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23. Our Lady of Hope
HE
DIDN'T CUT MUCH of a figure in the political estimates of his day. But he
should have. This country pastor, the Abbé Michel Guerin, exerted an
influence of such power over his parish of scarcely eighty families as to
draw an apparition from heaven and effect a spectacular turn of events.
His little church stood, an attraction to all the peasants around, in the
hamlet of Pontmain on the Britanny frontier. They loved it.
The curé had taught them to love it. Because
of its adorable Resident, he reasoned with them, it ought to be their
favorite home to visit. Why did they suppose the door remained unlocked
the whole day long if not because Someone was waiting there, expecting
visitors? Wouldn't they be cheating themselves to neglect the Christ of
their needs? From the pulpit the answers came at the morning Masses,
during the evening devotions.
For some weeks now, the evening services
featured along with Rosary and Benediction a sermon on how to ensure one's
love for God through a dedication to his closest intimate: the Father's
worthiest creature, the mother of his eternal Son, the prime favorite of
their mutual and coequal Spirit. Having made a study of True Devotion
to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the lost manuscript of which after a
century and a quarter had lately been found, their pastor was giving the
parish the benefit of his study. The results showed. Adults and children
of age, who had not belonged, now joined the Archconfraternity of the
Immaculate Heart. They paid more attention to the Blessed Sacrament,
coming oftener to their church. They lived their faith every hour of the
day. In all that area, no home but was likely to have a statue of the
Sacred Heart or of the Madonna over the front door or out on the lawn to
welcome visitors, and another such statue or picture on the mantel above
the fireplace to keep the family reminded. It was that kind of parish,
with that kind of pastor.
Their devotion brought a favor from heaven too
startling for the unbeliever in miracles to understand. A favor not just
for the parish! For the nation! The profane historian, who states the
effect but omits the cause, has no explanation for the sudden withdrawal
of the Prussian troops from the Britanny border in that critical January
of 1871; but never mind that; the bearing of Our Lady of Pontmain on a
military change of mind of international import has not gone unrecorded.
A commissioned inquiry has sorted out the circumstantial evidence,
documented it, and received the approval of the Church for the effort.
The historian who disallows the supernatural
does no worse, let it be said in passing, than what the American press did
with an overseas dispatch in 1917. This is what it did, what it
rejected. A correspondent for an international News Service, having
witnessed with 70,000 others the miracle of the sun at Fatima on the 13th
day of October that year, cabled his factual account to the United
States. It was never used. The World Series between the New York Giants
and the Chicago White Sox crowded it off the front page. It received at
most a mere reference far back from the front page. Just think! The most
sensational story of the century, the facts of which dare not be denied,
"became a one-inch item relegated to page 24" in the only American daily
the researcher could find carrying it. The Rt. Rev. William C. McGrath,
who did the research, neither blames nor excuses. He simply records the
flagrant omission.
To get back to the subject under treatment,
Paris had been surrounded by Prussian troops in September 1870. In late
December its daily bombardment began. Its citizens were being starved.
They had no natural hope for relief. Whole battalions of French soldiers
had already surrendered, which the Encyclopedia Britannica estimates at
720,000. Another 156,000 had fallen, dead or wounded, and Emperor
Napoleon III was taken captive. With its capital helplessly isolated, the
remainder of the country feared an imminent seizure. It had reason to
fear. The enemy had a select army camping at the border, ready at the
command of General Hubert von Schmidt to invade. But the invasion, set
for January 18, 1871, never occurred.
The evening before, at lunch table, the
commander boasted that tomorrow his troops would be marching through
France to total victory. Pontmain, just a few miles from their camp,
would be an early prey. Its livestock and grain were to be seized,
leaving the inhabitants in a sorry plight. But on that same 17th
evening of January, to fill in what the secular historians have omitted,
the villagers were not thinking of the Prussian threat. Much less did
they worry. Their minds were preoccupied. Two boys and two girls,
ranging in age from ten to nineteen, were seeing and reporting a vision in
the sky, which had the village astir.
The vision, appearing at about six o'clock and
lasting three hours, followed an hour of community prayer. For earlier,
in late afternoon, the resolute Abbé Guerin had summoned his parishioners
to church. He prayed with them to the Mother of God to use her influence
somehow to save their homes and farmland and indeed all France from
devastation. His final advice to these clients of hers, before he
dismissed them, sang hope into their devout souls. The words, written
down, have the look of prose. Spoken to a Marian audience, they were
sheer music: "Have confidence in our Blessed Mother. Remember, we are
consecrated to her as her property and possession. She is with us. She
will take care of us. Place all your trust in her Immaculate Heart."
The parish at Pontmain did not, however, hold a
monopoly on this intensified devotion to Mary during the national crisis.
Her shrines at Lourdes, at La Salette, and in Paris the chapel of the
Daughters of Charity and the oratory of Our Lady of Victories, had all
been drawing heavily. The bombardment, the danger of spoliation, while
not diminishing the stubborn infidelity of the government, did bring
multitudes of negligent believers to their senses. They were wiser than
their political leaders. "If our offended God is to have mercy on us,"
their actions as much as implies, "surely he will do it through Mary."
How right they were, let the sequence of events
affirm. After the curé had concluded his Marian service in the Pontmain
church with Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, on that late afternoon
of January 17th, the parishioners returned to their homes in
the gathering shades of night to await developments. They had less than
an hour to wail. At work in their barn, first one and then another of the
Barbedette boys walked to the open door to look out into the dark. Their
father, noticing the instant glow of wonder on their faces, hurried over
to the stable door to look with them. He saw nothing over their
neighbor's house but the deepening night.
But Eugene and Joseph were describing at a high
pitch of elation a grande belle Dame who shone brightly above the
chimneys, a figure of such awesome beauty as left the visionaries gasping
for breath between their inadequate words. She was wearing a long blue
robe, dotted with golden stars, and on her head a golden crown. This
queen, standing on air as on solid ground and in little slippers with
golden rosettes, looked a youthful eighteen. She had an endearing smile
on her face. The boys, not given to ecstatic outcries of appreciation at
their ages of twelve and ten, indulged in them now.
Their mother who had come running into the barn
with a visiting friend, while neither she nor the friend could see what
the boys saw, ran out with the friend to spread the word. Soon the abbé
with his lantern and the nuns from the school were there, and a solid mass
of villagers. They all looked. They strained their eyes to see. They
could not. They all remained blind to the vision.
"Why can you not see?" blurted out Eugene.
"The Lady stands there so bright. Do you see those three stars about
her?"
"Yes," answered Sister Vitaline, "I have no
trouble seeing them." Nor did at least sixty others in the crowd.
"Well, the highest one is right over the Lady's
crown and the other two are alongside her—on the right and on the left."
This unique triangle of stars nobody in
Pontmain would ever again behold. They lasted but three shining hours.
When the queen whom they served faded into the dark, so did they
disappear. Outsiders to astronomy, they remained all the more a blessed
memory to the village. Recognized as a supernatural occurrence, they made
it the easier for the many who saw them to believe in the incomparably
greater apparition they could not see.
Meanwhile, three newcomers to the crowded
Barbedette barnyard had arrived from the convent boarding school. Two of
them, but not the third, saw already at their approach exactly what the
boys were still seeing. "Oh, what a gorgeous Lady!" they exclaimed. The
description from Jeanne Marie Lebossé and Francoise Richer agreed to the
detail with Eugene's. The third girl, stare as she would, could not bring
the blessed figure of the description into visibility. She felt a twinge
of envy.
"It's because those who enjoy the celestial
vision are worthier than we are," a voice from the crowd said.
It was Abbé Guerin's. But the Lady herself had
not said that. Why four out of so many should have been chosen for the
honor, and even two younger children, remains a secret of heaven.
The Lady in fact said nothing during her
three-hour-long apparition. But she did have for the people, who were
kneeling when they were not standing in the snow, an unspoken message.
Right after the rosary when their priest was leading them in singing the
Magnificat, to quote from the official record, "a long white
streamer began to unroll beneath the feet of the beautiful Lady and an
invisible hand began to write on it in capital letters of gold these
words; 'BUT PRAY, MY CHILDREN.'" The crowd could not read the syllables,
not seeing them, but did pause in their hymn to listen as the four
youthful witnesses read aloud the completed sentence.
His account, which the Bishop of Laval
published as a diocesan pastoral the next year, proceeds: "Other hymns
followed and to the children's delighted gaze other letters appeared" in
the same line. These additional capital letters, forming a second
sentence, the unseeing waited in silence to hear. The visionaries, as
soon as the last capital letter of gold got written down, announced in
high glee: "GOD WILL NEED YOU IN A LITTLE WHILE."
A vociferous Te Deum might have exploded
on the night air if the intermediaries, intent on their vision, did not
show on their faces in the torchlight that there was more coming. There
was, indeed. The writing continued into the second line to form, again in
large lettering, a corollary statement. It informed the seers, beyond any
possible doubt, who the Lady of their vision was and what an influence
over God she had. They read to their audience the inscription done in
gold: "MY SON ALLOWS HIMSELF TO BE MOVED."
The people heard the golden answer to weeks of
prayer with an outburst of joy. But the identification did not surprise
them. After all, they had been singing to the unseen her Magnificat
because they thought her to be the Mother of God who could obtain favors
for them from her Son. They now, at a signal from Sister Mary Edward,
lifted their voices in a melody that moved to the lyrics of the lovely
French hymn, Mother of Hope. That attributive of Hope, would
henceforth be associated with the heavenly Visitant to Pontmain.
Our Lady of Hope had not done with her
visionaries. She looked tenderly from them to the crowd, who had finished
their hymn to her and were singing "Jesus, now the time has come, our
contrite hearts to pardon." At those words, the apparition saddened. The
Labossé girl, beckoning for a pause in the singing, described what was
happening. The sorrowing mother suddenly had a crimson crucifix in her
hands and was holding it to her bosom, but with the figure of her dying
Son facing the seers. Over the crucifix there appeared on a white band in
blood-red capitals, one by one: "JESUS CHRIST."
That was all. It was sufficient. The faithful
gathering, informed of it, caught the meaning at once. It was as clear to
them as the stations of the cross in their church. The cure spoke their
mind as well as his: "We have brought suffering to our crucified Savior
and his afflicted mother." And down in the snow they all knelt to pray.
"That was the conclusion of the great event,"
explains the bishop in his letter to the diocese, "and while at the
bidding of the parish priest the people were saying their night prayers, a
sort of blue veil came slowly up from the Lady's feet and gradually hid
the vision from view. Only her crown remained for a moment. Then that,
too, disappeared. The apparition was over."
But the pastoral letter not quite! It added a
comment, in low key, cool with irony. But first it presented in quick
order the preliminary facts. The advance guard of the Prussian army had
come within a mile and a quarter of the town. It came no farther. It
turned back. Three days later the enemy's total forces were in voluntary
retreat. A week after that, the two warring nations signed an armistice
and tentative peace terms. And now the icing goes on the cake: "This
occurred exactly on the 11th day after the white streamer with
its bright letters of gold displayed the blessed words: 'GOD WILL HEED YOU
IN A LITTLE WHILE.'"
The Holy See, after exhaustive inquiries, was
satisfied that an influence not of this world can best explain the
reversal of military plans which in 1871 saved France from ravage. It
placed its unequivocal sanction on the appearance of Our Lady of Hope to a
select few, who relayed her written messages to the many, at Pontmain. It
accredited her miracles. It has encouraged her cult. Pope Pius XI, in
one of his first official acts as Vicar of Christ, authorized a proper
Mass in her honor for her Britanny shrine. No more authentic approval
could have been granted than that.
Not surprisingly then, the Barbedette barn has
been converted to an oratory. One may stand in the renovated doorway from
which the working boys beheld their bright vision of the night: but one
would not see the neighbor's house over which the delight of their eyes
hovered. The house is gone. It is not forgotten, however. There rises
in its place, to ensure its hallowed association, the Church of Our Lady
of Hope. The twin spires befit this imposing edifice.
The shrine attracts the pious from both sides
of the border. Before even the shrine was there, the place drew
pilgrimages from within Prussia. Why should it not have drawn them?
These pilgrims knew that Our Lady of Hope, whom they came to honor, was
indeed the spiritual mother of not just one nation but of mankind. Then,
neither did they forget that the same benevolent Madonna of the air who
had appeared to the French youth showed herself on the same night in the
same sky to a group of their own youth who were standing guard at the
border. These soldiers reported to their general her benign request not
to advance on Pontmain, and they did it with an unction he had not thought
possible of them. "Even as they spoke," writes Francis de Sales Ryan, "a
mounted military officer hurried up to the door with a dispatch to von
Schmidt from the commander of the 11th Prussian Army, directing
him to withdraw ten miles and to await further orders. No historian has
ever given a satisfactory explanation of this action." The pious folk who
made the pilgrimages to the shrine from either country could have given
it.
The Holy Spirit who inspires noble thoughts can
by the same power suggest decisions. The mind so influenced may not
suspect the Source. Whether or not the commander of the 11th
Prussian Army was aware of being helped to his unprecedented reversal of
judgment, the known facts favor the conclusion that he did not act
entirely on his own. The Holy Spirit, at the request of Mary, could have
put the idea in his head.
Pitiably, France did not long persevere in her
1871 renewal of piety. Her multitudes of praying penitents rapidly
diminished, so that Our Lady of Hope who had brought good news to the
nation at Pontmain just five years later at Pellevoisin brought a prophecy
of woe. She spoke with sorrow of the sufferings that would afflict the
nation because of its spiritual relapse, and Estelle Faguette who listened
had never before heard such tender regret in a voice. The Mother of God
sounded terribly disappointed. And no wonder! After some fifty
appearances to French visionaries since 1830, in which she tried to
educate the country to the most neglected fact of history that a defiance
of God's right order breeds strife, the country still had not learned the
lesson.
Neither, of course, has the world learned it.
When the seer of Pellevoisin told Pope Leo XIII during an audience in
1900, "Holy Father, the Blessed Virgin said that France will have to
suffer," he answered back that so will the world. The Vicar of Christ
knew whereof he spoke. He had himself been shown a vision of the havoc
Satan and his devils would wreak upon the Church because of the moral
deterioration of the century, which would invite out of hell the fury of
its malice. From sheer fright the Holy Father swooned on the spot, in the
presence of others. Afterwards in his private quarters at the Vatican he
composed his prayer to St. Michael the Archangel for help, which he
ordered to be recited with three Hail Mary's and the Hail Holy
Queen after every Low Mass, and which were so recited at Catholic
altars from then until a decade ago. These prayers, while dropped as a
requirement after the Holy Sacrifice, need not and should not be
personally discontinued. We need them. We of this atheistic age need all
the help we can obtain from the Prince of the heavenly host and their
exalted Queen, the invincible antagonists of Satan.
How desperately the present generation needs
the aid of heaven against the encroachments of hell, let the telltale
symptoms of moral decay reveal. Promiscuity is being applauded in exact
ratio as marriage is being publicly held up to ridicule. The easy divorce
further threatens the home, the basic unit of a healthy society. The
legalized slaughter of unborn babies under the pretence that they lack
human life, the prevalence of hijacking and kidnapping and bombing and
dope-peddling and pornography with impunity, the loss of the citizen's
freedom of the streets to the murderous criminal who rather than his
victim receives the pity, the growing popularity of diabolism, the gross
defections from the Faith which has promoted the standard of sane and
right living, are all signs of a widespread craze for evil. The age has
killed its sense of sin, ignoring the divine commandments, and couldn't
care less. It will pay the price. In sad truth, it has been taking the
consequences right along. It is the era of world wars and endless little
wars, of destruction and carnage and atrocities at an enormity the former
ages together could not come near to matching, and the future holds the
distinct possibility of a global holocaust.
With more than half the world under the
dictatorship of an aggressive Communism which intends to seize the whole,
the yet unconquered nations have been growing weaker of will and less
concerned because this sizable population has become infected with the
poisonous atheism of the aggressor. More and more in its educated
thinking, God does not count, does not exist. The universe didn't need
and did not have a personal Creator. It just happened. Once a nothing,
the nothing then evolved itself into being: thus argues an influential
school of modernists. Advertised as benefactors of humanity, they enjoy a
wide following who believes they are. Be not deceived! In denying the
Source of his dignity, they degrade man; deprive him of the inalienable
rights of a creature made in God's image; reduce him to a puppet at the
mercy of the state. That so pernicious a doctrine should have gained a
fashionable respectability, portends trouble. What Our Lady of Fatima
forewarned might happen, has happened. Russia has spread her errors
through the world, provoking wars and persecution and general animosity,
so that not an island in the seas but must know the difference now.
Frantic agreements to keep the status quo among
nations will not work in a world without God. The ineffectual UN can do
nothing to ensure their observance. They are a hollow pretence when in
reality the Soviet Union has not set free a single one of its captive
countries while ever striving to add to their number. The Communists show
no signs of giving up their avowed objective of total conquest.
Untrustworthy pacts hold no assurance that the strategic stockpiles of
nuclear weapons, which lie in wait for use around the world, will not set
off a raging inferno. That is the somber possibility. How somber?
Nuclear physicists have estimated that within a few hours of the initial
blast some seven hundred millions of people will have perished. Treaties
to the contrary mean nothing. A popular turning away from sin and back
to God remains, as it proved to be in France in 1871, the only workable
solution toward peace.
But suppose France had not sufficiently
repented to save the country from being militarily ravaged, the devoted
clients of Mary at Pontmain would not have lost out. They would have been
sustained in their physical woes, as her afflicted servants everywhere
are, by an inner peace no hardships can destroy. Blessed Maximilian Mary
Kolbe of the present century, a second Louis de Montfort who founded the
unarmed Militia of the Immaculate, faced starvation with an undaunted
calm. He, a prisoner in the detention camp at Auschwitz, asked for it.
Here is what happened. A fugitive had escaped the camp, and ten inmates
were selected at random to be starved to death in retaliation, one of whom
pleaded for his life as the father of a dependent family. Whereupon the
Franciscan Conventual volunteered to take his place in the dungeon without
food; it was all the same to the officials as long as ten would die; so
the tenth victim, who need not have gone, went of his own accord to the
dreadful death. He welcomed it. This devotee of Mary thought of what her
all-holy Son had said and drew the strength of an indomitable courage from
the words: "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his
life for his friends" (Jn. 15:13).
The martyr for charity, who understood from
experience the atheist tyranny of Nazism and Communism alike, made a
jubilant prediction after his sojourn in Russia. It was not an
astonishing statement. What else should we expect from an avowed knight
of Our Lady of Hope, who at Pontmain brought sudden peace out of a
desperate situation and at Fatima foretold her ultimate triumph over the
present forces of evil? Blessed Maximilian Kolbe was but essentially
agreeing with her when he said that "one day the statue of the Immaculate
will stand in the very centre of Moscow, atop the Kremlin."
Meanwhile, from the evidence all around, the
prophecy seems a long way from fulfillment. Pope Pius XII declared the
world in his day more wicked than before the Flood. Has not its addiction
to debauchery and murder and blasphemous infidelity worsened since? When
William Thomas Walsh interviewed Sister Maria das Dores in her convent on
July 15, 1946, it soon became evident from her answers that the visionary
did not think our century was fulfilling the requests of Our Lady of
Fatima.
"Does this mean in your opinion," she was then
asked, "that every country, without exception, will be overcome by
Communism?"
"Yes."
Should a decisive ratio of conversions not take
place and the worst come to pass, what with various nations annihilated
and the decimated others subject to an atheist domination, that domination
will still lack the power to pervert any individual who cooperates with
the proffered graces of the Holy Spirit through Mary. It will harass and,
according to its past record, torture. It may even brainwash the
persecuted into a delirium of ineptitude. What it will not be able to do
is to force the persecuted to offend their all-lovable God by a single,
deliberate sin.
Nor can it prevent its own final defeat. Our
Lady of Fatima has spoken its doom. After the evil of the times has spent
its satanic force and the surviving nations have learnt of bitter
disillusionment the sanity of serving God instead of Mammon, the era of
peace will ensure. It will mean the cessation, not alone of hostilities,
but of wanton sin which causes them. It will open the greatest epoch in
human history when the nations shall be attuned to the purposes of their
Creator. It will come, St. Louis de Montfort explains, from the sublime
lessons of love which mankind shall by then have learned and adopted from
the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
What she brought about at Pontmain, what she
achieved by her other interventions in history, are but a fragmentary
preview of what she has promised to do. She will convert Russia and
soften obdurate hearts everywhere to the influence of the Holy Spirit in
the great overthrow of atheism and rediscovery, on the part of chastened
infidels, of their heavenly Father. She will teach all her children on
earth, from a mother's love, how to find the joy of perfect harmony with
one another in cherishing their divine Brother. She is still Our Lady of
Hope. |