Françoise Mélanie Calvat (, 7 November 183114 December 1904), religious name Mary of the Cross, was a French religious sister in the Roman Catholic church. She and Maximin Giraud were the two seers of Our Lady of La Salette.
Early life
Calvat was born on 7 November 1831 in Corps en Isère, France. She was the fourth of ten children to Pierre Calvat, a stonemason and "pitsawyer by trade" who did not hesitate to take whatever job he could find in order to support his family, and Julie Barnaud, his wife. The family was so poor "that the young were sometimes dispatched to beg on the street".
At a very young age, Calvat was hired out to tend the neighbors' cows, where she met Maximin Giraud on the eve of their apparition. From the spring to the fall of 1846 she worked for Jean-Baptiste Pra at Les Ablandins, one of the hamlets of the village of La Salette. She spoke only the regional Occitan dialect and fragmented French. She had neither schooling nor religious instruction, thus she could neither read or write.
Apparition
On 19 September 1846, it is related that Calvat and Maximin Giraud, who were only teenagers, saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the mountains of La Salette, who gave them both public and private messages.
The bishop of Grenoble, Philibert de Bruillard, named several commissions to examine the facts. In December 1846, the first commissions were established. One was formed of professors from the major seminary of Grenoble and the other from titulary canons. The latter commission concluded that a more extensive examination was necessary before formulating a judgment. A new inquiry was held from July to September 1847, by two members of the commission, Canon Orcel, the superior of the major seminary, and Canon Rousselot.
A conference on the matter at the bishop's residence took place in November–December 1847. Sixteen members – the vicars general of the diocese, the parish priests of Grenoble and the titulary canons – assembled in the presence of the bishop. The majority concluded to the authenticity of the apparition, after the examination of the report from Rousselot and Urcel. Moreover, the Bishop of Sens had examined very carefully three cures attributed to Our Lady of La Salette that had occurred in the city of Avallon. The local bishop, Mgr. Mellon Jolly, recognized on 4 May 1849, one of the three cures, which had occurred on 21 November 1847, as miraculous.
Mgr. de Bruillard was convinced of the reality of the apparition and authorized the publication of the Rousselot report, which affirmed the reality of the apparition. In his letter of approbation, added as a preface, the bishop of Grenoble declared that he shared the opinion of the majority of the commission which adopted the conclusions of the report.
However, Louis Jacques Maurice de Bonald, the Cardinal Archbishop of Lyon, on whom Grenoble depended, suspected a subterfuge. The Cardinal demanded that the children tell him their secret, saying that he had a mandate from the Pope. The children finally acceded to this demand. Calvat, however, insisted that her text be carried directly to the Pope. It was under those conditions that the Bishop of Grenoble sent two representatives to Rome. The text of the two private secrets were reportedly handed to Pope Pius IX on 18 July 1851 but was apparently lost.
The procedure was favourable, since the mandate of Mgr. de Bruillard, adjusted according to observations of Luigi Lambruschini, Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites at Rome, was signed on 18 September 1851, and was published the following 10 November 1851. In it, the bishop of Grenoble promulgated this judgement: "We judge that the apparition of the Holy Virgin to the two shepherds, 19 September 1846 ... in the parish of La Salette ... carries within it all the characteristics of truth, and that the faithful have reason to believe it indubitable and certain."
The motives of the decision, which rested on the work of Rousselot and that of the commission of 1847, were the impossibility of explaining the events, the miracles and the cures in a human manner, as well as the spiritual fruits of the apparition, notably conversions and finally the right expectations and desires of large crowds of priests and faithful.
Later, 16 November 1851, the Bishop of Grenoble published a statement that the mission of the shepherd children had ended and that the matter was now in the hands of the Church. The bishop made it clear that the approval of the Church was only for the original revelation of 1846, not for any subsequent claims.
