when the angels blew the trumpet.” She just looked at me with a forlorn expression, saying no, that she didn’t “have what it takes.” This despair surprised me as she was, by all apparent metrics, a person of solid moral character. I never got the chance to ask her why she felt this way, but since then, I’ve had similar conversations with many people who feel a disconnect between themselves and the perceived expectations of “the Christian God,” or a feeling that they simply aren’t the type of person who can “make it” at the eschaton. I’ve watched this feeling lead people to look elsewhere for transcendence, be it in politics, in obscure sociological theories, in other religious traditions, or, increasingly, in artificial intelligence.
Perhaps this phenomenon can be traced to the cultural imagery that surrounds the idea of “being religious” in a Christian sense. You don’t have to look far in popular media to see the image of a “good Christian kid” we are presented with as children. Pastel colors or a conformation dress, a sheltered innocence, hands clasped together while smiling up at the almighty. This aesthetic continues into the media of adulthood, and when Christianity is portrayed positively, by Christians and non-Christians alike, it is the religion of respectable people with respectable aesthetics and opinions going to a weekly bible study or a Sunday service. Popular sentiment, then, makes Christianity into a religion for people who have it figured out, and conversely, oftentimes implies that God isn’t around for people who are confused, struggling, or existing outside of the overton window of popular culture, but that He might show up if those traits go away. The people I watch pass over the message of Christ in favor of imitation-transcendence are almost always the people who don’t have it all together. They are people suffering from mental illness or psychological disorders, people who feel alienated from economic or social structures that seem to have no place for them, and people whose interests are niche and thus discordant with what the pseudo-Christian impulse to equate comfort levels with morality might call “good.” They look at the people in the pews and get the feeling, perhaps not always without just cause, that those people are not interested in dealing with them. The trouble starts when one falls into the trap of assuming that all this cultural baggage existing around the Church means that God, too, doesn’t want to deal with those people, that His companionship is for the people who are “good at church” in a cultural or social sense and not for those who are at other places in their lives.
La Salette reminds us that this is not the whole story. On the holy mountain, Mary appeared, talked to, and gave a special vocation to children who were quite far from the picturesque ideal of the Catholic child. Mélanie and Maximin never reached that ideal at any point in their lives, but still played a beautiful role in the spreading of the Gospel to all people. La Salette reminds us that there is a God who, along with the angels and the saints, is ready to walk with those that are, to borrow a euphemism I heard frequently growing up, “still figuring themselves out.” Our Lady, Michael the Archangel, and the rest of the saints befriend and accompany people who are lost. Jesus, the King of the Universe, does not remain on His throne doling out rewards for people who are “doing it right” and calling the alienated “difficult.” He gets down in the trenches with those whose lives many find distasteful, and He helps them. Jesus reaches out to those like Mélanie and Maximin, who don’t pray well, to those like Saint Peter and Saint Thomas, who deny and doubt, and those like Saint Joan of Arc and Saint Francis of Assisi, whose vocations took them outside of the cultural norm. During His earthly ministry, one of Jesus’ closest confidants and friends was Saint Mary Magdalene, a woman who, until He befriended her, was involved with the demonic.
Those who sit within the overton window of modern Christian culture would do well to remember that the saints are interceding for those outside it and talk about the life of faith accordingly. Those suffering, wandering, and alienated, conversely, should not let aesthetic stereotypes stop them from turning to Jesus and Mary, and becoming their friend. It is only when we recognize that the grace of God is active in the world offering salvation to all people, as Saint Paul writes to Saint Titus, that we can talk about the Divine will in a way that is reflective of the various states people find themselves in while encountering God.
