Our Lady of La Salette

On September 19, 1846, two shepherd children — Mélanie Calvat, aged fourteen, and Maximin Giraud, aged eleven — reported seeing a weeping woman on the slopes of a mountain above La Salette in the French Alps. The woman spoke to them in French and in their local dialect, warning of crop failures and calling for a return to Sunday observance and an end to blasphemy. She gave each child a personal secret intended for the Pope. Their accounts were internally consistent across repeated and independent questioning, and a spring appeared at the site. Bishop Philibert de Bruillard of Grenoble conducted a five-year investigation and approved the apparition in 1851, stating it "bears in itself all the marks of truth." The event had a significant impact on French Catholicism and led to the founding of the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette.