Mélanie Calvat

Françoise Mélanie Calvat
Mélanie Calvat, 1903, Moulins, France.
Born	7 November 1831 Corps en Isère, France
Died	15 December 1904 (aged 73) Altamura, Italy
Nationality	French
Other names	Sister Mary of the Cross,
Occupation	Roman Catholic Nun
Known for	Visionary of Our Lady of La Salette

Françoise Mélanie Calvat called Mathieu (7 November 1831 Corps, Isère, France - 15 December 1904 Altamura, Italy) was a French Roman Catholic nun and Marian visionary. As a religious, she was called Sister Mary of the Cross.

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 sawyer by trade who did not hesitate to take whatever job he could find because of the large family he had to support, and Julie Barnaud, his wife. The family's poverty was so complete 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 only spoke the regional Occitan dialect and fragmented French. She had neither schooling nor religious instruction and could neither read or write.

On 19 September 1846, it is related that Calvat and Maximin Giraud saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the mountains of La Salette. The apparition transmitted both a public message to them, and a personal message to each of them.

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. Also, the Bishop of Sens had very carefully examined 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.