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Our Lady of La Salette- part 1

Writer's picture: AhmedAhmed

When I review the various statistics for the website the most popular items are always of the same type. It's pretty much always Our Lady of Pontmain, Our Lady of La Salette and St Therese of Lisieux. It's clear that these have a special fascination for our customers. This is backed up by the many email requests I get to look for these items in particular. Also, overwhelmingly, these requests are from the United States. We have shipped versions of Our Lady of Pontmain all the way to Hawaii!






Well, that's obvious you might say- Americans have more money, more faith and less antiques. Possibly. In fact, the USA is only around half my overall sales and though it may, on average, be more religious than modern Europe why would Americans be interested in these depictions in particular? There aren't that many Marian apparitions in the modern era but frankly, it's not like there's a shortage of miracles in historical Europe.


The two depictions of Mary are quite special of course. Our Lady of Pontmain is usually wearing a robe of blue with stars and La Salette is often with her head bowed and often with tears. Here's one I sold recently:





St Therese was famous worldwide not long after her death, thanks to the then new phenomena of mass literacy and global publishing. The Miracle at Pontmain has particular resonance in times of war and suffering. Even so, the miracles at Pontmain and La Salette are relatively localised events.





To understand the popularity of these we need to look at the enormous French diaspora in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. Much like the rest of Europe thousands upon thousands left France, escaping poverty and disease to find work and a degree of liberty- emigration peaked after the fall of Napoleon and the various crises of 1848.  For many French emigrants that meant the new American factories for textiles, steel and later motor vehicles (William Durant who founded GM was of French descent, and of course Detroit is a French city). 



Source: US Library of Congress


It's in Attelboro Massachusetts where we can see the enormous impact of La Salette in the USA  most clearly in  the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette. This was founded in 1953 by missionaries of La Salette. One of their early successes was a Nativity which has since also expanded to become an annual Christmas Festival of Light, attracting up to 250,000 visitors.







The Missionaries can be traced back to the first Mission of La Salette which arrived in Hartford Connecticut in 1892, where there was an established French speaking community. The missionaries at this stage were largely following a Francophone diaspora across North America.

Although the French influence in Louisiana and Quebec are well known, French emigrants went anywhere there was work. This included following the Californian Gold Rush, the vast new farmlands of middle America and Canada and then, in the late 19th Century, flocking towards the rapidly industrializing states of the US North East.




The French community in Connecticut were both new arrivals as well as 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from Francophone Canada. Mass was still in French and in fact the last bastions of French speaking USA were in Maine and Massachusetts; there were over 250 French language newspapers before WW2 in New England alone! In Hartford the mission founded a large Seminary which still exists and has expanded considerably over the years.


The International Mission of La Salette still exists and works worldwide across Africa, Asia, the Americas and has even founded a university in the Philippines. Where did this start? We can follow this thread backward to the original Mission of La Salette, founded in 1852 not long after the reported apparition of Mary to two shepherd children on September 19, 1846 in the small French hamlet of La Salette.  But what was this apparition and why was it so controversial? And how did this story encompass Napoleon III, the small town of Darlington in England and a secret prophecy hidden in the Vatican archives?


For that, dear reader, you'll have to wait for Part 2.    

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