Chapter 72. Our Lady/Notre Dame: Mary
In 1814 Pope Pius VII, with Solicitudo Omnium Ecclesiarum, reestablished the Society of Jesus. In 1830 Catherine Laboure, a person who claimed to have a “personal angel,” received a Mary apparition in Paris. In 1846, two children in the French Alps, Melanie and Maxim Mathieu, encountered a brilliant light that enveloped a woman claiming she was the Virgin Mary. The early nineteenth-century apparitions (and reestablished Jesuit Order) bolstered the Mary movement within the Catholic Church, demanding a proclamation of “Mary’s Immaculate Conception.”
Pius IX, a devout believer in the “Blessed Virgin,” issued letters in 1849 soliciting views on Immaculate Conception. In 1854 Pius IX “proclaimed the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin as a church dogma in the Ineffabilis Deus (indescribable God).” With a stroke of the pen “Mary was preserved exempt from the stain of all original sin at the moment of her animation, and sanctifying grace was given to her before sin could have taken effect in her soul”; thus, sin “was never in her soul” as the “new Eve who was to be the mother of the new Adam.” In 1858, eighteen Mary apparitions of Our Lady of Lourdes manifested in southern France, as witnessed by fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous. After Bernadette was pressed by officials to ask the apparition’s name, the spirit responded to Bernadette with nothing but a “cryptic smile.” On the fourth asking, the apparition said, “Que soy era Immaculada Councepiou (I am the Immaculate Conception),” speaking in perfect Occitan dialect. Lourdes is located in the Occitanic region of Catalunya, Basque, Aragon, and Rennes Le Château—home of the Templars, Cathars, Albigensian, Essenes, Alain, Merovingians, and Mary Magdalene.
Further, Lourdes was occupied with people who spoke the Bigourdian/Bergundian dialect of French, who worshipped a goddess of water, the cognate goddess of their Ligurian neighbors, Marja Gambustas that was known in short form as Morgana, “the personification of an all-powerful spirit that protected grottos and replenished the land’s springs.” Morgana was the transliterated Roman Greek goddess Diana of the Tuatha De Danaan. Two-thousand-year-old Diana temples populated Occitan just west of Lourdes.
