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This is the first in a series of articles on La Salette Priorities; that is, emphases rooted in the La Salette Message, which should motivate and inspire all those connected with and devoted to Our Lady of La Salette.
An Overview
1) Priority of Christ
Early Italian La Salette Holy CardThe Lady places her Son as her first priority: she never mentions the name of Jesus but refers to him as "my Son." She wants to highlight her title of mother of the Lord. At La Salette, she appears to the world under no prerogative other than that of the Mother of God. by placing him above all else, she is telling the world that the people of God should also have Christ as its own priority. As St. Paul reminds us: “For to me life is Christ” (Philippians 1:21).
This emphasis is not lost on the La Salette person who strives to live the spirit that the Lady wished to convey at La Salette. The apparition is heavily Christ-centered. The life of those devoted to Our Lady of La Salette should reflect that same truth.
2) Priority of the Eucharist
The Mass is the Easter Mystery lived in everyday life. It is Christ's self-giving. In the Eucharist, I am to acquire what I pray for and be what I perform. If I become that, I will become what the La Salette mystery requires me to be, like Christ in the Eucharist.
The Beautiful Lady's message is strong on the matter of the Eucharist: “In the summer, only a few elderly women go to Mass. The rest work on Sundays all summer long. In the winter, when they don't know what to do, they go to Mass just to make fun of religion.” A reconciling La Salette person is one with an extraordinary devotion to the Eucharist because the first goal of the Eucharist is redemption, reconciliation.
3) The Priority of Prayer
Early French La Salette visualConcerning her third priority, Mary asked: “Do you say your prayers well, my children? ... Ah, my children, you should say them well, at night and in the morning, even if you say only an Our Father and a Hail Mary when you can't do better. When you can do better, say more.”
“God may be of no concern to humanity, but humanity is of much concern to God,” says Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in his splendid book, Quest for God. “The only way to discover this is the ultimate way, the way of worship. For worship is a way of living, seeing the world in the light of God. To worship is to rise to a higher level of existence, to see the world from the point of view of God. In worship,” continues Heschel, “we discover that the ultimate way is not to have a symbol but to be a symbol, to stand for the divine” (pg. xii).
Abraham Heschel said: “God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance. Religion is not expediency. Of all the things we do, prayer is the least expedient, the least worldly, the least practical. That is why prayer is an act of self-purification.”
The priority of true prayer is highly appropriate for a La Salette Missionary. It is so for any Christian. What would be unique about this in the case of a La Salette Missionary? His prayer is special in that he prays in the “style” of the Lady of La Salette. This “style” consists in not praying for himself that he dedicate his entire prayer to the people to whom he has been sent; that he “specialize,” so to speak, in the prayer of intercession; that he ask the Lord to delay if need be, the answer to his prayer in favor of the needs of his people.
In this way, he would be praying in the manner of Our Lady of La Salette, who said: “How long a time I have suffered for you! If I want my Son not to abandon you, I am obliged to plead with him constantly.” (See also the Gospel of John, chapter 17, the Priestly Prayer of Jesus. Also Luke 11:1-4 Christ and the Lord's prayer.)
4) The Priority of Broad Horizons
Early Angolan La Salette Holy Card“All my people.” The Lady had an expansive worldview that embraced not only a country, a continent, or a race but all her people.
“You will make this known.” To speak of La Salette is to talk about a mission because La Salette will never “make its way” as the Apparitions of Lourdes and Fatima make their way. The same can be said of the Gospel. It is to be carried, announced, witnessed to, suffered for.
The La Salette people are world persons. They carry the world in their mind as well as in their heart. They are well-informed concerning the condition of people around the globe—not out of curiosity or hunger for knowledge or merely being abreast of the news, but because they are interested in the welfare of all nations and people. This is the true spirit of La Salette.
5) The Priority of Respect for People
Everything Our Lady speaks about at La Salette has reference to people— the Eucharist, famine, prayer, penance, her suffering, the harvests, rotting wheat, spoiling walnuts, going to the butcher shop "like dogs," working on Sunday, the farm of Coin—all of this referred to her people. Her reason for appearing is her people: " Come closer, my children; don't be afraid. I am here to tell you great news ... If my people refuse to submit, I will be forced to let go the arm of my Son."
We might also insist on a priority for respect for people. One must admire the Lady's great care for the two little urchins standing before her. If they had been royalty, they would not have received more consideration. She speaks to them politely. She speaks in their patois when she learns that they do not understand French. She does not ask them what they cannot give: she asks that they say only one Our Father and one Hail Mary, nothing more.
She gives Maximin a practical example of rotting wheat, taken from his own life. Her words betray only a hint of the deep respect towards them. She also shows them that she loved them by her tone of voice and her general attitude.
The children were deeply saddened when the Lady finally left them and disappeared into the air. “If we had known she was a great saint,” they said, “we would have asked her to take us with her.” The Lady had expressed this love and inspired this requital of affection only after one half-hour in their presence. Hers is the kind of sovereign respect for the persons needed in our shared ministry of reconciliation.
As Paul states so succinctly: “…all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18-19).
6) The Priority of Our Mission
Early Brazilian La Salette Holy CardAt La Salette, we are reminded of another priority of our gospel mission, namely to "… make this known to all my people." The children were sent out on what was for them a seemingly impossible mission. They were too young. They were illiterate. They were in no way religious; in fact, they did not even realize that the Lady speaking to them was the Blessed Virgin.
If the truth be told, these two children were not especially lovable: Maximin was a scatterbrain; Melanie was constantly uncommunicative and morose. Neither of them knew the language of the country they were to evangelize. According to any human standard of competence, they were eminently unsuited for the assigned mission. Further, as they later realized, their entire lives were changed forever. Maximin later said that he would have been content to live out his life in the quiet of his mountains instead of trying to live up to the immensely stressful demands of his mission.
The Lady selected them very much in how her Son had chosen his disciples. She did not choose people who, according to popular wisdom, were qualified for the mission they had to fulfill. One might say that her choice of the children as unqualified was made abundantly evident, almost in an exaggerated manner.
This mission, the Lady seemed to say by implication, would be accomplished by children who would need the constant presence of a special grace. The simple fact that these “ambassadors” were mere children, chosen on purpose as children, is a manifestly divine “code” to say that this mission would be fulfilled by the Lord's constant love and presence. The children were messengers, but they soon became living proof of the heavenly origin of the “great news” they were spreading.
Early Polish La Salette Holy CardThe message they would communicate to the world was a “life” message. These children were not chosen in church or school or during Mass or prayer. They were selected at work, just as the Lord chose his disciples by the lakeside while fishing or cleaning their nets. The Lady wanted them – these children and no other. And so she went to the mountain and appeared to them while they were looking for their cows, in the rush of their work.
7) The Priority of Penance
This is Mary’s seventh gospel priority. The Beautiful Lady insisted on this in a powerful way, in words one would not readily expect from the Queen of Heaven. “In Lent they go to the butcher shops like dogs,” she said harshly. There is no doubt about the importance, the essential nature of this command. She is saying clearly that penance is a priority of Christian existence, that without penance, one cannot be a disciple. She says: “How long a time I have suffered for you! ... you will never be able to recompense the pains I have taken for you.” Penance was one of the Lady's priorities and must also be that of her people.
From the Acts of the Apostles, we hear Peter promise God’s people: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).