The apparition Maximin witnessed as an eleven year old cowherd founded an institution that has now outlived him by more than a century. Bishop Philibert de Bruillard of Grenoble established the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette in 1852, explicitly as a permanent remembrance of the reported 1846 apparition and a vehicle for spreading its call to reconciliation, and the congregation remains an active Roman Catholic religious institute today, numbering more than a thousand members organized into provinces across North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa, with its general house in Rome. La Salette missionaries staff parishes, shrines, schools and missions in dozens of countries, including sustained work among the poor in Angola, Haiti, India, Madagascar, the Philippines and Tanzania, and the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Attleboro, Massachusetts, opened in 1953, draws hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to its Festival of Lights. Maximin himself never joined the congregation his own testimony helped found; his adult life, unlike Melanie's, included no religious vocation, only a series of unsettled occupations before his death in 1875. The institution his childhood account helped establish has proved considerably more durable than his own subsequent life, continuing his witness's public reach long after he had stopped being actively connected to it.