Catholic Church: Vatican to weigh in on the supernatural, Marian apparitions

This Friday, the Vatican will release a document with new norms for discerning Marian apparitions and other supernatural phenomena. CLAIRE GIANGRAVÉ and ALEJA HERTZLER-MCCAIN, of Religion News Service, report…

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Every Sunday, in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, New York, a group of followers of Veronica Lueken, a Catholic housewife who said she saw visions of Mary starting in 1968, gather around a statue of Mary placed on a park bench and pray the rosary. A rival group, which split after Lueken’s 1995 death, gathers on a nearby traffic island.

During her life, Lueken said she received messages that challenged the post-Second Vatican Council Catholic Church and warned people to repent.

Pilgrims pray at the grotto of the Roman Catholic shrine at Lourdes, south-western France, on 11th February, 2022. PICTURE: AP Photo/Bob Edme.

While alleged Marian apparitions are plentiful, most, like Lueken’s, go without official recognition by the Catholic Church. Only 25 per cent of apparitions have been recognised by the local bishop in the church’s 2,000-year history. Of those, the Vatican has only recognised 16.

This Friday, the Vatican will release a document with new norms for discerning Marian apparitions and other supernatural phenomena, the first time those norms have been updated since 1978.

In explaining the importance of Marian shrines, Robert Orsi, who holds the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, cites a gas station attendant in Knock, Ireland, the site of an officially recognised Marian shrine, who told Orsi, “Here the transcendent broke into time.”

The sites are so beloved that people replicate them around the world. The tourism website for Lourdes, another site of a well-known and officially recognised apparition, says there are more than 765 replica sites in France and another 321 in the rest of the world.

At the Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto in the Bronx, near where Orsi grew up, people know the water they’re collecting to take back to their sick relatives or placing on their own bodies is from the city reservoir, but they also believe the water is holy and has some of the power of the water in Lourdes, Orsi said.

“These places are always at once both local and universal,” said Orsi, explaining that Marian apparitions often speak in the regional language, but that Marian devotions are all-inclusive.

Initially, Orsi said, the sites of the apparitions “capture the world’s attention because of their drama.”

But after the apparitions are over and the shrines are built, “they become places for friendship, for travel, for families, for support, for encouragement, for hoping, for dealing with despair and disappointment. They’re really rich sites of relationships,” Orsi said, explaining that the sites can also have political, nationalist and medical meanings.

Pilgrims gather outside the Basilica of Guadalupe on her feast day in Mexico City, on 12th December, 2023. Devotees of Our Lady of Guadalupe gather for one of the world’s largest religious pilgrimages on the anniversary of one of several apparitions of the Virgin Mary witnessed by an Indigenous Mexican man named Juan Diego in 1531. PICTURE: AP Photo/Marco Ugarte.

While the sites of Marian apparitions “help inculcate a Catholic consciousness or a Catholic imaginary” and “increase piety and devotion,” Orsi said they can prove “complicated” for ecclesiastical authorities because “there’s a power to these sites” that can go beyond their control.

Joseph Laycock, an assistant professor of religious studies at Texas State University, agrees the sites pose a particular conundrum for the institutional church.

“Private revelation is always a threat to the authority of the magisterium and the authority of the church,” said Laycock, who has studied Lueken in depth. “On the other hand, it’s also very precious to Catholic tradition.”

After the Second Vatican Council ended in 1965 and led to a host of reforms in the church, “there was kind of a spike of interest in Marian apparitions because a lot of traditionalist Catholics felt the church had kind of turned its back on tradition,” said Laycock. “That’s why in 1978, the church had to finally make some more specific guidelines.”

Those guidelines were not officially available to the public until 2011, possibly in order to prevent people from reverse-engineering approved apparitions, Laycock said. Copies had been, however, leaked before then.

Pope Francis’ devotion to the Virgin Mary and his support for popular piety have both been main features of his pontificate. The Pope was in the parish of Our Lady of Lourdes in his native Buenos Aires when he heard of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. Francis has said in interviews that a woman there yelled: “The Virgin of Lourdes will make you pope!”

But Francis has also been skeptical regarding alleged apparitions and miracles. He voiced doubts about what he described as the “Mail Lady Madonna” of the Shrine of Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where faithful believe the Virgin Mary appears to seers at specific hours since 1981. The popular Marian site never received the stamp of approval by the Vatican.

In 2018, the Pope selected Emeritus Bishop Henryk Hoser to be a permanent papal representative and inspect the apparitions and financial management of Medjugorje. The Pope eventually allowed the pilgrimages to continue, but without confirming the apparitions.

The Pope’s desire to rein in the management of Marian sites became clear in May, 2023, when he created a Pontifical International Marian Academy, a group of experts charged with investigating apparitions and the supernatural. When contacted by Religion News Service, the president of the academy, Rev Stefano Cecchin, said that due to past “slander” by Spanish and American journalists, “who became servants of Satan and consequently of Freemasonry (especially in North America)”, he no longer speaks to the press.

Pope Francis waves as he arrives at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, on 12th May, 2017. PICTURE: Nuno Veiga/Pool.

Paolo Parigi, a sociologist and the author of The Rationalization of Miracles, said, “In general, the posture of the church authority toward (Marian apparitions) is much more skeptical than toward potential miracles from a saint.” The latter are evaluated through a separate formalized process.

“When someone has private revelation,” like witnessing a Marian apparition, “it’s up to the bishop, and this is very much by design,” said Laycock, explaining that the process of approving Marian apparitions is highly political.

“In Lourdes and Fátima, the church had good political reason to approve those apparitions,” Laycock said. In Portugal, the church was facing persecution by a new Portuguese Government.

But in the US, Catholicism has been a minority religion and “viewed as a superstitious religion for immigrants,” Laycock explained.

“It’s not that people are not having private revelations in America. They are. But it’s that usually bishops regard them as an embarrassment,” he said, which means they avoid investigating or talking about them.

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The sole approved Marian apparitions in the US, a series of apparitions to a young woman in Champion, Wisconsin, in 1859, only received that approval in 2010.

While it’s possible the Vatican document will make stricter rules for approving Marian apparitions, Laycock said he has seen traditionalist Catholics on social media expressing approval that the Vatican is taking the supernatural seriously. He also raised the possibility that the document might address exorcisms, saying that, based on his monitoring of US social media, exorcisms are now a major source of private revelation among conservative Catholics.

Recent comments from Vatican leaders hint that tighter restrictions could be coming. The new head of the Vatican’s doctrinal department, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, told OSV News in February that apparitions have led to a rise in abuse cases – financially, spiritually and sexually – tied to “false mysticism.”

An aide adjusts Pope Francis’ cape as he speaks at the Knock Shrine, in Knock, Ireland, on 26th August, 2018. PICTURE: AP Photo/Peter Morrison.

A recent case was the so-called Madonna of Trevignano, a town not far from Rome, where a self-declared “clairvoyant” with a criminal past, Maria Giuseppe Scarpulla, convinced unsuspecting faithful that a statue of Mary wept tears of blood and performed miracles. A private investigator discovered that the blood belonged to a pig, and civil investigations found that believers had paid the mystic over $US100,000.

After a church investigation in 2023, the miracles were deemed nonexistent and the faithful were encouraged to not heed Scarpulla’s words.

Referring to the Madonna of Trevignano case, Francis warned that Marian apparitions are “not always real,” during an interview with Italian Public Television in June 2023. “There are images of the Madonna that are real, but the Madonna has never drawn attention to herself,” the pope said.

“I like to see her with her finger pointing up to Jesus. When Marian devotion is too self-centered, it’s not good. Both in the devotion and in the people who carry it forward,” he added.

Aleja Hertzler-McCain reported from Mount Rainier, Maryland. Claire Giangravè reported from Vatican City.