Places of worship in France
Notre Dame de la Salette
Isère
Salette Sanctuary
THE SITE
Our Lady of La Salette is the name under which Catholics designate the Virgin Mary as a child with two children on September 19, 1846 at the top of the village of La Salette-Fallavaux, near Corps (Isère), France.
Our Lady of La Salette is also the name under which we designate the Marian shrine which was built on the scene of the apparition.
Several important Marian shrines, such as that of Our Lady of La Salette or Lourdes, emerge following a series of nineteenth-century mariophanies that saw a local revival of Marian worship. This renewal has also been linked to the process of “sacral recharge” of pilgrimage sanctuaries shaken by the internal protest and external aggression of the Enlightenment.
This basilica remains a monument of religious architecture in Isère. Beyond the rallies of August 15 and September 19, the site, perched more than 1800 meters, is worth the detour.
On September 19, 1846, in the pastures above the village of La Salette, two shepherd children, Maximin Giraud and Mélanie Calvat, said they met a “Belle Dame” in tears, all of light. She gives them a message of conversion, for “all her people”. After 5 years of investigation, the Bishop of Grenoble officially recognizes the authenticity of the apparition. As part of the tremendous renewal of nineteenth-century religious practice, this apparition, like those of Lourdes (1858) and Pontmain (1871), will contribute to the development of popular fervor for Marian worship. The pilgrimage of La Salette, strongly supervised by the Church, preserves, despite the decline of Catholic practice in France, the international dimension that it acquired from its origin.
