Enfield
The stair project, funded by the family of the late Brother Claude Rheaume, comes just three years after La Salette’s parent order considered shuttering the shrine.
“I want it to be a center of reconciliation,” Sullivan said of the Route 4A complex. “We want to cure what separates us from God.”
Rheaume’s family donated several thousand dollars to the shrine after Claude died of cancer in 2017. At the time, the stairs posed a serious tripping hazard.
“We decided as a community that this would be a good place to invest it,” Sullivan said.
The La Sallette missionaries trace their existence to an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the namesake French Alpine community in 1846. Two shepherd children, Maximin and Melanie, claimed to have encountered a woman sitting on a rock, in period dress, crying. The bishop of nearby Grenoble deemed it a visit from Mary.
“She only appeared once,” Sullivan said, calling it “the only apparition that I know of that the mother of God appeared weeping.”
Many of those in attendance Sunday were Haitian-Americans visiting from a pair of partner churches in the Boston area: St. Mary in Randolph, Mass., and St. Charles Borromeo in Waltham, Mass.
One visitor wore a blue T-shirt with a phrase from the Gospel of Luke, “Rien n’est impossible à Dieu,” printed on the back: Nothing is impossible to God. The woman, Ruth Bonnet, said she was excited to be celebrating the life of Mary. “She’s so kind, such a sweet mother,” she said. “She’s your mother, too.”
Fellow Haitian immigrant Michaelle Sylvestre came to the U.S. in the 1980s, attended the now-defunct Mount Ida College in Newton, Mass., and decided with her husband to remain in the States. “We love Boston, so we stayed,” she said.
She is one year into a four-year term as a liaison between a group of Boston-area parishes and the city’s archdiocese. She said she meets with the cardinal every three months to pass on whatever concerns or complaints she’s received.
Sylvestre had visited the Enfield shrine before and was planning to return again in December to see its annual Christmas light display.
“I feel very welcome here,” she said. “I think I feel blessed. It is a blessing, and it is also an encouragement to keep on doing good.”
Sylvestre was accompanied on Sunday by 53 other Haitian-Americans, who cooked lunch — fall-off-the-bone chicken, boiled plantain, and rice — and filled the shrine cafeteria with a melange of English, Creole, and French.
A priest from southern New Hampshire, the Rev. Marc Montminy, led the morning Mass, part of a weekend-long observance of the 172nd anniversary of the La Salette apparition.
Montminy described the apparition as an example of God choosing “the weak of the world to confound the strong.” He said, “Look at these two little children: they didn’t even go to church,” adding the jab, “just like kids today.”
He grounded his remarks in Mary’s “Seven Sorrows,” describing them as “in sync with what moms today experience, and dads.”
“Mary watched her son set out on a path that from the very beginning was going to be perilous,” Montminy said.
He cited addiction to opioids and pornography and shifting family priorities as phenomena distancing today’s youth from God.
“Think of sports on Sundays: years ago it was a sacred day,” he said. “Parents are caught between sports and religion. What do they choose? Sports.
“People will say to me, father, I’m spiritual, but not religious, whatever that means.”
After Communion, the crowd, including members of the Knights of Columbus dressed in full regalia, gathered outside beneath the hot sun. Upon blessing the stairs, Sullivan echoed Montminy’s lament: “It’s not easy to be a Christian today,” he said. “It takes a lot of work.”
Nonetheless, three years after the threat of closing loomed over the La Salette Shrine, Sullivan said he believes its future is secure.
The community recently renovated a residence and repainted two barns. Sullivan said they also intend to cut down some dying fir trees and build a “peace garden” in their place.
Sullivan wants to broaden the shrine’s appeal, too. He lived for almost two decades in Argentina, where he became fluent in Spanish, a skill he uses to deliver monthly Spanish-language Masses.
In addition to the chapel and prayer garden, the La Salette complex includes a gift store that sells greeting cards, books, CDs and religious items.