Approval, and a Secret That Would Not Stay Secret

The bishop of Grenoble opened a formal canonical investigation into the La Salette apparition and, on 19 September 1851, exactly five years after the event itself, declared the apparition worthy of belief and authorized devotion to Our Lady of La Salette, a judgment that remains the church's official position. Maximin Giraud lived a largely unremarkable adult life and never published his own secret before his early death, but Melanie Calvat's path diverged sharply. She entered religious life, moved between several convents in France and Italy, and in 1879, decades after the original apparition, published her own version of her secret, a lengthy and apocalyptic text warning of the Antichrist, corrupted clergy and coming disaster, presented as the message she had withheld since childhood. Church authorities never endorsed this extended published text as an authentic part of the original 1846 revelation, and it was received with considerably more official caution than the core apparition itself, read by many church figures as reflecting Melanie's own later spiritual and psychological development rather than as an authenticated continuation of what she had actually heard on the mountain as a child. She died in 1904, her account of the original event unchanged even as the published secret remained a point of ongoing dispute.