We Would Love
to Keep in Touch!
Fr. Arthur Le Blanc, M.S. (1899-1990) as a young priest in 1928One afternoon in Attleboro I received a call from St. Louis, Missouri asking me to meet Fr. Arthur Le Blanc, M.S., at Logan Airport in Boston. He was arriving the next day from Madagascar to visit his family in the States. The old missionary did visit his relatives, but he also sought out ophthalmologists who would operate on his badly failing eyes; this would allow him to finish “whatever days he had left” he said, visiting his people in the bush of our La Salette mission. Most doctors told him he had waited too long, that there wasn't much to operate on, that whatever graft they would attempt would not “take,” etc.
Finally, one self-assured doctor performed the surgery – with outstanding success! Roman consuls never returned to Rome in greater triumph than this old missionary to his Provincial House in Attleboro, MA sometime later. Every morning he would set his alarm clock to “catch” the sunrise, and go outdoors at dusk to witness the sunset. He was like a man who had never seen daylight. He could now read his breviary and celebrate Mass with an ease he hadn't known in decades. Everyone knew this was a miracle of surgery. Fr. Le Blanc knew it was a true miracle.
The old priest had been a missionary in Madagascar for over fifty years. He had pushed into the forest to find people to whom he could reveal the wonder of Christ and the Church. He had suffered illness and disease. He had built churches and schools and, with his brother missionaries, lay the foundation for a thriving mission dedicated to preaching the Gospel and the message of Our Lady of La Salette.
See the light with new eyes
The light he had received through surgery was like a new creation. He kept saying, “I never knew that red was so....red, that yellow was so....bright.”
The La Salette Tableau painting in the La Salette House in La Tronche, FranceHe marveled at this new-found light, but all the time, all these years in Madagascar, he had followed another light within, far more powerful than sunshine. All these years he had walked in the light of wisdom that made him choose to give his life to Another. He had lived by the inner light of devotion and that famous quality of "zeal" that had made him leave his native land to spread the gospel of light abroad. Father LeBlanc could have lived a meaningful life without his corrected eyesight; never without the inner light he had enjoyed all his life.
“The light (of La Salette). . . blotted out the sun”
The light of La Salette, so brilliant that it blotted out the sun and swept shadows away was more than candle-power. The Lady's light belonged to her Son, as was clear from the crucifix awash in brightness. It was the light of heaven and the Light of the world. It symbolized ever so clearly the wisdom of her message and the love of those tears falling like incandescent rain upon the earth.
At La Salette, the light shone before the message was spoken, lasted throughout, and was last to disappear. Melanie saw it first down in the ravine and her shrill cries of fear brought Maximin on the dead run by her side. The Woman in the light said to them, “Come closer, my children, do not be afraid. I am here to tell you great news.” The sound of that voice caused all fear to vanish. They approached her, and in fact, stood so close to her that they had entered that sacred realm of light that the Lady herself inhabited.
The apparition took place within the context of light; everything and every word in it is to be viewed in the perspective of wisdom and the reconciling act of the Resurrection wrought by the Light of the World.
Father Le Blanc may have been elated at his new power to see. But he would never have exchanged that in-sight of wisdom and zeal that had illumined his life for all the reds and the yellows of the world.