cafetimes1991
06-08-2009, 03:36 PM
Have just been reading through this interesting article (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/marian_apparitions.aspx).
Here's some of it...
The Marian Apparitions: Divine Intervention or Delusion?
By Miriam Lambouras
No results returned. This may be due to a temporary Google Search Service problem or because the site has exceeded its daily limit. Please try again later or use the link, below.
More related articles on Google!...
The following article is one that we have wanted to publish for a long time as we believe that its message is timely and important. We hesitated as it was submitted just after we had begun St Nicolas Varzhansky's "Whole Armour of Truth," and we did not want to have two long and serialized pieces, both confessional in content, running together. Now we are nearing the end of St Nicolas' work and pleased to present "Marian Apparitions. " The work will be lengthy but we feel that it is well worth it. It began as a result of a correspondence between the writer and our brotherhood. She was troubled, as we had been too, by the fact that many Orthodox Christians seem indiscriminately to make pilgrimages to Marian shrines and that sometimes churches and parishes actively sponsor these pilgrimages. She asked for guidance, but it soon became clear that her knowledge of the subject was much more extensive than our own and that her perceptions were entirely Orthodox. We have been instructed by her work and hope others will be also. Perhaps one day the whole work might be published, as it well deserves, as a booklet. The writer, a long-time correspondent with our brotherhood and friend, is a convert to Holy Orthodoxy and member of the Russian Patriarchal Cathedral Parish at Ennismore Gardens, in London. (From the editors of The Shepherd, where this article first appeared.)
APART FROM WALSINGHAM in my distant Anglican days, the Marian shrines had never really interested me. I was of course aware of some of the most important ones—Lourdes, Fatima, and more recently Medjugorje—, and knew that while many people (the vast majority being Roman Catholics, of course) considered these apparitions a direct sign from Heaven, others (mainly Protestant) considered them some kind of hallucination or even demonic delusion. Not being a member of the Roman Catholic Church, I felt under no obligation or inclination to give them much thought. But learning that an Orthodox priest had been on pilgrimage to Lourdes, and that the wife of another Orthodox priest organized an annual visit by a group of Orthodox women to Lourdes, my interest was aroused, and I began to feel a strong compulsion to take a closer look at the Marian apparitions and their shrines.
Books by Roman Catholic authors were the main source of my information concerning the apparitions and the shrines. I was extremely surprised to find how numerous they were, and in the end confined myself to just fifteen, with a special look at the Miraculous Medal, La Salette, Lourdes, Fatima, Garabandal, Zeitoun, Medjugorje, Hriushiw. Walsingham I did not consider at all, since it seems to be in a somewhat different category, in that its raison d'etre is a straightforward honouring of the mystery of the Incarnation, with the Son of God as the central figure. The staunchest Protestant could hardly quarrel with that intention, however much he might disapprove of the particular way in which the honour is rendered.
The more I read the more convinced I became that the whole issue was considerably more complex than a straight choice between Divine revelation on the one hand and demonic delusion on the other. Several other factors seemed to play a part in varying degrees of significance at different shrines—psychological factors, the question of ecclesiastical manipulation and papal involvement, nationalist and political elements, the presence of something much older than Christianity, namely the worship of the goddess, and finally, the possibility of a link-up with New Age syncretism and neo-paganism.
One aspect that particularly interested me, and to which little attention seems to have been given, was the question of solar phenomena witnessed at most of the apparition sites from Fatima onwards. I had no idea that this would lead me into the realm of UFOs!
Any conclusion that I finally reached—and sometimes there seemed to be more questions than answers, and many loose ends which did not tie up, are purely the result of my own personal reasonings. It may well be that those who are far more competent to judge these matters than I am would interpret things in a different light. All along it was more an exploration than anything else. When I began, I really had no idea where it would eventually lead.
A brief resume of the shrines mentioned above may be of help in giving a general background.
Some Marian Apparitions
1) Around 1295, Duns Scotus, a Scottish Franciscan at Oxford, was defending the Immaculate Conception against Thomas Aquinas and the Dominicans. By 1708, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception was declared to be a universal holy day of obligation. In 1830, Catherine Laboure, a young nun in Paris, had a vision of the so-called Miraculous Medal. She was prone to visions, having already seen the heart of St Vincent, Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and Christ the King. Being greatly desirous of seeing the Blessed Virgin also, she requested the intercession of St Vincent and her wish was granted. A small child in white (her guardian) led her to the convent chapel late at night, where she saw, spoke with, and touched the Lady. Later in the year, the Lady, dressed in white, stood in the chapel with a serpent beneath her feet, surrounded by an oval frame with the words, "Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us, who have recourse to you." A voice instructed Catherine to have a medal struck, which would give great graces to the wearers. The reverse of the Medal was to show an "M," surmounted by a cross, together with the hearts of Jesus and Mary. Catherine continued to hear the voice of the Lady in her prayers. The Medal was a huge success, and led to an increased confidence in the prayers of the Virgin, the Mediatrix of all graces, and a growing popular demand to have the Immaculate Conception made an official dogma. While wearing the Medal to humour a Catholic friend, the Jewish convert, later Fr Marie-Alphonse Ratisbone was converted in 1842 after seeing a vision of the Virgin of the Miraculous Medal. (His brother was already a Roman Catholic priest). He devoted the rest of his life to the conversion of the Jews and built the Ecce Homo Convent of the Sisters of Zion in the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem.
2) In 1842 at La Salette, in France, two cowherds, an eleven year old boy, Maximin, and a fourteen year old girl, Melanie, saw a sudden flash of light from which a lady appeared, dressed in white and gold, with a cap of roses on her head. She was surrounded by a brilliant light and was weeping. The Lady complained that Sunday was being desecrated and the peasants were blaspheming the saints in swearing. (The Cure d'Ars and other clergy were regularly complaining about these very sins in their sermons). If there was no amendment, there would be great disasters—the harvest would fail and people would starve—as the Lady could no longer restrain her Son from inflicting punishment. The discourse of the apparition was very similar to a "Leter [sic] Fallen from Heaven" circulating at the time. The parish priest declared the Lady to be the Blessed Virgin; the apparitions were later approved by the Bishop of Grenoble, and pilgrimages began. Melanie became a nun and continued to receive visions and revelations. Maximin tried unsuccessfully to become a priest and was always in debt.
3) In 1854, the Immaculate Conception became an official article of faith in the Roman Catholic Church. Just four years later, in 1858, a series of visions took place from February 11th to July 16th, which would result in the establishment of the most famous of Marian shrines. At the grotto of Massabielle at Lourdes, the fourteen year old Bernadette Soubirous saw "something white in the shape of a girl." Under questioning she elaborated this to a "pretty young girl in white dress and veil, with a blue sash and a yellow rose on each foot." Later still, she said the vision most resembled "the Blessed Virgin in the parish church for the clothes and the face ... but alive and surrounded by light." The Lady, who carried a rosary over her arm, spoke in the local dialect, in a very polite manner, and, called for penance. Bernadette was given three "secrets," asked to pray for the conversion of sinners and told that the Lady promised to make her happy not in this world but in the next. The apparition asked for a procession and a chapel, and instructed Bernadette to dig for a spring, which was already known to exist. Bernadette recited the rosary and went into trances. The Lady announced her name as "I am the Immaculate Conception," thereby confirming the recently defined dogma. In the following October, the ecclesiastical authorities took charge, the results being that the apparitions were confirmed as of the Blessed Virgin, the cult of Our Lady of Lourdes was authorized, and plans were put in motion for building a sanctuary. In 1933, Bernadette was canonized.
4) In August 1879, fifteen people aged from six to seventy-five years old saw an apparition at the south gable of the parish church at Knock, in Ireland. The vision was in the form of a tableau, with an altar on which stood a Lamb, with angels hovering overhead, and three figures—the Virgin crowned, St Joseph and St John the Evangelist dressed as a bishop and apparently preaching. The figures were a little way out from the church wall and about two feet above the ground. They were motionless, except that from time to time they receded and then moved out again. No word was spoken. Some of the witnesses remained for up to two hours in the pouring rain, reciting the rosary. This is the only known apparition of the Lamb. An international runway was eventually built in anticipation of huge numbers of pilgrims, but somehow the shrine never achieved great popularity. In 1954 Pope Plus XII blessed the Knock banner at St Peter's and gave permission for the crowning of Our Lady of Knock. In 1960, John XXIII presented a blessed candle, and in 1967 Paul VI renewed indulgences to pilgrims and those connected with the shrine. John Paul II visited Knock in the centenary year, raised the church to the status of a basilica, and presented the Golden Rose.
5) In 1917, at Cova da Iria, near the village of Fatima in Portugal, three cousins who were all young peasant shepherds—Lucia, aged ten, Francisco aged nine, and Jacinta aged seven—saw flashes like lightning after which "a pretty little lady" appeared above a tree, who said she had come "from Heaven." The children were told to come to the same spot on the thirteenth day of the month for the next six months, then they would be told who the Lady was and what she wanted. In reply to Lucia's questions, she said that Lucia and Jacinta would go to Heaven, also Francisco, but he would "have to say many rosaries." One little friend of the children who had recently died was in Heaven, but another was in Purgatory "till the end of the world." The boy Francisco could not see the vision at first and never heard anything. Jacinta both saw and heard, but never spoke to the Lady. On other occasions they were told to say the rosary and pray especially to be "saved from the fires of hell." Lucia was told "secrets" and saw a terrifying vision of bell. The Lady promised to work a miracle in October. Lucia was beaten by her mother for telling lies, and the local atheist administrator interrogated the children and imprisoned them for two days, but they continued to stick to their story.
On October 13th, a day of pouring rain, a crowd of seventy thousand people assembled at the Cova, expecting the promised miracle. According to a Roman Catholic priest, they were highly excited, kneeling, weeping and praying. The Lady appeared, announcing that she was Our Lady of the Rosary and that the war would end that day (in fact it did not end till thirteen months later). Then she disappeared and the famous "miracle of the sun" took place. The rain had ceased, and when Lucia cried out "Look at the sun!" (in which she claimed to see in turn Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, St Joseph with the Holy Child, and Our Lord), the crowd stared at the sun which appeared to spin, give out coloured rays, zigzag from east to west, fall towards the earth—making those present fear that it was the end of the world,—and return to its place. This was not seen by everyone in the crowd, although some people ten kilometres from Fatima saw it. Other reported solar phenomena, both during the period of the apparitions and afterwards, were a sun casting rainbow-coloured light over everything, a "luminous globe," a "night-time star" and a "rain of flowers" (similar to the "rain of roses" following the death of Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower).
Like Melanie of La Salette and Bernadette of Lourdes, Lucia became a nun, and like Melanie she continued to have visions and revelations. In 1925, the Lady appeared to her with the Child and the message that devotion to the Immaculate Heart should be spread. The following year, the Infant appeared alone. Then in 1929, the Lady commanded that Russia should be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart—this was the first mention of Russia. In 1937, Lucia wrote a detailed account of the apparitions, which grew in the telling and included previous appearances of an Angel to the children. In 1915, he had appeared "like a person wrapped in a sheet;" in 1916, as a youth of fifteen or sixteen years old, "whiter than snow," who announced himself as the "Angel of Peace," and instructed them to pray for unbelievers with their foreheads touching the ground. Later in 1916 he told them he was Portugal's guardian angel, that they must pray and make a sacrifice of everything they did (similar to Therese of Lisieux) in order for peace to come, and that "the most holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary" had plans for them. Later still in 1916, the angel appeared "like a cloud in human form, whiter than snow, almost transparent," and gave the children Holy Communion.
In 1941-42, Lucia revealed still more, writing a description of her terrifying vision of hell on July 13th, 1917, in conventional terms of red fire, black demons, screams of pain and despair, and relating that the Lady had warned of a great sign of a night illumined by an unknown light that would signal some terrible Divine punishment which could only be averted by the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart. This was done in 1952 by Pope Pius XII, as the conversion of Russia was promised unconditionally. The Roman Catholic priest Fr Martindale somewhat sceptically pointed out that "the conversion of the world was not unconditionally attached to Calvary itself"! Pope John Paul II repeated the consecration in 1981.
In 1960, Pope John II opened the sealed envelope containing the Third Secret of Fatima, but refused to reveal it; it remains unrevealed. The Second Vatican Council officially recognized the apparitions and the cult of Our Lady of Fatima.
6) At Garabandal, in Spain, a series of apparitions took place between 1961 and 1965, during which time the visionaries, four girls aged from ten to twelve years, claimed to have been favoured with two thousand appearances of the Virgin and the Archangel Michael. On June 18th, while they were playing, after a flash of light and the sound of "thunder," the Archangel Michael made the first of his nine appearances that month. The girls described him as about nine years old, dressed in blue with rose-coloured wings, swarthy skinned, dark eyed, with well kept hands and nails. The following month, watched by crowds of people, the girls went into a two hour trance. The next day, during another trance, they saw the Virgin in white and blue, with a crown of stars. She spoke to them about hay-making and everyday things. Sometimes she appeared with the Baby, which the girls were allowed to hold. The trances lasted from a few minutes to nine hours, and while in trance the girls would give the Virgin holy objects—rosaries, medals and crucifixes—to kiss for the pilgrims. A large crowd saw the Host appear on Conchita's tongue when the Archangel Michael gave her Communion. This "miracle" had been announced in advance.
The messages contained warnings of great punishments, which could only be averted by many sacrifices and penances. The girls were told to visit the Blessed Sacrament often, and try to be perfect. There would be a great miracle at Garabandal in the future, which would be seen by the Pope and Padre Pio (who, of course, died without doing so), and Russia would be converted as a result of the miracle. A young Jesuit priest saw a "vision" of the miracle, pronounced that day the happiest day of his life, and promptly died the next day. Padre Pio is said to have believed in the apparitions. The local hierarchy did not, and at one stage, Conchita confessed, under lengthy interrogation, to having doubts about her visions. The present bishop, appointed in 1991, is asking Rome to re-open the case. Some people have seen the sun dance, and a red star with a tail like fire was seen during the apparitions. Once the Virgin came in a mysterious cloud of "fire."
7) In many ways the appearances over the Coptic Church of St Mary at Zeitoun, Cairo, were the most interesting and the most credible. They concerned not the Roman Church, but the Coptic Church, and Coptic bishops, including the Coptic Patriarch's representative, were among the millions of Christians, Muslims, Jews and non-believers, who many times witnessed the apparitions over a period of three years, from 1968-1971. The Coptic Church recognized the apparitions as true appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as did the Coptic Catholic Church, the Greek Catholic Church, and the then Head of the Evangelical Church and Speaker on behalf of all the Protestant Churches of Egypt. Even the Egyptian Government Director of General Information and Complaints Department submitted a report to his superior stating that it was "an undeniable fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary has been appearing on the Coptic Orthodox Church at Zeitoun ..." The vision maintained a complete silence. There were no threats of punishment, pushing of Latin dogmas and practices, apocalyptic warnings and no trances.
The apparition appeared on the domes of the church for up to two hours or more at a time, always at night, but not every night and not at regular times. The Lady appeared in glittering light—so bright that her features could not be clearly seen—which streamed across the church. She was invariably preceded or accompanied by luminous "doves," "strange bird-like creatures made of light," which did not flap their wings but glided. The figure moved across the domes bowing and greeting the enormous crowds, estimated at times to be as many as 250,000 people. Sometimes she blessed them or held out an olive branch. The Patriarch's representative described her as "very quiet, full of glory." Occasionally she was seen holding the Child, or as part of the Holy Family. All prayed in their own way—Moslems reciting the Koran on their prayer mats, Greeks saying prayers, Copts singing hymns. The "doves" were consistently mentioned by eyewitnesses. Other phenomena were a "shower of diamonds," a glowing red cloud, and billowing clouds of incense. Spectacular and medically authenticated cures took place, although as at the other shrines, these were few in number compared with the multitudes of sick people.
8) With the apparitions which began in 1981 in Medjugorje in Yugoslavia, it was back to the familiar atmosphere of youngsters, trances and secrets. Four teenagers, three girls and a boy, aged fifteen and sixteen years old, saw a light on a hillside one evening in June. In the light was a young woman holding a child. She called to them, but they ran away. The following evening they returned with two more friends, a girl of sixteen and a ten year old boy, and all saw, on the opposite hill this time, the same great light encircling the woman as if she were "clothed with the sun," but they were too frightened to approach her. On the third evening the six young people were joined by a crowd of five thousand. After three flashes of light the Lady appeared, but only the six could see her—dark haired, blue-eyed, in a grey dress, with a crown of stars, standing on a white cloud just above the ground, so close they could have touched her. One of the girls, clutching a jar of holy water, said to the apparition, "if you are satan, go away," (!) and received the reply, "I am the Virgin Mary," come to "convert and reconcile." Later they saw her in a cross of rainbow-coloured light, sad, and repeating, "Peace, peace. Be reconciled."
The vision appeared weekly at about 6 p.m., during the recitation of the rosary, over the past few years. She was dressed in grey with a white veil, but wore a gold-sequinned dress at Easter and at Christmas, when she held the Child. Sometimes the "Gospa" [Lady] came to the young people at home, especially if they were ill, praying with them for five minutes to half an hour. They were shown visions of heaven, hell and purgatory. (In heaven angels flew and people in grey, pink and yellow robes walked about, singing and praying. Purgatory, a place of mist, resounded to the noise of hammering on prison bars. In the fires of hell, men and women emerged unrecognizable as human beings.) The Gospa gave them messages calling for peace, conversion, prayer—the daily recitation of the Creed, followed by seven Paters, Aves and Glorias (a local devotion)—penance, fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, and respect for other religions.
The Gospa told the seers that she suffered because of the sinfulness of humanity, and that she and satan were engaged in a great battle for souls. Medjugorje would be the last place where she would appear—all future visions would be false. There would be a great sign on the hillside to convert unbelievers. Ten secrets were given to the young people, believed to be apocalyptic and warning of possible disasters to come. As the Vatican refuses to reveal Fatima's third secret, so the Franciscans are believed to be playing down the more sensational aspects of the Gospa's revelations.
The former Roman Catholic Bishop of Mostar refused to accept the Apparitions as genuine but the Franciscan parish priest, Fr Jozo, supported later by the Archbishop of Split, enthusiastically supported the visionaries. Fr Jozo was imprisoned by the Communist authorities for his activities in connection with the apparitions. On his release, he was sent to the parish of Tihaljia, where, in the gleaming new church, services of healing took place for the many pilgrims who came to see and speak with the man who was the confidant of the visionaries. The laying on of hands was accompanied by embracing, weeping and fainting. Between 1981 and 1990, before the Bosnian conflict, ten million pilgrims from all over the world including many Americans and Australians, also Lutherans, Anglicans and Orthodox, had come to Medjugorje. The usual crop of hysterical stories had circulated—Christ had been seen in the sky, one woman's rosary had turned into gold—24 carat in another case—, and someone had taken a snap [shot] of the Virgin.
In 1993, four of the young people were still seeing visions. Cures have been claimed, and various phenomena reported. The sun has rotated, mysterious "fires" and "rainbows" without rain have been seen, a thirty foot high stone cross on the mountainside has spun round and round, and the word "MIR" (Peace) appeared over the mountain in letters of white light, and could be seen by everyone in Medjugorje.
9) The Ukraine has been visionary territory for centuries, and in 1987 the Virgin was said to have appeared at fifteen places. On April 26th, 1987, a thirteen year old peasant girl from Hriushiw saw a light above a derelict chapel. A woman dressed in black, with a child in her arms, appeared in the light, saying that the Ukrainians had been chosen to lead the Russians back to God. The girl called her sister and mother, who immediately declared that it must be the Bogoroditsa [Theotokos]—the Virgin. From then on, streams of people flowing into the village increased, until half a million claimed to have seen the Bogoroditsa, whose outline even appeared on television on May 13th, the anniversary of the Fatima appearance. Communist authorities failed to stop the crowds and "Pravda" pronounced it the work of extremists trying to wreck Perestroika.
It is not clear whether everyone heard the messages or whether they were relayed through the peasant girl, Marina, who was examined by a psychiatrist and declared to be normal. Certainly not everyone in the crowds saw the Virgin—many, including monks and nuns, saw nothing. The purport of the messages appeared to be that the Virgin sorrows for the state of the world, that the Last Times are approaching, and Chernobyl had been a warning for the world. The rosary is a great weapon against satan; the Ukraine, "my daughter," is under the special protection of the Virgin, and would become an independent state. Because they had suffered the most under Communism, the Ukrainians had been chosen as Apostles to convert Russia, and if Russia was not converted there would be a third world war. If they stayed loyal to the Pope, the third secret of Fatima would be revealed.
As at Zeitoun, the appearances were irregular, they were seen by many, and the light surrounding the apparition was "lunar," not "solar," and the words used to describe the light were very similar—"moonlight but not moonlight," "phosphorescent," "silver glow," "streams of light." But there was no ecumenical spirit at Hriushiw. The messages were not conducive to any lessening of tensions between the Uniats and the Orthodox.
Divine Intervention
Is God really speaking through all, or any, of these apparitions? Are any of the related solar phenomena genuine signs from Heaven, or are they counterfeit?
Believing, as we do, that the Orthodox Church Is the Church, wherein is to be found the fullness of the Catholic Faith—that is, the Apostolic Faith in all its purity and wholeness—there can be no question of accepting anything contrary to Orthodox teaching and practice. This must immediately render suspect any shrine or apparition involving the dogma of the Immaculate Conception or encouraging the un-Orthodox cult of devotion to parts of the body—the hearts of Jesus and Mary. (In seventeenth century France, there had even been devotion to the Virgin's left foot and the soles of her shoes.)
Equally doubtful would be any suggestion of replacing "Christ our God, long-suffering, all-merciful, all-compassionate, Who loves the righteous and has mercy on sinners," with a distant, impersonal figure of wrath, bent on punishment and vengeance. The apparition of La Salette said, "I can no longer hold back the heavy arm of my Son;" the apparition of Fatima: "... already He is deeply offended." At San Damiano, 1961, 'The Eternal Father is tired, very tired.... He has freed the Demon, who is working havoc. " At Oliveto Citra, Italy, in 1985, again we hear, "I can no longer hold back the righteous arm of my Son." The sayings echo the unbalanced but very popular teachings of some of the Latin saints and preachers of the past, whereby Christ's Kingdom of justice was opposed to Mary's Kingdom of Mercy. "If God is angry with a sinner, Mary takes him under her protection, she withholds the avenging arm of her Son and saves him" (Alphonsus Liguari). "She is the sure refuge of sinners and criminals from the rigour of the wrath and vengeance of Jesus Christ;" she "binds the power of Jesus Christ to prevent the evil He would do to the guilty" (Jean-Jacques Olier).
Absurdities from La Salette speak for themselves, with the apparition claiming that she had given the people six days for work and reserved the seventh for herself (l). Desmond Seward in The Dancing Sun states that,
According to the visionaries, the Virgin (of Medjugorje) has said that the world is passing through a period of unparalleled darkness.... Satan ... is waging a great battle for souls with the Mother of God, who has been sent from the Eternal Father to warn and hearten them, for, as God told the serpent in Genesis, the woman "shall crush thy head."
If so, this perpetuates the Roman Catholic mistranslation in the Douay Bible of Genesis, chapter 3, verse 15. It is not the woman, but the seed of the woman—Christ—Who will crush the serpent's head, by His Passion and Resurrection.
The more cautious and sober Latin theologians have often been uneasy with the excesses of their contemporaries, but on many occasions the weight of popular enthusiasm has proved too strong for sound theology to prevail. Louie-Marie Grignion de Montfort (d. 1716)—a master of Marian excess—closely connected the Virgin to eschatology. With the Second Coming she must be revealed by the Holy Spirit so that Christ may be made known, and she must shine forth in power against the enemies of God, since in some way the devil fears her more than God Himself. The idea of the Virgin as always being the one who prepares the way for the coming of Christ—not only His first physical coming at the Incarnation, but of His coming into the souls of men, and of His Second Coming, has continued into modern times. "As there would have been no advent of Christ in the flesh in His first coming without Mary, so there can be no coming of Christ in spirit ... without Mary again preparing the way." "As she prepared His body, so now she prepares souls for His coming" (Archbishop Fulton Sheen). At Zeitoun, "one can perceive the salvific role of the Blessed Virgin in evidence, as it was at Fatima in 1917. This role is essentially that of preparing the way for her Divine Son, by opening the souls of mankind to His redeeming grace." "…[H]aving prepared His way 2,000 years ago among His own people" she "now prepares His way into the souls of millions of Gentiles of all faiths and none with a new and greater Visitation" (Francis Johnston: When Millions Saw Mary). One wonders if there is anything left for the Holy Spirit to do.
This thinking accords well both with the current belief, prevalent in some Roman Catholic circles, in a Marian Age which is to precede the Second Coming, and with the strongly apocalyptic tone of the majority of the apparitions. But as such a role for the Mother of God is to be found neither in Scripture nor in Tradition, it inspires little confidence in the authenticity of the apparitions.
One of the most disturbing features of these apparitions is that the Virgin appears as an autonomous figure, while Christ is strangely absent. It is she who weeps for the sinful state of humanity, she who decides who will be healed ("some I will heal, but not others"). Whatever the messages actually say, it is the Virgin through whom Heaven speaks, not Christ. The Orthodox Church never separates the Mother from the Son, and an absent or distant Christ would be an impossibility, since without life in the God-man Christ, lived in the power of the Holy Spirit, the Church would cease to be the Church.
Psychological Factors
In the majority of the apparitions considered, children or adolescents were the sole or main visionaries, making it likely that an element of child psychology might well be involved. For a thorough evaluation of the visions and messages, it would be necessary to know a great deal more about the children—what kind of religious art they had been exposed to, what sermons they had listened to, what teaching they had received at school and catechism classes, and what religious books they had read.
In the case of Bernadette, for instance, her visions did not come out of the blue, as is often thought. She was already familiar with the Miraculous Medal (as a nun, she was said to have worn it constantly), and the Immaculate Conception had been declared an official dogma in 1854, so for four years she must have heard it repeatedly mentioned both at church and at catechism classes, even if she did not fully understand its meaning.
In addition, visions were a familiar occurrence in the Lourdes area. The essential elements of the Lourdes vision—a Lady, a shepherdess (Bernadette had at one time been engaged temporarily to mind sheep in the nearby village of Bartnes), a chapel, processions, and a spring with miraculous powers—had all featured in shrines across the Pyrenees, which in Medieval times had been on the route to Compostella. In 1475, a young shepherd at Betharvam had seen a vision of a Lady who asked for a chapel to be erected. In 1520, a young shepherdess at Gavaison had seen a vision of a Lady and the request for a chapel was repeated. Besides Gavaison, other nearby shrines of the Virgin were Poeylanum, Heas and Pietat. There was also Our Lady of Sarrance, of Bourisp, of Medous, of Nestes, of Buglose. There were also four other pilgrimage centres in the region, making fourteen established centres close to Lourdes. Whether genuine or not, Bernadette's vision fitted easily into the local pattern. The area had earlier been infected with the Albigensian heresy. In a crusade against this particular heresy by Pope Innocent III, the heretics had been put to the sword, and the Inquisition moved in. The usual methods of the Inquisition had been employed leaving behind a people orthodox in (Latin) doctrine, but no lovers of the clergy. Consequently visions were very popular, as they dispensed with the need for clerical mediation.
It is well known that children of a certain stage of mental development, which can vary considerably with different children, love to have a secret world inaccessible to adults, and often play out in their minds situations where they can be important. There are a number of similarities between La Salette and Fatima, and Lucia admitted that her mother had read her the story of La Salette. And how far were Bernadette's visions an unconscious form of compensation? The Lady was small, no taller than Bernadette herself, and addressed the sickly, under-sized girl, generally referred to as "the little idiot," very politely as vous. The attention given to the youthful "seers" on account of their visions would be further enhanced by the "secrets" delivered to them—a standard feature of apparitions to adolescents and children from La Salette onwards—increasing their importance in adult eyes.
Also well known is the fact that a small number of people—nearly always children and adolescents—demonstrate considerable eidetic ability, that is, vivid visual images of specific objects that are not present in actuality, but are present to their conscious or sub-conscious imagination, are "seen" by the persons concerned. Hilda Graef mentions in her book Mary—A History of Doctrine and Devotion, a very interesting experiment carried out by a psychologist, C. M. Staehlin, in which he tested the suggestibility of six boys aged fifteen to eighteen, letting there appear to them by suggestion a battle of medieval warriors above a tree. Two boys saw nothing at all, two "saw" the battle but heard nothing, and two both saw and heard the noise, even the shouts of individual knights. None of the boys had been able to communicate with each other, yet even the two who saw and heard agreed in every detail. In the apparitions we have the same thing—the agreement of children, their apparent telepathic communication with each other, the fact that some only saw, while others both saw and heard the apparition speak.
How much were suggestibility and eidetic gifts in evidence when twelve year old Eugene Barbadette saw a Lady in a blue robe with gold stars in the sky at Pontmain, France, in 1871? The ceiling of his parish church was painted blue with gold stars. Adult neighbours who gathered saw nothing, although other children claimed to see the apparition. Once the local priest arrived on the scene, the vision became more elaborate, with a blue oval frame with writing inside it (echoes of the Miraculous Medal), small white crosses, a large red cross, and four candies that lit themselves. The parish priest had previously had white crosses erected all over the parish, he was leading the small crowd in the recitation of the "red rosary" in honour of twenty-six Japanese martyrs (which may have suggested the red cross), and he himself always lit four candies after Sunday vespers in front of a statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.
However, eidetic ability and ordinary developmental factors are not sufficient by themselves to account for the children sticking to their stories when in some cases they were repeatedly questioned, mocked, physically punished for "lying," and even imprisoned. Nor would they account for the trances, sometimes lasting for hours, during which the young people—at Garabandal, for instance—were impervious to flashing lights, cigarette burns, and having pins stuck in them. A neurologist from Barcelona medical school, who examined the Garabandal visionaries during and after at least twenty trances, could find no explanation, declaring them to be perfectly normal young people.
Trance is acknowledged by psychologists to be connected with religious ecstasy and visionary experiences, but also to be linked with mediumistic ability, whereby paranormal physical effects and materializations can be produced. Trance states are, of course, well-known to pagan shamans and medicine men.
On the occasions when many adults saw the apparitions or accompanying solar phenomena, not all those present did, in fact, see anything. An interesting example of adult susceptibility to telepathic suggestion or mass hallucination is recorded in Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future by Fr Seraphim Rose. At the end of the nineteenth century, some passengers, mainly English, were aboard a ship that docked at a Ceylonese port en route to India. Having some time to spare, they visited a local magician-fakir who, while appearing not to notice them, caused the crown of the tree under which he was sifting to fade, and an incredible scene to appear of their ship sailing the seas. The amazed spectators had a bird's eye view of the deck and could see themselves laughing and talking, the Captain giving orders, the crew working, and even the ship's monkey, Nelly, eating bananas. The source of the story, a Russian priest-monk, in fear began silently to pray the Jesus Prayer, as he had previously dabbled in the occult and realized who the real power was behind the false vision. For him the scene disappeared, while the others continued to see it and marvel.
The Return of the Goddess
Why is it always the Mother of God who supposedly appears in these visions? Was Canon John of Satge, an Evangelical Anglican, right when he said that the Marian cult (here Orthodox would draw a clear distinction between Mariolatry and the Orthodox veneration of the Mother of God) had its roots in an older paganism, in the recurring tendency of mankind to worship a mother-goddess?
Gnosticism is clearly linked with the present clamour for the ordination of women and the use of inclusive language for God, but the ancient pagan goddess seems more closely linked to the Marian apparitions. Gnostic heretics allowed women to minister equally with men as priests and bishops, and adopted some Christian beliefs, distorting them unmercifully to fit them into the Gnostic religious / philosophical system, but their interest lay not with Mary, the human Mother of God, but with God "the Mother," that is, the Holy Spirit. Some Gnostics developed an immortal Sophia figure, and at times saw the Virgin Mary as one of her incarnations, but there seems nothing that would lead to a Christian cult of Mary such as prevailed in the Roman Church.
The one Great All-Mother of the pagans showed herself in various forms of nature on earth and in the sky. Having no human shape, she was worshipped at sacred sites and high places marked with pillars. Later she was represented in human form, attended by doves and snakes, symbolizing her power in the air and on earth. Pre-eminently she was the Bringer and Sustainer of life, the bearer of fertility to man and nature, and, in her later role as Muse, the inspiration that gave birth to music, art and poetry.
As societies merged and influenced each other, the Goddess became fragmented and identified with local deities, taking on their characteristics. As Neith, brought from Libya to Egypt, she was a cosmic virgin-mother, who "gave birth to the Sun, and became a mother when none else had yet borne children." As Isis, she tells a supplicant that in many different places, she, the one, is "worshipped in many aspects, known by many names"—Mother of gods, Artemis, Aphrodite, Mother of the Corn, Persephone the Maiden par excellence. Likewise the Lady of the apparitions is venerated in many localities under a variety of names and aspects—Our Lady of the Rosary, Virgin of the Poor, Mother of Consolation, The Immaculate Conception, and so on.
A Babylonian hymn to Ishtar hails her as Queen of all, who in her pity makes the dead live, heals the sick and saves the afflicted, yet nevertheless has a "dark" side, and in the Gilgamesh epic decides capriciously on the destruction of mankind. The nineteenth century Roman Catholic writer, Robert Hugh Benson, discerned this dark aspect of the Lady of Lourdes. He wrote,
Mary, then, has appeared to me in a new light since I have visited Lourdes. I shall in [the] future not only hate to offend her, but fear also. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of that Mother who allows the broken sufferer to crawl across France to her feet and then to crawl back again. She is one of the Maries of Chartes that reveals herself here, dark, mighty, dominant and all but inexorable: not the Mary of an ecclesiastical shop who dwells amid tinsel and tuberoses.
Doubtless men thought like this of the Magna Mater long ago, or of Artemis, benign enough at Athens, but dark and terrible as Diana of Ephesus. Geoffrey Ashe (Miracles, 1978) commenting on the "miracle of the sun" supposedly performed by the Lady of Fatima wrote, "Even to accept it as Mary's doing is surely to admit that she has an alarming and inscrutable aspect, which does not sit well with Christian ideas of her."
If the Goddess does play a part in the Marian visions, France would seem to provide a naturally fertile ground for them, since there, on the whole, the Goddess seems to have been benign and helpful. There had been a temple of Isis at Soissons, a strong mother cult in the region of Treves, the cult of the Earth Mother prevailed in the Seine, Oise and Tarn regions, and there were many shrines to minor goddesses, who protected springs. There were also enchanting nymphs who protected springs, rocks and water, and a multitude of "white ladies," descendents of the Earth Mother.
In Rome, Cybele, the Great Mother of the gods, a divinity imported from Asia Minor was credited with the defeat of Hannibal and developed a lasting following. A special feature of the statues of Cybele was that they were crowned and carried from place to place. Similarly, a further development of the apparitions has been the solemn crowning of Marian statues and their procession, especially at Fatima, from place to place. In 1864, the Garaison Virgin had been crowned with Papal permission (Pius IX), followed by La Salette (Leo XIII) and Fatima (Pius XII). In 1954, Our Lady of Knock, Queen of Ireland, was crowned. Earlier, in 1732, by permission of Clement XII, the Virgin of Svata Hora in Slovakia was crowned with the diadem of the Holy Roman Emperor. That the Mother of God, representing redeemed humanity, is glorified and reigns with Christ is beyond doubt, but this earthly crowning tends to set her apart from us and to obscure the fact that her heavenly crown is not the "diadem," the royal emblem of monarchy, but the stephanos, the crown of laurels given to those who are victorious in the battle of life, the reward for faithfully striving, attained through suffering and purification, the crown with which all Christians hope and pray to be crowned.
Universally worshipped, the Goddess supplied a deep need in the human psyche for the Eternal Feminine. Sometimes she acted in her own right as sole superior deity, sometimes as co-equal partner to a male divinity, and sometimes in a Goddess-Spouse / Son relationship. Only among the Hebrews, led by their fiercely monotheistic and uncompromising prophets, was there no place for the Goddess, and even the Hebrews, surrounded as they were by polytheistic societies, sometimes relapsed into pagan worship. With the Hebrews, the serpents of the Goddess, benign symbols of healing and wisdom, were reduced to an evil tempter, and Eve, the mother of all the living, became a Pandora figure unleashing sin and death on mankind. The dove, the other attendant of the Goddess, was not demoted, most likely because of its connection with Noah and the Ark. The Lady of Zeitoun has her attendant "doves," and the serpent appears, in the accepted Judaeo-Christian form as the symbol of evil, beneath the feet of the Lady of the Miraculous Medal, while the vision of Medjugorje is engaged in a battle to crush the serpent's head.
If the assumption of a Goddess connection with the apparitions is correct, how did she gain a foothold in the Latin Church and remain undetected?
The Apostolic missionaries moved out from a strictly monotheistic background to encounter societies steeped in a world of gods and semi-divine human beings. Doubtless for many converts to Christianity, the old ways of thinking could not have been easily shed, even after Baptism.
From the Church Father, Epiphanius, we learn of a sect, composed mainly of women, nicknamed the Collyridians. Originating in Thrace, it had extended to Upper Scythia (roughly to the west and north of the Black Sea) and into Arabia by the fourth century. It seems to have been inspired by the Gospel events, combined with an Elias-type legend of Mary's purity and "non-death." St Epiphanius states that the "priestesses of Mary" worshipped her as a goddess in her own right, the Queen of Heaven, with rituals far older than Christianity, and "adorn a chair or square throne, spread a cloth over it, and at a certain solemn time, place bread on it and offer it in the name of Mary." Recalling the Jews, condemned by the Prophet Jeremias, who made similar offerings to the "Queen of Heaven"—in their case, Astarte—he warns against the worship of the Virgin as strongly as he had also warned against a lack of proper respect for her. This is the seventy-ninth heresy in a long list, challenged by Epiphanius, yet somehow it seems more like a different religion than a Christian deviation the ancient pagan religion of the Goddess, under her new manifestation: "Mary." While it is unlikely that the Collyridians as such influenced the Church, this shows how such distortions of true belief can arise and it might be that a more orthodox version of some of their ideas might well have been congenial to some new converts from a pagan background, lying dormant until the right combination of circumstances caused them to take root. While working on this study of the apparitions, I began to feel what seemed to be the presence of another religion, running side by side with Christianity; so I was interested to discover that the nineteenth century French novelist Emile Zola had experienced a similar feeling, and believed he perceived "almost a new religion" at Lourdes.
Within the Church, Christ [is] the Second Adam, but once the Virgin had been seen in a certain sense as the Second Eve (without, of course, the slightest surrender to paganism) this was likely to have recalled to the spiritually weak the Goddess-Son / Spouse relationship; while the title Theotokos, although solely concerned with teaching that Christ was God, might surely have evoked the memory of Cybele, Great Mother of the gods, except that this was in fact an even greater title, the Mother of God. As paganism crumbled and local deities were dethroned, it was more often than not the Mother of God who was put in their place as patroness of healing springs and holy mountains, for long centuries associated with pilgrimage. In the West, where the theological and liturgical foundation was perhaps weaker, during the Middle Ages "Our Lady" of one district came to take on an almost separate personality from the Virgin of a rival shrine. Sir Thomas More, the Roman Catholic Tudor martyr, commented, "They will make comparisons between our ladie of Ippiswitch and our ladie of Walsingham, as weening that one image hath more power than the other."
Nothing like this happened in the East. Rooted soundly and soberly in the solid theology of Orthodoxy, and spiritually nourished by a vernacular liturgy, the Lord's Mother fitted naturally into her rightful place in a perfectly balanced and harmonious whole. The Western distortion of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity resulting from the Filioque with its (almost unintentional) down-grading of the Holy Spirit, together with the historical events that overtook the Western Empire in the shape of the invasion of barbarian tribes and the resultant consequences, increasingly isolated the Church in the West from the pure Orthodoxy of the Church in the East.
With the restoration of order and stable government at the end of the Dark Ages, the Church in the West found itself with a largely illiterate and semi-barbarian laity. Churchmen had to supply the clerks and lawyers needed by the lay rulers. In consequence, the Papacy found itself relying on ecclesiastical lawyers, and this was to give the Roman Church the legalistic outlook and systematic philosophy which are its hallmarks. The ecclesiastical establishment acquired an overriding authority, and with the enforced celibacy of priests, "the Church" in common parlance came to mean the clergy. A faulty Trinitarian theology, and an undue emphasis on the Augustinian teachings on original sin and the Atonement, together with an all-male hierarchy, led to the loss of the feminine element in Western Christianity and created a "Goddess-shaped gap." The Virgin Mary was the obvious candidate to fill that gap.
In contrast, the Tradition was handed on unchanged from generation to generation in the Eastern Church. Apart from the treacherous Fourth Crusade, the Roman Empire in the East remained unconquered until the arrival of the Turks. There was always an independent and highly-educated laity. With a powerful Emperor there was never any opportunity—nor was there any need or the desire—to subject all lay power to the authority of the Patriarch, and "the Church" continued to mean the whole body of the faithful, past and present, including the angels. Married priests ensured that the priesthood was not a class apart. (As today, the priest lives in the same kind of house as his parishioners—a village priest in Cyprus may also be the village bootmaker, and a Greek papas, in cassock and stove pipe hat may be seen clasping a small son or daughter with one hand and a shopping basket with the other). There was no Goddess-shaped gap to be filled in Orthodoxy, and anchored safely in Orthodox theology and hymnology, the holy Virgin, more honourable than the cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim on account of her Divine Maternity, remained a woman with a human nature in all points like our own, completely purified by the Holy Spirit at the Annunciation in order that she might be able to give a human nature to the Eternal Logos.
In the Latin Church, Marian exaggeration soared to ever new heights, checked only briefly by the Protestant Reformation. The Virgin had "added certain perfection to the Maker of the universe" by giving Him a human nature—quite the opposite view from that taken by Scripture and Orthodoxy, which saw the Incarnation as a kenosis, a self-emptying, of Christ—"though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor." Bernadine of Siena's weirdest fantasy, the "seduction of God," was described in language more appropriate to a Greek legend of Zeus than to the Great Mystery of the Incarnation. The Virgin was higher than the Church ... she had authority over her Son in heaven ... she appeased the Divine justice and prevented God from chastening sinners ... she and the Holy Spirit produced Christ in souls. "Even the tongue of the Holy Spirit" was "scarcely sufficient to celebrate her praises worthily"! Unfortunately the authors and preachers of such offensive nonsense were frequently canonized, which was naturally taken as a sign of official approval. Such distortions could well be the stuff of which Marian apparitions are made. The Goddess, or at least a semi-divine being, had returned.
It is interesting to note that John Henry (Cardinal) Newman was appalled at all the excesses. While accepting the Immaculate Conception, he considered the popular exaggerations and other deviations from Patristic teaching to be "calculated to ... unsettle consciences, to provoke blasphemy, and to work the loss of souls." In a quaintly nationalistic touch, he noted that all these devotions and teachings were clearly the work of foreigners and not Englishmen!
Pope John XXIII still found it necessary to remind his flock, "The Madonna is not pleased when she is put above her Son." Needless to say, such excesses are out of favour in the present ecumenical climate. What the current guide book says I do not know, but the Lourdes Official Guide for 1980 spoke against "a superfluous devotion to the Virgin, relying on trinkets, rosaries and medals: a perversion of authentic religion, bordering on superstition." Somehow I do not think that Goddess will be so easily dislodged.
Politics, Nationalism and Ecclesiastical Involvement
How did these apparitions acquire national and even international fame? How is it, for instance, that a young girl's real or imaginary visions turned Lourdes not only into a major religious centre of the Roman Catholic Church, but into a major tourist industry, a "religious Disneyland," with more pilgrims than the Holy Land, more hotels than any city or town in France other than Paris and Nice, a factory that produces over a ton of candles daily, and souvenir shops where one may purchase Virgins in snow-storms, Virgins in TV sets, and Madonna shaped holy water bottles, a metre high, with removable golden crowns for filling? Of course, all the regrettable and tasteless commercialism has no bearing on the authenticity or otherwise of the visions.