The Anniversary of Pontmain

Pontmain Basilica (www.sanctaire-de-pontmain.com).

The 17th January 2021 was the 150th anniversary of the apparition of Mary at Pontmain in France. This is the kind of thing you notice when you have studied apparitions!

Pontmain was a small village in 1871; now it has a basilica and many visitors. Finding out about events such as the apparition at Pontmain opens up a whole new field of history, which can be fascinating.

1871 was an extremely important year in European history. The villagers of Pontmain were worried about the advance of the Prussian army which had swept through Normandy. Prussia (northern Germany) was at war with France and had invaded it. Pontmain is just on the Normandy side of the border with another French region, Brittany, and, at the time, on the main road west.

In Pontmain, the Virgin Mary was seen by children who claimed she had told them that God would answer their prayers. The apparition became famous because the Prussian army ceased its advance very soon afterwards, and an armistice was signed before the end of January to bring the war to a halt. The villagers of Pontmain and the surrounding area would be saved from invasion while the whole of Brittany remained untouched.

Nevertheless, the French had lost the war with Prussia. The war between France and Prussia was the final trigger in the creation of two nations which would become very influential in Europe: Germany and Italy. Prussia joined with the southern German regions to become a single German state; the victories of Prussia against Austria (1866) and France (1870-1) established it as the most powerful of the German regions and its capital, Berlin, became the capital of all Germany. Further south, Italian revolutionaries finally defeated the papal armies and captured Rome.

In France, Emperor Napoleon III was displaced by defeat in the war and France became a republic for the third time; it would never again be ruled by a king or emperor. But the shift of power from France to Germany on mainland Europe would begin a process leading to the two World Wars in twentieth century Europe. Britain, which earlier in the nineteenth century had been the enemy of Napoleon I and the ally of Prussia, was always hostile to a single power dominating Europe. In 1871, Germany emerged as the dominant military force in Europe and it aspired to be the equal of Britain as a colonial power. France, to protect itself, eventually formed an alliance with Russia which Britain joined in the early twentieth century. Hence from 1871 onwards, Europe was on the slippery slope to the Great War.

Pontmain was an insignificant village but its inhabitants were, like many others across Europe, standing at the beginning of a new age in Europe. It was not a comfortable era for traditional Catholicism. Apparitions are often taken more seriously in times of crisis, and Pontmain began to receive its first pilgrims. It proclaimed a message of hope in a difficult time. Although Pontmain would never achieve the status of a shrine like Lourdes or Fatima, it has continued to welcome pilgrims from 1871 and still does now, 150 years later.