La que llora: Nuestra Señora de La Salette

by Léon Bloy, Juan Manuel de Prada (Foreword), Almudena Montojo Micó (Translator)

En las páginas de La que llora, el afamado escritor católico Léon Bloy reflexiona sobre una de las apariciones marianas más enigmáticas y desconocidas de la historia de la la que tuvo lugar, ante dos humildísimos pastorcillos, a mediados del siglo XIX en la población alpina de La Salette. «Para Bloy, el discurso de La Salette es “el suspiro más doloroso escuchado desde el Consummatum”; y su olvido por parte de los hombres de su generación, una prueba incontestable de que la Humanidad se ha internado en las tinieblas del Viernes Santo, donde “la realidad aparente es el fracaso de Dios en la tierra, la inutilidad de la Redención”. ¿De qué le ha valido a Dios –se pregunta nuestro autor—morir de forma tan espeluznante para encontrarse, diecinueve siglos después, con “los demonios del catolicismo actual”? Bloy arremete contra los católicos ñoños que demandan a la Virgen palabras dulces y no pueden soportar que su boca profiera amenazas tan rotundas como las que se escucharon en La Salette. “Hoy es el tiempo —escribe, mojando su pluma en la sangre profética que manaba de su corazón— de los demonios tibios y pálidos, el tiempo de los cristianos sin fe, de los cristianos afables”. Y esta sentimentalidad devota, a su juicio, está desvirtuando la propia fe, que quiere una Reina del cielo “coronada de rosas, pero no de espinas”; que exige que la hiel y el vinagre del Calvario sean edulcorados para poder digerirlos; que, en fin, no quiere escuchar el mensaje escatológico de La Salette porque no soporta enfrentarse a tribulaciones sin cuento, antes de merecer la dicha de la Segunda Venida de Cristo. Una sentimentalidad devota que tal vez prefiera olvidar esa Segunda Venida, con tal de evitarse las tribulaciones que la precederán. ¿No está Bloy, en realidad, anticipando las delicuescencias de cierto catolicismo contemporáneo?» (Del prólogo de Juan Manuel de Prada).

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1908

About the author

Bloy was born in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, in the arondissement of Périgueux, Dordogne. He was the second of six sons of Voltairean freethinker and stern disciplinarian Jean Baptiste Bloy and his wife Anne-Marie Carreau, pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier. After an agnostic and unhappy youth in which he cultivated an intense hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and its teaching, his father found him a job in Paris, where he went in 1864. In December 1868, he met the aging Catholic author Barbey d'Aurevilly, who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and became his mentor. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion.

Bloy's works reflect a deepening devotion to the Catholic Church and most generally a tremendous craving for the Absolute. His devotion to religion resulted in a complete dependence on charity; he acquired his nickname ("the ungrateful beggar") as a result of the many letters requesting financial aid from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, all the while carrying on with his literary work, in which his eight-volume Diary takes an important place.

Bloy was a friend of the author Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter Georges Rouault, and the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and was instrumental in reconciling these intellectuals with Roman Catholicism. However, he acquired a reputation for bigotry because of his frequent outbursts of temper; and his first novel, Le Désespéré, a fierce attack on rationalism and those he believed to be in league with it, made him fall out with the literary community of his time and even many of his old friends. Soon, Bloy could count such prestigious authors as Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Ernest Renan, Alphonse Daudet, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget and Anatole France as his enemies.

In addition to his published works, he left a large body of correspondence with public and literary figures. He died in Bourg-la-Reine.

Reviews

[cadfael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scathingly sweet.

[Richard Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

She continues to weep, but not over this book, which is like an unblemished altar to the memory of Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, but particularly Mélanie Calvat. One has to admire the undying conviction of such (uncanonized) "saints."

The blurb for this book on Goodreads says that this is the "first English translation" but it turns out that it is not. Nevertheless, it appears to be the only one currently in circulation.