Mélanie’s words became controversial in the compromise between Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) and the bishops of France. She revealed that the Blessed Virgin Mary had warned her of a Freemasonic plot to overturn the Catholic Church in France. Eager to remove this visionary from French politics, the hierarchy allowed her to transfer to an English Carmelite convent in 1855.
For five years in England, she spoke of prophecies and things to come. The local English bishop forbade her from speaking, so she returned to France and joined a convent at Marseille. Her identity was found out, and she shuffled through a few convents before leaving for Naples in 1867. In Naples, she wrote down her secret and a rule for a religious community of men called the Order of the Apostles of the Last Days, and another for women called the Order of the Mother of God. Mélanie met privately with Pope Leo XIII to discuss these orders, but nothing came of them. When she died in Naples, the local people were shocked to learn that the seer of La Salette had been living incognito in their midst.
What is the secret of Our Lady of La Salette that was given to Mélanie? She first wrote down the secret in 1851, and it was sealed and sent to Pope Pius IX — after which it was archived in the Holy Office in Rome. Mélanie wrote it down a second time 1873 and published this second version in 1879 as a booklet bearing the imprimatur of Bishop Salvatore Luigi Zola of the diocese of Lecce, Italy. The title of this booklet is Apparition of the Blessed Virgin on the Mountain of La Salette.
Mélanie’s original 1851 version had been archived, lost, and forgotten since the late 1800s. In 1999, however, it was rediscovered in the archives of the Holy Office and published.4 Only since 1999 have we been able to compare the two versions side by side. The 1851 archived version and the 1879 published version follow the same themes (persecution of the pope, apostasy, the destruction of Paris and Marseille, the birth of the antichrist from a nun, etc.), but the 1879 is much longer and more precise and contains details that are not found the other version.
The Holy Office censured the 1879 version almost immediately after its publication because it predicted the future apostasy of Rome. In 1923, it was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Most people today assume that the archived 1851 version is the pure, pristine, and true version, whereas the 1879 published edition was falsified and sensationalized by Mélanie in her adult life. But why would Mélanie corrupt and falsely expand a secret she received from the Blessed Virgin Mary?
Those who reject the 1879 version, with its account of Rome as the seat of the antichrist, claim that Mélanie either lost her mind or that she bore malice toward the Catholic Church, so she created an embellished version of her secret. Yet we read that she died humbly, receiving the sacraments, and professing the Catholic Faith. Those who knew her testified to her sanctity and fidelity. Even Pope Pius X admired her and suggested her beatification after her death.
Mélanie was not insane, and she did not bear false witness about the words of the Mother of God. We can conclude, then, that the 1851 and 1879 versions are both equally true and do not invalidate one another, any more than the differing details in Saint Matthew’s Gospel refute the authenticity and truth of Saint Mark’s Gospel. The 1851 version states that the antichrist will be born of a nun. The 1879 version states the antichrist will be born of a Hebrew nun. Differences such as this do not discredit the more detailed 1879 version. Moreover, we know that the 1851 version was written down twice in 1851, and the first draft was rejected and destroyed. Some tampering did occur in 1851 as well.
We also know that in 1851, when the original version was approved and sealed, the girl Mélanie was suffering intimidation by a cardinal, a bishop, inquisitors, and theologians. The 1851 version, therefore, may not have been the exhaustive version, but simply the gist of Our Lady’s secret to satisfy the cardinal commanding Mélanie. Moreover, the 1879 version has a bracketed section in which Mélanie makes a comment “according to the Vision which I had in the moment that the very Blessed Virgin was speaking of the resurrection of the dead.”5 That Mélanie received a vision as the Virgin spoke is often overlooked. In this author’s opinion, the 1879 version incorporates both the message and the vision, whereas the 1851 contains a truncated version of the message.
I believe that both versions are valid (both versions are included in the appendix of this book), and thus I here reprint the most interesting passages from the 1879 edition. Firstly, Our Lady condemns the evil priests of the Catholic Church:
The priests, ministers of my Son, the priests, by their wicked lives, by their irreverence and their impiety in the celebration of the holy mysteries, by their love of money, their love of honors and pleasures, the priests have become cesspools of impurity. Yes, the priests are asking vengeance, and vengeance is hanging over their heads. Woe to the priests and to those dedicated to God who by their unfaithfulness and their wicked lives are crucifying my Son again! The sins of those dedicated to God cry out to Heaven and call for vengeance, and now vengeance is at their door, for there is no one left to beg mercy and forgiveness for the people. There are no more generous souls, there is no one left worthy of offering a stainless sacrifice to the Eternal for the sake of the world.6
Our Lady of La Salette then praises Pope Pius IX and condemns Napoleon III:
May the Vicar of my Son, Pope Pius IX, never leave Rome again after 1859; may he, however, be steadfast and noble; may he fight with the weapons of faith and love. I will be at his side. May he be on his guard against Napoleon: he is two-faced, and he wishes to make himself Pope as well as Emperor. God will soon draw back from him. He is the mastermind who, always wanting to ascend further, will fall on the sword he wishes to use to force his people to be raised up.7
Our Lady names 1864 as the year in which Satan and his demons will be unleashed from hell; 1864 marks the publication of the Syllabus of Errors, in which Pope Pius IX condemns liberalism, rationalism, and socialism.
In the year 1864, Lucifer together with many demons will be unloosed from hell; they will put an end to faith little by little, even in those dedicated to God. They will blind them in such a way, that, unless they are blessed with a special grace, these people will take on the spirit of these angels of hell; several religious institutions will lose all faith and will lose many souls. . . . All the civil governments will have one and the same plan, which will be to abolish and do away with every religious principle, to make way for materialism, atheism, spiritualism, and vice of all kinds.8
Our Lady then turns to the end of the world and describes the advent of the antichrist upon the earth:
It will be during this time that the Antichrist will be born of a Hebrew nun, a false virgin who will communicate with the old serpent, the master of impurity, his father will be B.9 At birth, he will spew out blasphemy; he will have teeth; in a word, he will be the devil incarnate. He will scream horribly, he will perform wonders, he will feed on nothing but impurity. He will have brothers who, although not devils incarnate like him, will be children of evil. At the age of twelve, they will draw attention upon themselves by the gallant victories they will have won; soon they will each lead armies, aided by the legions of hell.10
The seasons will be altered, the earth will produce nothing but bad fruit, the stars will lose their regular motion, the moon will only reflect a faint reddish glow. Water and fire will give the earth’s globe convulsions and terrible earthquakes, which will swallow up mountains, cities, etc.11
Rome will lose faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.12
Mélanie’s booklet received much resistance in Rome, presumably because it condemned wicked priests so violently and stated, “Rome will lose faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.” In 1880, the Holy Office restricted the book, but it was reprinted repeatedly in France and Italy into the 1900s.13 Yet Pope Pius X seems to have given her his approbation, when, having read the biography of Mélanie, he exclaimed to the bishop of Altamura, “La nostra Santa!” and proposed to open the cause for her beatification. Despite the c
ontroversy surrounding her 1879 publication, Mélanie Calvat confirmed the claim of Cardinal Manning, who stated:
The apostasy of the city of Rome . . . and its destruction by the Antichrist may be thought so new to many Catholics, that I think it well to recite the text of theologians of greatest repute. First, Malvenda, who writes expressly on the subject, states as the opinion of Ribera, Gaspar Melus, Viegas, Suarez, Bellarmine, and Bosius, that Rome shall apostatize from the faith, drive away the Vicar of Christ, and return to its ancient paganism.14
The war against the Vicar of Christ and the apostasy of Rome had just begun. And according to Mélanie, it began with satanic rage in 1864.
4 Father Michel Corteville discovered Mélanie’s original written secret of 1851 in the archives of the Holy Office in 1999. The 1851 version conforms in essence to her published 1879 version, but it lacks the phrases “Rome will lose faith and become the seat of the Antichrist,” and “There will be an eclipse of the Church.” In 2000 at the Angelicum, Father Michel Corteville defended his doctoral thesis in theology, entitled Discovery of the Secret of La Salette.
5 Le Secret de Mélanie, p. 29-30.
6 Mélanie Calvat, Apparition of the Blessed Virgin on the Mountain of La Salette (Lecce, Italy: 1879), 2.
7 Ibid., 7
8 Ibid., 11
9 Here “B” is usually assumed to be “bishop.” This means that the antichrist is not the son of Satan but born naturally of an unholy union between a nun and a bishop.
10 Calvat, Apparition, 26.
11 Ibid., 27.
12 Ibid., 28.
13 The Holy Office, under Pope Benedict XV, placed a reprinting of the 1879 version of the secret on the Index of Forbidden Books on 9 May 1923.
14 Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, “The Present Crises of the Holy See Tested by Prophecy,” reprinted in The Pope and the Antichrist (Sainte-Croix du Mont, France: Tradibooks, 2007), 75.
4
Attack on the Papal States in 1870
When this corruption has been abolished, then eradicate those secret societies of factious men who, completely opposed to God and to princes, are wholly dedicated to bringing about the fall of the Church, the destruction of kingdoms, and disorder in the whole world. Having cast off the restraints of true religion, they prepare the way for shameful crimes.
— Pope Pius VIII, Traditi humilitati
Napoleon Bonaparte once taunted a Catholic cardinal by threatening: “Your Eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” To which the cardinal quipped: “Your Majesty, we Catholic clergy have done our best to destroy the Church for the last eighteen hundred years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”
From the time of Nero Caesar to the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, the enemies of Christ sought to destroy His Catholic Church by an outward attack of persecution. In every century, these attacks yielded a stronger Church, which confirmed the testimony of Tertullian: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”15
Nero killed Peter and Paul, and the Church in Rome grew. Diocletian implemented the grandest persecution of Christians, and within decades the Roman Empire became majority Christian, even producing the first baptized emperor. It seems to have taken eighteen hundred years for the enemies of the Church to realize that the Catholic Church cannot be destroyed by outward attacks. She must be infiltrated and compromised from within. Persecution by the sword only filled the world with cathedrals and basilicas erected to the honor of the martyrs.
Then, as Judas had betrayed Christ, so the Catholic Church would soon be betrayed by a kiss. The 1800s and 1900s would see the Church attacked by Judas priests from within her own ranks.
* * *
The moral and financial corruption of contemporary Catholicism begins not with the Second Vatican Council, as some Catholics naively insist, but rather with the fall of the Papal States under Pope Pius IX in 1870.
Before we can appreciate the way in which the internal attacks on the Church were launched, we must appreciate the origin and role of the Papal States in protecting the papal office. From the time Constantine moved his capital to Constantinople in A.D. 330, the pope in Rome maintained de facto political autonomy in Rome. The kings of the Franks formally ratified the pope’s political autonomy five hundred years later.
In 751, Pope Zachary crowned Pepin the Short as “King of the Franks” in order to replace the Merovingian king Childeric III. Pope Zachary’s successor, Pope Stephen II, extended the privileges by also granting King Pepin the title “Patrician of the Romans.” King Pepin expressed his gratitude by defeating the Lombards in 754 and transferring their geographical properties to Pope Stephen II and his successors. These new “Papal States” were denoted in Latin as Status Ecclesiasticus, or the “the Church State,” wherein the pope was both spiritual pastor and temporal governor.
In 781, King Pepin’s son Charlemagne confirmed the Papal States as the Duchies of Rome, Ravenna, the Pentapolis, parts of the Duchy of Benevento, Tuscany, Corsica, Lombardy, and a number of Italian cities. The favors and gratitude were mutual when Pope Leo III crowned Charles Magnus, or Charlemagne, as he is commonly known, as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas in 800. This Frankish-Roman arrangement yielded two important kingdoms. There would be an official Papal State that would protect the popes from political invasion by means of geographic insulation around Rome; and there would be a “Holy Roman Empire” that would serve as an allied security guard to protect the Papal State.
From 754 until 1870, the pope of Rome was both the spiritual pontiff and the temporal ruler of the Papal States. Famously, Pope Boniface VIII carried two swords in procession to signify his authority over both the spiritual realm of the Church and the temporal realm of the Papal States. On 18 November 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued the papal bull Unam sanctam, in which he claimed that the pope’s twofold authority derives from the “two swords” kept by Saint Peter at the Last Supper:
“I tell you, Peter, the cock will not crow this day, until you three times deny that you know me.” He said to them, “But now, let him who has a purse take it, and likewise a bag. And let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one. For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was reckoned with transgressors’; for what is written about me has its fulfilment.” And they said, “Look, Lord, here are two swords.” And he said to them, “It is enough.” (Luke 22:34, 36–38).
This became known as the “two swords” theory, and it remained in place until 1798, when troops commanded by Napoleon dissolved the Papal States. The next year, Pope Pius VI died in exile. His successor, Pius VII, was elected in Venice and crowned in a rush with a famous papier-mâché papal tiara. Napoleon allowed Pius VII to return to Rome and restored the Papal States to the pope in 1800 — a fitting millennial anniversary of the pope’s crowning Charlemagne. Napoleon seized the Papal States in 1809, however, and the Congress of Vienna did not return them to the pope until 1814.
From 1814 until 1870, the Papal States were in danger. In 1859, Pope Pius IX ordered that every Low Mass of the Catholic Church end with three Hail Marys, the Salve Regina, a versicle and response, and a collect for the protection of the Church. In February 1849, a Roman Republic was declared, and Pope Pius IX fled Rome. In 1860, Emperor Napoleon III seized much of the Papal States but protected Rome. But with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III withdrew and left Rome vulnerable. King Victor Emmanuel II offered the pope protection. Pope Pius IX refused. Italy declared war against the pope on 10 September 1870. Papal Rome fell on 20 September 1870 after a few hours’ siege. The Kingdom of Italy offered the pope the use of the Vatican and an annual budget of 3.25 million liras. Italy denied the pope’s sovereignty but granted him the right to send and receive ambassadors. Pope Pius IX resolutely rejected this offer. He refused to recognize the new kingdom and excommunicated King Victor Emmanuel II and the Italian parliament for their sacrilegious usurpation.
This was the definitive term
inus of the Papal States — the end of a 1,116-year temporal rule of the pope (754 to 1870). Pope Pius IX declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican. He saw the attack not merely as political but as demonic.
15 Tertullian, Apologeticus, 50.
5
Pope Leo XIII Sees Demons Gather on Rome
As early as 1859, Pope Pius IX decreed that a series of prayers be recited after all Low Masses. Priests and laity were to kneel and pray the Hail Mary three times, followed by the Salve Regina, and then a prayer for the Church.16 The reason for the additions to the Holy Mass is the topic of a conspiracy theory, but in this case, it is a papally acknowledged “conspiracy” of “Socialism and Communism” addressed directly by Pope Pius IX in his encyclical Nostis et nobiscum:
But if the faithful scorn both the fatherly warnings of their pastors and the commandments of the Christian Law recalled here, and if they let themselves be deceived by the present-day promoters of plots, deciding to work with them in their perverted theories of Socialism and Communism, let them know and earnestly consider what they are laying up for themselves. The Divine Judge will seek vengeance on the day of wrath. Until then, no temporal benefit for the people will result from their conspiracy, but rather new increases of misery and disaster. For man is not empowered to establish new societies and unions which are opposed to the nature of mankind. If these conspiracies spread throughout Italy there can only be one result: if the present political arrangement is shaken violently and totally ruined by reciprocal attacks of citizens against citizens by their wrongful appropriations and slaughter, in the end some few, enriched by the plunder of many, will seize supreme control to the ruin of all.”17
Those conspiracies of which Pius IX spoke came to pass, as we have seen, in 1870, but his direct successor, Pope Leo XIII mystically observed an apparition revealing an infiltration deeply demonic and now settling upon Rome itself. Leo XIII identified this satanic infiltration as being accomplished by “secret societies” that foster demonic worship and rebellion. In his 1886 encyclical Quod multum, he refers to this infiltrating work:
Infiltration Page 3