The Tears of the Blessed Virgin: “The Cross Will be Despised and Overthrown …”

Statue at La Salette in France, where Our Lady appeared weeping for the modern world …

‘The sickness of the West today is that it is more and more lacking creative élan.

The Reformation, rationalism, the French revolution, materialistic faith of the nineteenth century, and the Bolshevik revolution, show that everywhere mankind is turning away from the Virgin.

The consequence of this is that the sources of creative spiritual élan are drying up, one after the other, and that an increasing aridity is showing up in all domains of the spiritual life of the West.

It is said that the West is growing old. But why? Because it lacks creative élan, because it has turned away from the source of creative élan, because it has turned away from the Virgin.’

So writes Valentin Tomberg in his mysterious and deeply Catholic Meditations on the Tarot.

In doing so, he also expresses some of the deepest concerns of  this website.

For this website is a cry in the arid desert of Secular Materialism.

And it is an expression of my ongoing attempt to understand how we created this aridity  – and where we need to turn to restore it to a living garden of culture once more.

All my efforts to understand lead ever more in the direction that Valentin Tomberg points to as the source: the ‘turning away’ that manifested itself in “the Reformation, rationalism, the French revolution” etc.

And my years of living in France and study of French history only continually re-emphasise how much the secular sickness of the West owes to the French Revolution and the innumerable later revolutions it begat.

Video from Authors of this Website (post continues below).

I have written of this much here – including in an illustrated travelogue of ‘French Fragments’ that I published here of journeys through France.

And there I have indicated how clear it became to me that modern, secular France – which personally I find so terribly materialistic – only prospered by the calculated, determined attempt to eradicate the French Catholic culture that had previously existed.

Secularism did not evolve naturally in France. It required enormous amounts of skulduggery, repression, persecution of the Church, appropriation of her property, forced exile of her priests and religious, massacre – even ‘scorched earth’ genocide in the case of those Vendée Catholics who fought on behalf of Altar and Throne.

Recently all of this came even more sharply into focus via an old out-of-copyright book I recently discovered – The Blessed Virgin in the Nineteenth Century: Apparitions, Revelations, Graces by Bernard St John.

For the book has great value not only for understanding ‘how we created this desert’  as I said above, but also where I feel ‘we need to turn to restore this desert to a living garden of culture.’

In the meantime, we will be publishing some extracts from the book here in our Tridentine Archive.

The extracts will have to do with the response of the Blessed Virgin to the French Revolution. For after that Revolution commenced in 1789, it is a remarkable fact that in France alone, the Blessed Virgin appeared at least four times in the following hundred years.

At least four times: I speak of the four great approved Marian Apparitions of the Nineteenth Century in France.

First in 1830, Our Lady appeared to St Catherine Labouré in the Rue du Bac, Paris, bringing the Miraculous Medal. And weeping for the world, she appeared in La Salette in 1846. Then in Lourdes she came in 1858. And the final approved apparition came in Pontmain in 1871.

Through Providence, I had the Grace of pilgrimage to all these places. And the result in my soul is that I am forever marked.

I have spoken about this before and will say more in the future. For the moment, I mainly want to recall what I once said here about La Salette:

“La Salette! I have been writing at this site about my journeys with Kim through Catholic France. And La Salette made a very, very profound impression on me.

For La Salette contrasted powerfully with the other sites graced by the Mother of God which I visited, for example the Rue du Bac in Paris where Our Lady brought instructions for the Miraculous Medal and Lourdes where Our Lady brought forth miraculous healing water.

If Lourdes then is a site evoking joy, La Salette is very, very different.

For there Our Lady appeared weeping and on the site high in the mountains where the Blessed Virgin appeared to the shepherd children, there are statues.

There is a statue of Mary Mother of God as she appeared, head bent, back bowed down in grief.

And at the base of the statue, I witnessed something I will never forget. I saw crowds of people come and go, not in the happy chatter one might see at Lourdes. But silent and solemn.

This was not within the quiet interior of a church. The statue of Our Lady is outside and there was beautiful sunshine. But the people clustered round Her statue seemed unusually sober.

I could not help but feel that many of us who gathered there felt quietly called to look solemnly at our own sin and failing.”