OUR LADY OF THE POOR

Day 248: January 15

Our Lady of the Poor, The apparitions and messages of Banneaux, Belgium

Banneux is a small village in the Ardennes, Belgium, just over twenty kilometers from the city of Liège. It is a village of poor people, made up of just 325 souls, almost all miners in charge of peat bogs and lumberjacks who came from outside to exploit the great forests of the Ardennes. In a hamlet of Banneux, called La Fange (The Mud), Julien Beco, who had married Louise Wégimont in 1920, had set up her home. A year later, on March 25, 1921, Good Friday, Mariette was born, the first of eleven children.

The little girl, as the eldest child, often found herself in the need to help her family. At school she was two years late compared to her peers due to the many absences due to family commitments and also to the catechism, in which she enrolled on May 20, 1931. She turned out to be the worst in the class, so much so that she provoked the chaplain's complaints. However, no one in the family cared about these things, at the Beco house, among other things, there was an atmosphere of complete religious indifference at that time. A rather common attitude among the inhabitants of Banneux, where disbelief and agnosticism, fueled by vague "socialist" ideals, were widespread.

On January 15, 1933, exactly 12 days after the end of the Beauraing apparitions, snow and ice covered "la Fange", the wind blowing icy and sharp. It was about 7 O'clock in the evening. A little girl of just over eleven years old, Mariette Beco, was looking through the kitchen windows, from which you could see the vegetable garden, the road and the fir forest. From afar she spied on the return of her brother Julien, who had left the house with some friends since morning, and in the meantime she watched over the sleep of the last born, who slept blissfully in the cradle. Suddenly she saw the figure of a beautiful Lady in the garden. She was upright, motionless, shining, with her hands clasped and her head slightly tilted to the left.

"Oh mom," she exclaims, "there's a Lady in the garden!" She did not take her very seriously but then looking out the window she realized that her daughter did not tell stories, in fact she too saw that prodigious apparition. Mrs. Beco, seeing that luminous figure, which had the shape of a person and seemed to have a white sheet on her head. She was frightened and closed the curtains.

Mariette, taking courage, glanced out again and saw the Lady smiling at her again. He took a rosary that she had found only a few days earlier along the road to Tancrémont and began to recite the rosary while contemplating the apparition with amazement. As she prayed, she had the impression that the Lady outside the window was also moving her lips as if she were praying. The beautiful Lady beckoned her to go to her, Mariette then left the window preparing to go out, but her mother, very frightened, prevented her by locking the door of the house. Mariette returned to the window, but the Lady had already disappeared.

On Tuesday, January 17, Mariette went to Don Jamin, her parish priest, and told him what had happened. The priest said that perhaps she only saw the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, but Mariette insisted that the Lady she saw was much more beautiful. Don Jamin, although not convinced by Mariette's story, was nevertheless amazed by the fact that suddenly the little girl had resumed going to Mass and attending catechism after several months of absence.

On January 18 at 7:00 p.m., Mariette left the house, knelt near the gate and began the recitation of the Rosary. Suddenly, the Virgin appeared between two tall pines. Mariette saw as a form that grew and became brighter as it approached; until it stopped right in front of her suspended on a gray cloud about half a meter above the ground. The Lady joined in the prayer of the little girl. Mariette then got up and following the indications of the Virgin, who signaled her to follow her, she left the gate of the courtyard of the house and headed towards the street. Here, falling to her knees with a dull thud three times, she went into ecstasy; Our Lady then asked Mariette to dip her hand in a stream that was nearby. People heard them repeat aloud the words that Our Lady told them: "This stream is reserved for Me" and then "Good evening."

Immediately afterwards the Lady rose among the pines and disappeared. Meanwhile, Mariette's father, Julien Beco, went to look for Don Jamin, but he was in Liège that evening. When the priest returned home, he was told what had happened and immediately went to the Beco house; there, however, he found Mariette already in bed. As Don Jamin was about to leave, the child's father asked him to be able to see him the next day to return to the sacraments. The priest was very surprised by this because some time earlier, praying for a sign to prove the veracity of the apparitions, he had asked for the conversion of Mariette's father.

On the evening of January 19th, accompanied this time by her father, Mariette left the house and once in the garden she knelt, despite the ground covered with snow, and prayed a couple of decades of the rosary in a low voice. When at a certain point she stretched her arms towards the sky and shouted: "Here it is!" After a moment of silence, she asked: "Who are you, beautiful Lady?" The Lady replied: "I am the Virgin of the Poor."

Then Our Lady guided the child to the spring. There Mariette fell to her knees again three times and asks again: "Beautiful Lady, yesterday you said: this spring is reserved for me. Why for me?"

Saying thus, she brought her hand to her chest, pointing to herself. Our Lady's smile was accentuated even more and she replied that that spring "is for all nations... for the sick..." At the end of that brief apparition that would last about seven minutes, Mariette repeated the last words of the Lady: "I will pray for you. Goodbye."

St Justin Russolillo Writes...

"We unite ourselves, O Mary, to the Saints and the Angels, especially to your Holy Parents, Joachim and Anne and to your Spouse, Joseph, in greeting you on behalf of the Blessed Trinity, for all eternity: "Full of Grace, the Lord is with you, O Mary"."

(Justin Russolillo, Spirit of Prayer, trans. Louis Caputo, Vocationist Fathers, Newark, 1996, p. 154)