At 3pm this afternoon in 1846, the Virgin Mary appeared to two alpine village children, Mélanie (15) and Maximin (11), on an 1,800 metre (6,000 ft) mountain in southeast France as they looked after their cows. The children were from La Salette, a poor area with scattered hamlets, and had never been to school. The figure they reported seeing was a woman, her head in her hands quietly weeping, clothed in dazzling white, wearing a crown trimmed with roses. She told them that her Son was very angry at people breaking the sabbath and using his name as a curse word, so angry, in fact, that she was trying to talk him down from smiting the region with a great famine. The report caused a sensation at the time, and a shrine to Mary (above) was built near the site of the vision, which is a place of pilgrimage. Neither Mélanie nor Maximin have been made saints, unlike the children of other apparitions of Mary.
William Kirby, the parson-naturalist, was born today in 1759 in Witnesham, Suffolk. He was the curate and then the rector of St Mary’s Barham, in Suffolk, for 68 years, but in his early 30s he caught the natural history bug and started to collect and write about insects, which became his speciality. He wrote the first scientific book about English bees, the Monographia Apum Angliæ, and is regarded as the father of modern entomology.
‘And here, to trace the footsteps, and elucidate the system of nature, and nature’s God, has invariably been his aim; to discover the wonderful works, and adore the wisdom of his Creator, his highest pleasure; and to point out His meaning, and see things where He has placed them, his single desire.’ William Kirby (speaking of himself in the third person), Monographia Apum Angliæ
John Wesley, the future founder of Methodism, was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on this day in 1725. He was 22 years old. A year later, he wrote to a friend, ‘Leisure and I have taken leave of one another. I propose to be busy as long as I live, if my health is so long indulged me.’ He lived another 66 years.
Confusingly for the middle of September, today is dedicated to St Januarius, an Italian martyr who died somewhere around the year 305. A phial of his dried blood is preserved in Naples Cathedral and exhibited three times a year, when it is said to turn liquid again. He is the patron saint of blood banks, of course.
Igor II of Kiev died today in 1147. He had been the ruler of Kiev for just two weeks when he was usurped by his cousin, and later died when a mob attacked him, even though by then he was a monk. A saint in the Russian Church, he had a striking new church, complete with technicolour onion domes, dedicated to him in 2012.
Image: Net Circlion