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22. The Grieving Madonna
OUR
LADY OF FATIMA was doing nothing new when she pleaded with the human race,
through her seers, to give up sinning and have recourse to prayer and
self-denial. As its spiritual mother who would save it from the devil,
she had time and again and in place after place offered it the identical
recipe for victory over his evil designs. Call her by whatever title, Our
Lady of the Miraculous Medal, Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of this or
that, she remains the loving mother whose solicitude has tried to persuade
her children on earth to avoid the modern estrangement from her divine Son
and to turn to him and stay devoted to him so as to keep out of hell and
get into heaven.
No other motive in this Age of Mary can explain
her various apparitions and her many miracles to ensure their
credibility. Whether she appears to one or two, or to a group of several
visionaries, it is always to the same purpose. Her message does not
essentially change. Once she identified herself as the Immaculate
Conception, at another time as the Immaculate Heart, at still another the
Queen of the Rosary; but such incidentals only set off her persistent
advice how to go about saving the soul in an irreligious era. Our Lady,
appearing no matter where and no matter when in the past century and a
half, has enunciated the means to that end. She wants none of her
children on earth to fall into the eternal possession of Satan. Not if
she can help it!
The two manifestations of so loving an
advocate, which in the incidentals are the most closely allied, occurred
seventy years and eight months apart. The former nevertheless has a
strong bearing on the latter, so that to come by a deeper understanding of
Fatima one should know about La Salette. The distance between one and the
other has to do with time, not meaning. They belong together. At both
places Mary showed herself the Sorrowful Mother.
It was no accident that, when Lucia dos Santos
joined the Dorothean nuns, she assumed the name of Maria das Dores (Mary
of the Sorrows). Asked what she thought of the current pictures and
statues of Our Lady of Fatima, she said the portrayals made their blessed
subject "too gay." Her criticism, while allowing for the inability of art
to reproduce a perfect likeness, did not flinch. Sister Dores insisted
that the beautiful Lady she saw at the Cova always looked sad; gracious
and loving and unspeakably lovable, yet sad; her very smile could not hide
the sorrow it adorned. At La Salette, her sorrow still more in evidence,
the same mother of a grievously offended God wept bitterly.
Two young cowherds saw her, noticing how bright
as silver were the tears. Not acquainted with each other until only two
days before. Melanie Mathieu and Maximin Giraud on the morning of
September 19, 1846, drove their separate herds to a summit among the
French Alps. Significantly, it was the feast of the Sorrowful Mother.
But this meant nothing to the fourteen-year-old girl and the
eleven-year-old boy, who knew little of their faith and even less about
the liturgy. The faint sound of the angelus from the hamlet of La Salette
down below reminded them to do nothing more than eat their noontime lunch
of bread and cheese. They had received no formal instructions, whether
religious or profane. Neither had gone to school. They were neglected
children—yet would not long remain so. Within hours they would be granted
an unsolicited audience with the greatest and more important person now or
ever to be in existence—outside the adorable Trinity of Father, Son and
Holy Spirit.
Melanie, while her cows were grazing under the
mid-afternoon sun, wandered over the plateau toward a ravine to pick up
the knapsacks which she and the boy had left there after lunch. It was
her signal to him that they must soon be getting their cattle together and
starting them down the mountain to the stables. She miscalculated. There
would be quite a delay. Arriving at the ravine, taking a look into it,
the girl forgot all about the herds. She called out in a burst of
excitement: "Hurry over here, Maximin. Quick!"
He did. And standing with her, side by side,
he shared her astonishment. Down in the ravine, a globe of some ethereal
but luminous material was fading away and in the process revealed the much
brighter figure of a woman, seated on a small heap of rocks, her elbows
resting on her knees, her head bent forward, her hands covering her face.
She was crying. The tears trickled through her fingers.
It fascinated the seers. But why should the
lady of such radiance, with a lustrous crown on her head, and a wreath of
shimmering roses edging the lower rim of that crown, be weeping at all?
Presently she stood up, showing her magnetically beautiful face as well as
a golden crucifix dangling from a golden chain about her neck. The
crucifix shone bright on her clothing, the corpus having a dazzling
brilliance; whereas the hammer to the left and the pliers to the right,
which both hung from the crosspiece, lacked all luster. But why a
representation of these particular tools? How did they relate? Even the
uneducated waifs of the parish knew that. Why, of course, a hammer had
driven the nails through the hands and feet of the crucified Savior and
after his death pincers were used to pull them out.
"Come near, my children," they were invited.
"I have an important message for you."
They walked down into the ravine, irresistibly
drawn by the kindliest voice they had ever heard. Neither Melanie, hired
out to work for a pittance among strangers, nor Maximin whose stepmother
detested him, knew the luxury of a material care. They were experiencing
it now.
Having approached the tearful queen until they
could have reached out and touched her, they stood motionless. Her face
held a sorrow that awed them. Her weeping accentuated the words spoken to
the children in their language: "If my people will not obey, I shall be
forced to let go the hand of my Son. I cannot withhold it much longer.
To restrain my Son from abandoning you, I must pray to him constantly."
If this is to be interpreted as a plea to
France in particular, it could apply no less surely to the world in
general. For there followed an admission from the Mother of Sorrows,
which recalls her role on Mount Calvary on behalf of the human race:
"However much you may pray, however well you repent and do penance, you
will never be able to make up for all the sufferings I have endured for
you."
Let it be said to their credit that the
parishioners of La Salette and many of the negligent elsewhere did pray
better, once they knew of the heavenly rebuke, and did start going to Mass
in larger numbers again and observing the Lord's day and refraining from a
profane use of the Holy Name. Their efforts of good will cannot but have
lessened the wrath of God upon a sinful generation: yet the number of
penitents did not reach the necessary quota. France had been amply
forewarned. The grain will crumble into dust, the visionaries had quoted
the grieving Madonna as saying, and the potatoes will go on decaying in
the ground, and the grapes will rot on the vines, and the usual supply of
walnuts will be worm-eaten.
None of which had to happen, as in truth it
did. The people could have prevented the famine. If they would only obey
her admonition to repent their sins. Our Lady of La Salle had stipulated,
"the very rocks will turn into wheat and the potatoes will be found to
have sown themselves." Not enough of the population did. And the fear
that not enough would, had grieved the mother of mankind to tears. They
were the tears of a mother whose all-holy and infinitely lovable Son her
other children were crucifying anew to bring on themselves his divine
vengeance.
Our Lady of La Salette in weeping over her dire
prophecy was following the precedent set by the Son of God. Jesus, having
from her a human heart, naturally wept over his beloved Jerusalem while
foretelling its destruction (Lk. 19:41-44). He had just been to Bethany,
the village of Mary and Martha, and the road from there to nearby
Jerusalem climbs the Mount of Olives to a ridge from which one could look
across the Kidron Valley to the opposite ridge upon which the city stood.
Although Jerusalem rises 2,500 feet above sea level, the Mount of Olives
rises almost another time as high; so that Jesus, reaching the summit, had
a complete view of the city. He stopped to fix his gaze upon it.
It touched his heart. There before him on the
opposite mount lay the city of his hopes, dear to him with memories of the
prophets, the spires of the Temple gleaming in the sunlight, the streets,
the houses, the encircling wall, all speaking to him of the past of the
dealings between his heavenly Father and the Chosen People. How beautiful
it was! Yet the eyes that saw the beauty of it all filled with tears.
They foresaw the city in ruins.
Profane history is satisfied to say that an
army demolished it. Scripture says more. Its greatest of spokesmen,
being the Son of God, saw through the externals to the cause. His words
suggest, not weakly, but with the declarative force of a shout, that Titus
with his avenging army was serving the designs of an outraged God without
knowing he was.
St. Matthew supplies the setting for these
words, which could be the saddest on record. Jesus had spent the day in
the Temple, uneasily. The scribes and Pharisees would give him no peace,
though he had a higher right to be there in his Father's House than they.
True to form, they tried to catch him up in his answers to their
persistent and insidious questions. In a burst of indignation, the more
startling because of his characteristic gentleness, he hurled at them a
tirade of denunciations, seven of which began with the same curse of doom:
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"
Having denounced them for what they were, Jesus
left the Temple, broken of heart, never more to return. It was then, as
he stood momentarily looking out over the city from the lofty portico,
that the rejected Messiah spoke the words: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often
would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood
under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken and
desolate" (Mt. 23).
So in truth it was. The Temple presented a
mere shell of magnificence. The scribes and Pharisees had hollowed it of
its true meaning, had stripped it of its real glory. Jesus could not do
else than mourn. It was no longer his Father's House. It would soon lie
in ruins.
Within the week he was dead on the cross. And
his mother, who had watched him bleed to death, agonized with him.
Participating in his anguish then, she has ever since felt in her heart
his solicitude for wayward souls. His apostles had seen him weep on Mount
Olivet; her witnesses at La Salette saw what a profusion of tears she
herself shed. Her pity for France coincided with his compassion for
Jerusalem. She did not wear the pendant of a hammer on her elegant robe
for an ornament. It served a different purpose. It represented the real
thing. It was meant to remind her Alpine seers, and her trusting clients
everywhere, that the iron hammer which had nailed her Son to the cross had
come down in blow after blow on her maternal heart as well.
She had her Son's reason for shedding tears.
Her beloved France, like other countries, was giving up its faith in
Christ. The churches, which used to be filled on Sunday, no longer were.
"Only a few older women attend Mass all summer long," she complained to
her seers, while the men spend the Lord's day working and "cart drivers
cannot swear without brining in my Son's name." Remembering what France
had been, and what France now was, she wept.
Our Lady of La Salette did not need Robert de
Torigui, Abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel, to inform her that in the year 1144
men and women alike from the little town of Chartres volunteered to have
themselves harnessed to wagons loaded with stone and wood and other
material, and then for the love of God sang out their hymns to heaven as
they hauled the heavy wagons to the site of their rising cathedral. Our
Lady of La Salette did not need the chronicler to acquaint her with the
fact that throughout France "men and women were dragging loads even over
the mud of marshes" and that "everywhere people were doing penance,
everywhere they were forgiving their enemies." Our Lady of La Salette did
not have to be reminded by Henry Adams that, in one century alone, France
"built eighty cathedrals and five hundred churches of the size of
cathedrals, which to rebuilt in the year 1840 would have cost a thousand
million dollars." Our Lady of Chartres, of Paris, of La Salette did not
depend for her information on the historians. She inspired the
achievements they merely recorded. Her influence dominated. Even the
queens of France openly acknowledged her their greater Queen.
What France was, what France became,
alternately rejoiced her heart and saddened it. The completed Notre
Dame de Chartres stood in its little town the pride of the
architectural world. The townspeople had spared nothing of their
resources and of their genius to give Christ their primary King a
residence among them, worthy of his hidden Eucharistic Grandeur, and the
dearer to him for being named after his mother. It was an edifice of such
dimensions as to accommodate 10,000 kneeling worshippers and, if its
standing room were used, an extra 5,000. Not the kind of women to forget
so heroic a devotion to her Son and herself, which then prevailed
throughout the nation, Our Lady of Chartres and of France could not but
grieve over the nation's later drift from God.
The alienation reached an extremity of malice
when in 1793 the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris was satanically
violated. A lewd actress was carried in triumph to the altar and thereon
crowned "the goddess of reason" and given the adoration of bended knee.
The revolutionists had set her throne where they wanted no chalice ever
again to stand. They had disowned Our Lady of Paris by their act of
blasphemy toward her Son in her cathedral.
The Revolution was taking Christ from the
nation that had for centuries shown its reverential love for him by
honoring to a superlative degree his mother. She acted. She would save
France if she could—that is, if it let her. She appeared to Catherine
Labouré in Paris to warn the country of impending disasters unless it
repented of its current follies. Six years later she did not appear but
did speak in a clearly audible voice to the most forlorn pastor in the
city of Paris, whose historic shrine of Our Lady of Victories drew no more
crowds and very few worshippers at all. It had been desecrated, pillaged,
and then restored to use. But it remained desolate until its heavenly
patroness intervened. She instructed Father Charles du Friche des
Gennettes how to win back the crowds. He was to establish the
Confraternity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the Conversion of
Sinners, which he did, and which Pope Gregory XVI approved. The crowds
returned.
Incidentally, it was in this rehabilitated
church that the girl who would become St. Theresa of the Child Jesus knelt
in ecstasy. She had traveled to Paris with her father to take in the
sights. Once in the church, she wanted to see no further sights. "I was
filled with peace and joy," she wrote of the experience. "It was there
that my Mother, the Virgin Mary, told me distinctly that she had cured
me." Theresa was but one of many. The Parisian shrine has its walls
covered with grateful acknowledgments or tokens of cures.
Our Lady had not done with Paris. She appeared
to another novice in the same convent where but ten years before she had
shown herself to Catherine Labouré. She held in her hands a heart,
representing her own, and from the top emitting flames of light. Several
times did the novice enjoy the vision in that favored little chapel on the
rue du Bac. Then, after Sister Justine Bisqueyburu had been sent
from the novitiate to a teaching assignment at Blangy, the now professed
Daughter of Charity who had regretted leaving the hallowed place of her
ecstasies soon had no cause to regret.
At chapel in her new convent, meditating on the
joys of the day, the feast of the Virgin Mary's birthday, September 8,
1840, she looked up at a burst of brilliance to see again the same
all-beautiful figure of her previous apparitions. This time the Blessed
Mother held the heart in her right hand and in her left a one-piece
scapular of green cloth dangling from a double string, also of green,
which could be worn around the neck and over the shoulders, as its many
duplicates would be. The badge depicted the same Blessed Mother exactly
as seen in the former apparitions, with heart in both hands. The reverse
side pictured the heart by itself, pierced through by a sword, surmounted
by a cross above its flames of ardor. An inscription, written around the
design and belonging to it, stood out in sharp French lettering to the
visionary. In English it would read: "Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for
us now and at the hour of our death."
The design, like that on the miraculous medal,
denotes the inseparability of the Sorrowful Mother from the Passion. It
honors her as coredemptrix. As for the invocation which encircles
the design, and which appeals to the intercessory power of Mary when the
soul at death needs it most, it holds an implied wealth of meaning. In
addressing her immaculate heart instead of her august person, it would
have us understand that in her distribution of God's graces to her
children on earth she is all heart. The idea caught on. The green
scapular became quite popular in France. Nor did its vogue remain within
national bounds. It spread.
And that was what the mother of mankind wanted
it to do. For throughout the phase of her French apparitions from 1830 to
1876 she was thinking of her children at large as well as those of one
nation. But since the high-spirited nation of the Revolution was taking
the lead in the campaign to paganize society and plan the future without
God, she personally intervened no less than fifty times, in Paris, at
Blangy, at La Salette, at Lourdes, at Pontmain, and finally at Pellevoisin.
The Pellevoisin apparitions are too little known, although Pope Leo XIII
sanctioned them and cited the miracles in support of them and in general
sang the praises of Our Mother All Merciful of Pellevoisin. If Bernadette
Soubirous was favored with a record number of eighteen or nineteen visions
in 1858, Estelle Faguette enjoyed a near equivalent of fifteen in 1876.
The burden of the message, which the servant
girl in a mansion received from Our Lady, remained the same plea for
prayer and repentance which her other French visionaries had heard. "I
have come to promote the conversion of sinners," she explained on one of
her visits. Another time she urged a deeper devotion to the Sacred Heart
of Jesus as a means to so necessary an end. She showed her grief, short
of tears, again and again, over the outrages committed against the
infinitely lovable God. What gained her most, she confided to her
listening client of thirty-three, was the gross indifference to the
Blessed Sacrament.
Our Lady of Pellevoisin repeated her complaint
of La Salette, yet now after her long series of apparitions with all the
greater poignancy: "And France, what have I not done for her? How many
pleadings, and still she would not heed me! I can no longer restrain my
Son." Then followed the lament, which had first been spoken to Catherine
Labouré so many apparitions ago, and was at present spoken to Estelle
Faguette with an anguish that pierced the girl's heart. The lament
compressed a mother's grief into three words: "France will suffer."
But isn't it true that the saints in heaven,
among whom the Mother of God rates supreme, can no longer suffer the pangs
of grief? It is, indeed. They cannot. Nothing mars the bliss of their
inexhaustible joys. Yet at the same time, compatibly with their
beatitude, they do feel a profound solicitude for their humankind in
exile. They have not lost interest. They have from the Most High some of
his magnanimity of desire to share heaven with future prospects. And of
all the beatified under God not even the guardian angels of these
candidates from earth do so much praying for them and caring for them as
does his mother whom Jesus gave them as theirs too.
At La Salette she wept miraculously, letting
the tears flow, in order to express in a way her visionaries could best
understand the truth of her tender solicitude. How else could she have so
effectively impressed on the minds of two illiterates the reality of her
beatific compassion? Mystics have seen the Divine Host bleed at
Benediction, while knowing that Christ now glorified can bleed no more.
They accepted the vision as a supernatural reminder that their Savior did
in truth bleed to death on the cross and that the merciful love which
motivated his sacrifice has not diminished. Just so: her tears at La
Salette did not deceive Melanie and Maximin who could see what unearthly
glory enveloped the weeping Madonna, and from her precious crown might
have inferred what a Queen of the angels she was. Those tears, which told
better than words of her anguish on Good Friday and of her continued and
unending concern, did not misrepresent the truth. They conveyed it with a
dramatic force not possible to plain speech.
Speech itself, to drive a truth more forcibly
home, may express it imaginatively. The phrase "crucifying Christ anew",
as the Fathers use it of sinners, is not to be taken ad literam.
It is an honest, though figurative, way of saying that what once occurred
on Mount Calvary for their salvation they would mercilessly repeat—if
human malice could. Insensitive murderers at heart, if not in deed, the
words accuse them of being. And they are!
A great theologian by the name of St.
Bonaventure cites a close parallel in his Life of St. Francis.
When a seraph who was fastened to a cross flew with the cross to the
visionary of Mount Alverna, Francis did not for a moment think the
heavenly spirit was in pain. To a glorified spirit that would be
impossible. Rather, writes his biographer, Francis "understood, since the
Lord revealed it to him, that this vision had been thus presented to his
gaze to let him know he would himself be transformed into the likeness of
Christ Crucified." And so he promptly was. The angel flew away and out
of sight, having delivered his visible message, but Francis bore on his
willing body the incisions of the five sacred wounds. A bodiless spirit,
as the angels of the Old and New Testaments have shown, can assume a human
form at will and with it do wonders no less real for being a mystery.
During its stay in New Orleans from July 6 to
16, 1972, the pilgrim statue of Fatima shed tears from its eyes twelve
different times. Multitudes who saw have certified the fact. The statue
was submitted to an investigation, the tears themselves to photographic
close-ups. They were found to be real tears. They were a miracle. They
were an effective demonstration to the sinful United States from Our Lady
of Fatima that in her beatitude she still cares.
She cares with that same yearning for souls
which their Savior had and has to an infinite degree. "I am the good
shepherd," he said of himself in a parable of what tender charm (Jn.
10:11-16). No literal use of language could have spoken the truth so
tenderly and therefore so accurately. And the Omniscient knew it. So
does his mother, partaking of his compassion for sinners, know how best to
touch their hearts.
Mystically, out of her untroubled beatitude,
yet as the best possible expression of her pity, she shows them a mother's
tears.
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