| | In our original plan, we were going to make a day trip out to the shrine of LaSalette on our way through eastern France. It was one of the places in Europe (along with Fatima and Lourdes) where Mary had appeared to children and spoken with them. All of them were in the past 200 years, too, so it’s been heavily documented and investigated.
After mass in Nice, we flagged down the priest to see if he knew a good way to get out to the shrine. He didn’t know English, but he knew enough to introduce us to a young couple that did. They thought it was pretty cool that we turned our spring break into a pilgrimage, but told us that getting out to LaSalette before we left on Friday was impossible. If we had a car, it would be a 4-5 hour drive; by bus, it was 6-8. “But” they said, “if you want to visit a shrine to Our Lady, you should go out to Laghet. That’s where people in Nice go when they want to ask Mary to pray for them.” The wife scribbled some bus routes on the back of a receipt, and then they were gone.
Well, we had already explored a lot of Nice, and the beach was a little bit on the cold and windy side, so it was set as the official adventure for the following day.
The story is: the chapel of Laghet was built sometime between 1200 and 1500 AD in the mountains of southeast France. It was used mostly as a shelter by local shepherds until the early 1600s, when a nobleman from a nearby town visited the sanctuary. He was saddened by how much it had fallen into disrepair, and paid from his own money to have it restored. He also had a Parisian artist carve a statue of Mary to place in the church, and then (inexplicably) miracles started happening. When the local faithful started praying at the shrine, a boy was healed of leprosy, a prisoner of war was set free, a girl was cured of possession... From that point on, it became a place of pilgrimage and prayer for the local people. (This was as much detail as we could get translated on the story.)
It had such a completely local feel. Everyone there was French, spoke only French, and the flyers they gave out were in French, Italian or Spanish (so it seemed like pilgrims came from only as far as the bordering countries). It made a really interesting contrast to the other major global destinations we visited later (Lourdes and Fatima), but don’t let me get ahead of myself here.
To get out to the shrine, we hopped a bus that took us out of the city and wound its way up the mountainside. Nestled in the where the air was clear and sharp was a tiny church (the sanctuary was maybe 50 ft square) with a cloister (hallway) wrapped around it. Around the cloister were statues of heavy-duty prayer warrior saints: St. Anthony, Padre Pio, the Little Flower, St. Rita, the Cure of Ars… but the most amazing thing about the place was the paintings.
Every wall of the cloister was covered with rows and rows of paintings, some of them very rough, all of them very simple and humble. Apparently, the way that you pray at the shrine of Laghet is to bring a painting of the tragedy that occurred, and leave it there for the Blessed Mother. There were pictures of deathbeds, falls from buildings, wounded children, carriage accidents (the shrine has been around for quite some time), and there was even a painting from 1790 of a ship lost at sea. Everywhere you looked, there was a human tragedy with real people, faces you could recognize, and they had all been brought out to the mountains to entrust to Our Lady. Almost all of them had the Madonna of Laghet up in the corner praying, or watching, or receiving a dying child into her arms from heaven. It was really beautiful.
As if that wasn’t moving enough, there was a crypt below the church that they just opened in the past few decades. We went down to see what it held, and found the recent petitions. The walls had huge corkboards, where people had pinned up photos, poems, and prayers, there were candles burning in every corner, and one wall had a row of crutches that had been left behind by people who apparently didn’t need them anymore. I wanted so bad to leave a picture of Arif there, but there was no way to make that happen. We were able to spend a lot of time there praying, and attended mass before heading back to Nice.
The whole layover in Nice was a really refreshing breather. We never got out to LaSalette, instead we had it replaced by a place that was more ancient, more reverent, and really seemed more miraculous. One way or another, I was pretty thrilled with how well our trip was going, and we boarded our first overnight train to bring us to Lourdes.
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| | Posted 4/4/2009 8:36 PM - 20 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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