The Modern Mary- According to Local Circumstance

Something that I thought about that didn't come up in class was that the apparition of La Salette initially spoke to Melanie and Maximin in French. This is confusing because Melanie's French was imperfect, necessitating the apparition to switch over to their local dialect. If this really was the Virgin Mary, why would she have started speaking in a language that the children did not understand? For that matter, what she had to say to Melanie and Maximin was itself puzzling. The woman warned them of the town's godlessness and impending famine, but they were only children—and not especially devout children, at that. Melanie was described as "extremely lazy, disobedient, and sullen"; she was illiterate and not very knowledgeable of prayer. Maximin, in a similar vein, was "a reckless child, an innocent without malice but also without foresight." He was also illiterate and had only been taught a few prayers "with a great deal of difficulty." If the Virgin Mary had really appeared, why did she appear with such a portentous message to two children who weren't exactly model Catholics?

The nature of the message's delivery was also unlike previous appearances of Mary that we have seen this quarter. She said:

"If you have wheat, it is not good to sow it. All that you will sow, the beasts will eat, and that which remains the beasts will not dare to eat... A great famine will come. Before the famine comes, the children under seven years of age will be seized by trembling and they will die in the hands of those who hold them..."

This sounds to me nothing like the benevolent, radiant maternal figure of previous visions and encounters. Rather, it reminds me of the more wrathful Old Testament God. Why was there this sudden and dramatic shift in the tone of the apparition—now somewhat fallible, having initially tried communicating in a language that the children did not understand? The message in the event seemed to have been ignored by the population; there was no large scale attempt by the clergy to use it to rally religious fervor, and it seems that there was little panic caused by the prediction of hardship. Rather, one of the features of the apparition that contributed most to its popularity was the miraculous healing spring.

The message delivered by the apparition at Lourdes made me think along similar lines. Among some of Mary's most extolled virtues were her humility in our earlier readings; although the vision that appeared to Bernadette was not as wrathful as the one that spoke to Melanie and Maximin, it seemed to lack that humility. It reportedly had said: "I am the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. I want a chapel built on this very spot." Demanding the construction of a chapel doesn't strike me as particularly humble. What changed, then, in the image of Mary and the nature of her popular cult? As the world entered the age of modernity, it seemed that not only did visions of the Virgin Mary begin appearing to less educated people and become more accessible to people without a strict religious background and education, but her messages also began to shift, losing some of their old maternal quality.

Some of the changes in her appearances' receptions may have been due to simple practicality. Unlike previous writers who we have read, the children at La Salette, Lourdes and Fatima came from poor and troubled backgrounds. They (and those close to them) had little time, much less the religious education and upbringing in some instances, to properly receive and digest the visions as Maria de Agreda had done, and in any case had other things to worry about. For instance, one of the reasons that Lucia's visions created a rift between her and her mother was that one of the effects of the visions was to hurt them economically. "Lucia's sisters... found themselves, after the onset of the apparition, spending a large amount of time dealing with the people who wanted to speak with Lucia and watching the sheep in her place so that she could spend time with these people herself... These were matters of considerable importance, at a time of general economic distress, for a family who had only limited resources to start with..."

This unfortunate practicality stemming from the children's backgrounds was not the only new aspect of Marian devotion in the "modern" world. As Marian and Christian devotion became more "decentralized" and prominent in local, small towns and villages, the effects of their smallness became more evident. Melanie and Maximin were not fluent in French; there has also been some discussion over the vision at Lourdes and how it fit into local Pyrenean religion. "Although [Bernadette's] apparition bore little resemblance to orthodox Marian imagery, its similarities with mythical creatures of Pyrenean folklore were much more marked... Bernadette chose the term used to describe fairies, the little women of the forest." What Bernadette saw was a little girl—a child like herself, not a maternal figure at all. Nonetheless, the events at Lourdes were eventually accepted by the Catholic Church, Bernadette was later canonized as a saint and the shrine requested by the apparition was built.

Modernity, then—much had changed over the course of the centuries. Visible instances Marian devotion had spread to a much wider social strata, and the nature of the appearances had changed to reflect differences between locales and the unique socioeconomic circumstances of any particular visionary. That these apparitions were accepted by the authorities indicates that these changes were recognized by the Catholic Church, as well.

-EC