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C h a p t e r & V e r s e
La Salette: Sorting Fact From Fiction
By James Akin
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This Rock
Volume 11, Number 1
 January 2000 
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In recent years radical traditionalists have
been attacking the Church using a line allegedly uttered by
Our Lady of La Salette: "Rome will lose the faith and
become the seat of the Antichrist."
My initial inclination is to respond by saying, "Big deal.
Tell me something I don’t already know."
Actually, that’s a little strong. I don’t know that those
things will happen, but I strongly suspect that they will. The
New Testament predicts that before the Second Coming there
will be a great falling away from the faith (2 Thess. 2:3a), and I
imagine that this will apply to the populace of Rome as much
as people in other places.
Scripture also predicts the coming of an individual known as
the Antichrist who will deny that Jesus has come in the flesh (2
John 7). This individual is often identified with the "man of
sin" whom Paul mentions (2 Thess. 2:3b; see this issue’s
cover story for more information), who will demand worship and
persecute the Church, as did some of the early Roman
emperors. As for where this persecuting, emperor-like
individual will be based, Rome is a more likely candidate than
any other city I can name.
I even expect that the worldview of the Church’s persecutors
will be the same as its first ones: a form of paganism.
So the claim that "Rome will lose the faith and become
the seat of Antichrist" doesn’t particularly impress me. It
just means that—in religious terms—the city of Rome in the
last century will be a lot like it was in the first. The Antichrist
will be the head of state, persecuting the Church, and the pope
will be leading the Christian underground, just like Peter in
first-century Rome.
What is absurd is the radical traditionalist claim that the
alleged prophecy of Our Lady of La Salette may be applied to
Rome today. That’s nonsense. Regardless of how tepid the
faith of Italians may be or how many erroneous ideas they
have, they still overwhelmingly identify themselves as
Christian. As long as that’s the case, Italy has not
apostatized.
Radical traditionalists often seem to have a defective
understanding of what counts as apostasy. It is much more
than tepid or weak faith. It is more than just accepting ideas
contrary to the Catholic faith (that’s what heresy is). Apostasy
constitutes a full repudiation of the faith so that one no longer
considers oneself a Christian.
That’s what Scripture has in mind when it talks about there
being a great apostasy. It doesn’t envision Christians by the
truckload abandoning orthodoxy for a heresy but still calling
themselves Christian. It envisions Christians by the truckload
leaving Christianity altogether, which in a first-century context
would mean reverting to either paganism of Judaism.
We will be able to say that the apostasy has occurred when
Christians are being drug again through the streets of Rome to
execution in the Coliseum. Compared to what will happen then,
charges of a present apostasy in Europe are not only
laughable, but insulting to the future, final wave of
martyrs.
In a way, radical traditionalists who charge the Church has
apostatized are committing the Protestant error: To justify their
separation from the Church, Protestant leaders charged it with
having "apostatized" and become a heretical
Church. We know because of Christ’s promise that this cannot
happen (Matt. 16:18), but the claim was made nonetheless.
Radical traditionalists who commit the same error do so for the
same reason: to advance their own cause and—in some
cases—their own schism from the Church.
Another strategy early Protestants used to justify their
separation from the Church was to accuse it of being run by
the Antichrist, whom they identified as the pope. This too is out
of whack with Scripture, which identifies the Antichrist as
someone who claims that Jesus Christ has not come in the
flesh (2 John 7). That’s hard to do if you are the pope, since
your job rests on your being the vicar (representative) of Jesus
Christ until he returns to the earth. Nevertheless, early
Protestants made the claim, as some do today.
Radical traditionalists at times seem to be doing the same
thing. "Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of
Antichrist" is such a tempting, juicy quote that they really
want to apply it to today. But in that case, who could the
Antichrist be?
Well, unless Romano Prodi, the current president of the Italian
Republic, plans to pass some rather sweeping anti-Christian
laws, he’s out of the running. With the absence of an Italian
political leader for the role of Antichrist, radical traditionalists
seem to be suggesting that the pope (either the current one or
one soon to come) fills that role.
Again, this is simply absurd. We’ve already seen that, on the
grounds of justifying his job alone, the pope is the last
person on earth to meet the biblical requirements for the
Antichrist. He also isn’t the kind of political leader the Antichrist
will be.
But there is another reason why you can’t apply the La Salette
prophecy to today: The prophecy itself precludes it. You see,
the prophecy doesn’t consist of just one sentence. It has a lot
of other things to say, including things about the Antichrist.
Among these is the fact that he is not a pope but a military or
political figure that the "secret" contrasts
with the pope.
First, a little background. The apparition of Our Lady of La
Salette occurred in 1846. The visionaries were two children in
France named Maximin Giraud and Melanie Calvat. The local
bishop approved the apparition in 1851, and that same year
the two children were persuaded to write down information the
Virgin Mary had given them. The question of what these
"secrets" contained was on many people’s minds,
and the children were relentlessly pestered to reveal the
information. It was not until 1851, when they were asked to
write down the secrets so that they could be given to the pope,
that they complied.
Afterwards, Maximin never revealed his secret. He is reported
to have claimed that Mary told him that he would become a
millionaire, that the Antichrist would slay him, and that the next
pope would be French. None of those things happened, and
scholars generally conclude that they were stories Maximin
made up in an attempt to stop people from pestering him about
the secret. When texts alleging to be Maximin’s secret began
to appear in the press (some of which are demonstrably false),
the frustrated seer refused to either confirm or deny that they
were his, saying it was the pope’s responsibility to decide
whether the secret should be revealed.
Melanie’s story is different. Over the years she apparently did
begin revealing pieces of her secret to others, and in 1879 she
published the whole thing.
The trouble is, what she wrote in 1851 consisted of only three,
hand-written pages. The booklet she produced in 1879 was
much longer than this, and undoubtedly contains ideas that
were not part of the secret sent to the pope. So, while
Melanie’s 1879 publication may have been based on her
original secret, it undoubtedly contains elements not in the
original, and we cannot tell which elements are which. That
raises a concern about the "Rome will lose the
faith" line. It may not have been in the secret sent to the
pope.
There is another problem: Some of the prophecies contained in
Melanie’s secret are demonstrably false. They’re too specific,
they’re tied to the nineteenth century, and they didn’t
happen.
For example, here is the main passage about the Antichrist:
"In the year 1865 the abomination shall be seen in Holy
Places in Convents, and then the demon shall make himself as
the king of hearts. It will be about that time that Antichrist shall
be born. At his birth he shall vomit b.asphemies. He shall have
teeth; in a word, he shall be like an incarnate demon; he shall
utter frightful screams; he shall work prodigies; and he shall
feed on impure things. He shall have brothers who, though not
incarnate demons like him, shall nevertheless be children of
iniquity. At the age of twelve years they shall have become
remarkable for valiant victories, which they shall achieve; very
soon each of them will be at the head of armies. Paris shall be
burned, and Marseilles shall be submerged; many great cities
shall be shattered and swallowed up by earthquakes. The
populace will believe that everything is lost, will see nothing but
murder, and will hear only the clang of arms and sacrilegious
b.asphemies."
Well, now that we’re in the year 2000, either there is a
135-year-old guy out there somewhere—with brothers who
won great battles as the heads of armies in the 1880s in a war
that everyone seems to have forgotten about—or else what
Melanie published as her "secret" from Our Lady of
La Salette contains elements that are false.
Radical traditionalists are being duplicitous when, in an attempt
to frighten people, they quote the line about Rome and the
Antichrist without supplying the context that reveals that
Melanie’s published version of the "secret"
established for itself a timeframe that has already
passed.
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