I ran across this article on Spirit Daily about Our Lady’s apparition to two young French shepherd children in La Salette, France in 1846 (today, September 19, is the 180th anniversary of it.) 

In the remote Alpine village of La Salette, France, two shepherd children, Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, encountered a weeping woman bathed in light, her head in her hands. They had been shepherding the cows inntheir charge during the day; however, Melanie had fallen asleep during the afternoon, and Maximin had wandered off; the cows were lost. They quickly searched and found them deeper in the valley. This is where they discovered the beautiful woman crying.

Her message combined maternal tenderness with prophetic urgency, addressing both the decline in the practice of the faith by the local villagers and material issues. The Lady revealed her profound sorrow over humanity’s sinfulness, particularly the violation of Sundays with commercial activity and the neglect of Mass; and the profanation of her Son’s name through casual blasphemy. The message prophesied agricultural failure as a consequence of sin and linked spiritual causes to the material suffering.

According to “Our Lady of La Salette: History, Message & Apparition,” the Message of La Salette involves:

• A call to conversion and penance for personal and societal sins
• Warning about divine punishment if humanity refused to repent
• Emphasis on proper Sunday observance and reverence for God’s name
• Promise of abundance if people returned to faithful practice
• Prediction of crop failures and famine as consequences of sin

Taking these points and applying them today involves:

• Renewed Sunday observance – Protecting the Lord’s Day from secular encroachment
• Reverence in speech – Avoiding casual profanity and blasphemy
• Regular sacramental confession – Embracing reconciliation as ongoing conversion
• Authentic penance – Accepting sacrifice as expression of love and reparation
• Active evangelization – Sharing faith urgently with those drifting from God

All of these can be applied to your Sober Catholic Way of recovery.

A call to conversion and penance for personal and societal sins;  this is basic to any recovery program, but is adds a distinctly Catholic dimension to it in the reparative work for other people’s sins. Most (if not all) recovery programs concern themselves with helping the alcoholic or addict with remoiving their own defects of character and making amends to others. None concern themselves with the person in recovery making amends for other people.

Warning about divine punishment if humanity refused to repent/Prediction of crop failures and famine as consequences of sin. You are a part of Humanity; your sins contribute to the whole. Your repentance and penance for yours (and others) mitigates this divine punishment. Apparently people hadn’t heeded the Message of La Salette and the Blessed Virgin repeated this at Fatima when she said “War is punishment for sin.” Later, Jesus told St. Faustina, His Apostle of Divine Mercy, that “Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy.” (Diary, 300)

Emphasis on proper Sunday observance and reverence for God’s name/Promise of abundance if people returned to faithful practice. Catholics are obligated to attend Mass on Sunday; missing it is a mortal sin (except when you cannot attend due to extenuating circumstances like illness, weather and other unsurmountable issues.)  “Promises of abundance” should be taken in its proper context. For our purposes of recovery, it could mean material abundance, it could also mean the abundance of graces for those willingy cooperating with God’s Will.

Reverence in speech – Avoiding casual profanity and blasphemy Violating any one of the Ten Commandments is a mortal sin; apart from that, even causal profanity implies a lack of self-control and self-discipline. (I need to work on this; while I do not take the Name of the Lord in vain, I cuss a lot.)

Regular sacramental confession – Embracing reconciliation as ongoing conversion/Authentic penance – Accepting sacrifice as expression of love and reparation It goes without much saying that this is a core part of any Catholic-based recovery program.

Active evangelization – Sharing faith urgently with those drifting from God Start a recovery blog or podcast about your own Catholic-based recovery! Or, just talk about Jesus as best you can with other; or, live the Gospel (“preaching without words.) 

The article also connected the La Salette apparition to Our Lady of Sorrows, whose feast day we just celebrated this past Tuesday (September 15th.)

This sorrowful aspect connects Our Lady of La Salette to the prophecy of Simeon, who told Mary that a sword would pierce her heart. At La Salette, that sword pierces anew as she witnesses her children rejecting her Son through negligence, blasphemy, and hardened hearts. Her weeping calls Catholics to recognize sin’s gravity and embrace the reconciliation Christ offers.

That “embrace the reconciliation Christ offers” recalls Divine Mercy and how important that is to peace: both peace in our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls; and peace in the world.

Other resources on the Apparition:

The National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette

Our Lady of La Salette at Catholic Tradition

Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette

Our Lady of La Salette at Roman-Catholic-Saints

Our Lady of La Salette at Simply Catholic

La Salette: Sorting Fact From Fiction

“Our Lady of La Salette “ is one of Our Lady’s apparitions that I’ve not paid too much attention to since the message of it has been corrupted by the repeated false claims that the statements and prophecies of one of the seers (Melanie Calvat) were approved and are a part of the ‘message,’ despite her making them decades after the apparition. (See the last link I added on “Sorting Fact from Fiction.”) Because Calvat is a seer of an approved apparition, many things she has said decades later have been mislabelled as being a part of the approved apparition. This is incorrect. Approval of an apparition does not extend to things the seers have said or done after the apparition is over.  

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