Mélanie Calvat

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.

Biography

Early age

Calvat was born on November 7, 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.