Church-Sanctioned Apparitions in 19th-Century France

       The phenomenon of Marian apparitions was first reported in the Middle Ages, but the number of alleged sightings of the Virgin increased dramatically around the 19th century. Whereas before Mary usually reportedly appeared to the consecrated religious, particularly nuns, the 19th century saw an increase in reports of poor peasant children, often shepherds or shepherdesses, claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary. Each claim was extensively evaluated by Church commissions—children were interviewed many times and local clergy would report to their bishops as officials tried to piece together the story—so that stories might be formally recognized. This process is a feature of the “modern” era, where scepticism was more rampant and the Church had to avoid being perceived either as too credulous of local superstition or as suppressing the faith of the laity. In class, we emphasized that only 12 out of 295 total supposed visions of Mary were Church-sanctioned. The apparitions at Lourdes and La Salette, since both occurred around the same time and were approved by the towns’ respective bishops, must therefore indicate what attributes a vision must have in order to be considered believable. What did it take for a Marian apparition to be sanctioned by the Church in mid-19th century France?

        

       One place to begin is the nature of the seers of the apparitions. Unlike in medieval reports, such as testimonies like that of Elisabeth of Schonau, very poor children now claim to have seen the Virgin. Sandra L. Zimdars-Swartz’s Encountering Mary: from La Salette to Medjugorge has a strong focus on these seers, their background, and character—fundamentally important traits in considering such miracles. These children—Mélanie and Maximin at La Salette, and Bernadette at Lourdes—share some important characteristics that could indicate why their testimony was believed. Members of religious orders are very well-educated and familiar with the Catholic canon and its iconography, and this knowledge can provoke suspicion, as they could better fabricate a story or project imagery they are intimately familiar with onto some kind of hallucination. Mélanie and Maximin, however, are both illiterate, and Maximin learns a few prayers “only with a great degree of difficulty,” while Mélanie uses the Lord’s name in vain upon seeing the apparition (28-29). Similarly, Bernadette was judged “stupid and incapable of learning her lessons” the first time an attempt was made to teach her the catechism (47). These children, by Zimdars-Swartz’s account, seem to know little about the teachings of the Church past whatever they picked up during the (presumable) weekly Mass. As shown in Bernadette’s case, though, being uneducated and poor inspired a “bourgeois class-prejudice” that engendered doubt that such “vile intermediaries” could see she who is “pure par excellence” (46). Albeit common “in the early records” of the investigations of such claims, classist derision did not overshadow the added credibility implicit in being a young, uneducated layperson, probably thus deemed unimaginative and too simple to be dishonest (46). 

       In a similar vein, the seers’ reactions to the apparitions could legitimize what they saw. Mélanie and Maximin do not at first recognize the Virgin as such, and refer to her only as a “beautiful lady” and initially interpret her prophecy—obviously, to a reader familiar with Christian doctrine, about Mary’s intercessory power and her son, Jesus—as a cry for help about domestic violence (31-32). Maximin even thinks she might be a villager from nearby Valjouffrey (31). The idea of the “beautiful lady” being, in fact, the Virgin was only promulgated once the mother of Mélanie’s employer suggested it (32). Their not recognizing the person “in the light” as Mary does raise a problem (29). The siblings’ failure to recognize the apparition as Mary either indicates that they did not claim to see an image they associate with the Virgin from popular iconography, thereby decreasing the likelihood that their story was fabricated, or it hints that whatever they saw was not Mary at all, but rather another kind of phenomenon. While the former possibility further evidences the legitimacy of their story, the latter raises the possibility that this apparition of the Virgin was just an embellishment made by adults. Similarly, Bernadette refers to her vision as “aquerò”, evidencing that she did not recognize her vision as Mary initially (47). It is possible that Bernadette herself suggested “this identification” later, a discovery which makes her story seem more genuine (49). She might have associated her vision of a very small Virgin with that of the tiny statues of Mary popular in the area, though the youthful apparition is a very different representation of Mary than the statues’ depiction of an older Virgin and child. Not describing her vision of Mary as a familiar image of the Virgin lessens the likelihood that she made her story up, while identifying her (according to one story) on her own makes her account all the more credible. 

       Other parallels in the two stories indicate why the Church sanctioned these two apparitions. Springs were discovered on both sites after the apparitions occurred that had celebrated healing powers (though some of these miracles were called into question by commissions). Both places, particularly Bernadette’s grotto during her fortnight of visions, became pilgrimage sites attracting thousands of visitors—a mass demonstration of faith that the Church would be hard-pressed to deny. Naturally, in addition to different aspects of the apparitions, the proceedings of the Church’s investigation played an important role, though a more obvious one—the Church clearly did not find any significant discrepancies in from interviewing the seers, nor did they find any evidence of a local church trying to bring in money by establishing a pilgrimage site. 

       Both the La Salette and Lourdes apparitions feature different aspects that lend credibility to their claims. For example, Mélanie and Maximin’s report results in an increase in townspeople attending church; Bernadette is miraculously not burned by a candle and her vision of Mary declares herself to be “the Immaculate Conception,” corroborating a Church doctrine officially proclaimed by Pius IX four years earlier (56). It is difficult to say for sure what lead the Church to sanctify these two apparitions, particularly since the accounts of each are jumbled and probably inaccurate in some capacity, even when assembled together in modern scholarship. Though the nature of the seers and of their apparitions raises some questions, it also contributes to a new narrative of legitimacy: that of poor and uneducated children as those most likely to truly see Mary. Reports of miracles tangential to the apparition itself, though substantiated in varying degrees, also add to the legitimacy of these Church-sanctioned apparitions.

–LS

The Modern Mary- According to Local Circumstance

Something that I thought about that didn't come up in class was that the apparition of La Salette initially spoke to Melanie and Maximin in French. This is confusing because Melanie's French was imperfect, necessitating the apparition to switch over to their local dialect. If this really was the Virgin Mary, why would she have started speaking in a language that the children did not understand? For that matter, what she had to say to Melanie and Maximin was itself puzzling. The woman warned them of the town's godlessness and impending famine, but they were only children—and not especially devout children, at that. Melanie was described as "extremely lazy, disobedient, and sullen"; she was illiterate and not very knowledgeable of prayer. Maximin, in a similar vein, was "a reckless child, an innocent without malice but also without foresight." He was also illiterate and had only been taught a few prayers "with a great deal of difficulty." If the Virgin Mary had really appeared, why did she appear with such a portentous message to two children who weren't exactly model Catholics?

The nature of the message's delivery was also unlike previous appearances of Mary that we have seen this quarter. She said:

"If you have wheat, it is not good to sow it. All that you will sow, the beasts will eat, and that which remains the beasts will not dare to eat... A great famine will come. Before the famine comes, the children under seven years of age will be seized by trembling and they will die in the hands of those who hold them..."

This sounds to me nothing like the benevolent, radiant maternal figure of previous visions and encounters. Rather, it reminds me of the more wrathful Old Testament God. Why was there this sudden and dramatic shift in the tone of the apparition—now somewhat fallible, having initially tried communicating in a language that the children did not understand? The message in the event seemed to have been ignored by the population; there was no large scale attempt by the clergy to use it to rally religious fervor, and it seems that there was little panic caused by the prediction of hardship. Rather, one of the features of the apparition that contributed most to its popularity was the miraculous healing spring.

The message delivered by the apparition at Lourdes made me think along similar lines. Among some of Mary's most extolled virtues were her humility in our earlier readings; although the vision that appeared to Bernadette was not as wrathful as the one that spoke to Melanie and Maximin, it seemed to lack that humility. It reportedly had said: "I am the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. I want a chapel built on this very spot." Demanding the construction of a chapel doesn't strike me as particularly humble. What changed, then, in the image of Mary and the nature of her popular cult? As the world entered the age of modernity, it seemed that not only did visions of the Virgin Mary begin appearing to less educated people and become more accessible to people without a strict religious background and education, but her messages also began to shift, losing some of their old maternal quality.

Some of the changes in her appearances' receptions may have been due to simple practicality. Unlike previous writers who we have read, the children at La Salette, Lourdes and Fatima came from poor and troubled backgrounds. They (and those close to them) had little time, much less the religious education and upbringing in some instances, to properly receive and digest the visions as Maria de Agreda had done, and in any case had other things to worry about. For instance, one of the reasons that Lucia's visions created a rift between her and her mother was that one of the effects of the visions was to hurt them economically. "Lucia's sisters... found themselves, after the onset of the apparition, spending a large amount of time dealing with the people who wanted to speak with Lucia and watching the sheep in her place so that she could spend time with these people herself... These were matters of considerable importance, at a time of general economic distress, for a family who had only limited resources to start with..."

This unfortunate practicality stemming from the children's backgrounds was not the only new aspect of Marian devotion in the "modern" world. As Marian and Christian devotion became more "decentralized" and prominent in local, small towns and villages, the effects of their smallness became more evident. Melanie and Maximin were not fluent in French; there has also been some discussion over the vision at Lourdes and how it fit into local Pyrenean religion. "Although [Bernadette's] apparition bore little resemblance to orthodox Marian imagery, its similarities with mythical creatures of Pyrenean folklore were much more marked... Bernadette chose the term used to describe fairies, the little women of the forest." What Bernadette saw was a little girl—a child like herself, not a maternal figure at all. Nonetheless, the events at Lourdes were eventually accepted by the Catholic Church, Bernadette was later canonized as a saint and the shrine requested by the apparition was built.

Modernity, then—much had changed over the course of the centuries. Visible instances Marian devotion had spread to a much wider social strata, and the nature of the appearances had changed to reflect differences between locales and the unique socioeconomic circumstances of any particular visionary. That these apparitions were accepted by the authorities indicates that these changes were recognized by the Catholic Church, as well.

-EC

Apparition of the Virgin at Lourdes: The Mary "We've Been Waiting For"?

At the beginning of our class on interpretations of the Virgin in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Prof. Fulton Brown asked if we had finally arrived at "the Mary we've been waiting for," a mystical apparition who appears to the poor and humble in mysterious ways. I posit that the "popular" image of the Virgin, and in this case I mean popular image to describe the one often seen in contemporary culture, an image many of us had before this Fall, is drawn from these nineteenth century apparitions and their resulting dissemination: here, then, is the Mary we've been waiting for.

The question of "is this 'popular' religion" featured heavily in our earlier discussion, and, though I have no illusions of answering that question in its entirety here, I do think that there are things going on in these apparitions, and the responses to these apparitions, that mark a new emphasis within Marian devotion. This shift doesn't come out of nowhere: there are similarities in the accounts of the apparitions at Santa Gadea and Cubas. Here we encounter a mysterious figure witnessed by shepherds and other townsfolk; it is presented to us in a legal document. These fourteenth- and fifteenth-century apparitions borrowed much of their visual vocabulary from the liturgical and Scriptural sources upon which the Marian tradition is based. However, these public apparitions, in their public nature, are a shift from what we've seen before, and I believe we can see them as a bridge to the nineteenth-century apparitions in the Pyrenees and Iberia.

In the chapter from Ruth Harris's Lourdes, she approaches head-on this question of the "popularity" of the apparition at Lourdes. In reflecting on the vision's claim (via Bernadette) that "I am the Immaculate Conception," Harris attempts to tie the vision to both the older theological tradition and the more recent developments in Marian doctrine: "The words 'I am the Immaculate Conception' struck them as so monumental in significance that they were unwittingly heedless of the visionary's statements on other matters. In acting thus, they were neither willful nor consciously manipulative. Instead they filtered Bernadette's words through the sieve of their religious imagination, filled with the iconographic traditions of childhood teachings.... They chose to stay within the tradition they knew and venerated" (Harris, 82). Is this, then, the answer to our question regarding the popularity of the vision and how it fits with the tradition? Bernadette's vision does not have all of the usual scriptural iconography that we, as a class, have come to expect, but rather aspects of Marian devotion that seem a step or two removed. The Virgin appears as a young girl, dressed in the uniform of the local Children of Mary group. She appears to those praying the rosary and assumes the pose of the woman on the Miraculous Medal, another popular devotional object (Zimdars-Swartz, 55). She declares herself to be "The Immaculate Conception," a concept previously applied solely to Mary, but not one of the many names by which she was referred in the earlier tradition. The Marian vocabulary here is a sort of pidgin language: rather than running to the Psalms or language from the liturgy, the rosary, the miraculous medal, and a local church group provide Bernadette an iconography once removed from the tradition we've been studying. Given these departures, does Bernadette's vision only become "Our Lady of Lourdes," as Harris seems to argue, after the news is spread and the visions can be interpreted by those more steeped in Marian vocabulary?

According to L'ere Imperiale, a newspaper that covered the event (cited by Zimdars-Swartz in Encountering Mary) the massive crowds that gathered at the grotto on the last scheduled appearance had no problems labeling all of the characters in the encounter: "...for a rumor was circulating that Bernadette had predicted 'a revelation of the Virgin on that day....' Such was the conduct of the people... when Bernadette finally appeared and the cry was heard, 'There is the saint! There is the saint!'" (Zimdars-Swartz, 52). The spreading word about the apparition, through rumors and newspaper articles, seems to pin down the somewhat odd visions of Bernadette. The huge and immediate response to the event creates a new Marian iconography where the colors of the temple veil are replaced by white and blue (an image that stays with us to this day). A hagiography developed around Bernadette as well, as can be seen by the crowds calling her "the saint" and the stories of healings at the grotto (Zimdars-Swartz, 53).

Since word of the vision was not cloistered, not written by a religious and disseminated via ecclesiastical channels, one does get the sense that the ancient, Marian tradition is being referenced obliquely. The resulting surge in popularity of Our Lady of Lourdes and the pilgrimage site there helps explain why the Bernadette's vision of the Virgin, and the way that vision has been filtered and made sense of by her contemporaries, matches this image of the Virgin we've been waiting for. Notions of "popular religion" and the long, Marian tradition is obviously a huge topic and one that can't be treated nearly as fully as it deserves here. However, as our readings have taken us into the nineteenth-century and we see one of the world's most popular Marian shrines at its origin, we can begin to see the way interpretation of the Virgin has changed and how we came to understand her as so many of us did at the first meeting of the class.

-ZSR 

"Worthy of the assent of the faithful"

            At the beginning of class, Professor Fulton Brown gave us the statistic that less than twenty Marian apparitions out of 295 reported have been deemed “worthy of the assent of the faithful” (66). We were asked whether we thought this number was too many (showing the Church to be a bit backwards) or maybe too few (presenting the Church as too skeptical). In addition to the number of apparition confirmations, I wondered why “the Church” choose to endorse and approve certain apparitions. If we think of the Church as a strategic institution, the selection of certain apparitions may fit into goals of local priests and bishops to increase attendance at Mass, scare parishioners into following religious rules, and other motivations. To explore these possible motivations of the Church, I will look at the apparition at La Salette to try to speak to how the Church (specifically local priests and bishops) may have selected apparitions. While it may have been possible that the Church deemed this apparition worthy because its truth, I want to consider what a skeptic might think of the choice to approve the apparition at La Salette. After reviewing some details of the La Salette apparition and the general circumstances of France during the apparition’s approval, the Church seems to act strategically by approving Melanie and Maximin’s story.[1]

            What would a skeptic question about the apparition at La Salette? Both Mary’s dire warnings and the healing spring seem like potentially suspicious elements. The “beautiful lady” that Melanie and Maximin see commands them to tell people of the “great famine” and plight (on potatoes, walnuts, grapes, wheat) that is coming (Zimdars-Swartz 28, 30). Mary (identified later by Melanie’s employer) then decries that few people go to Mass on Sunday, rest on the Sabbath, or observe lent. In Mary’s message, lack of proper religious behavior is connected to the upcoming disasters. The children obey Mary and share their story with people. It spread like wild fire. Then, some “marvelous effects” were seen (33). Many people started coming to Mass and stopped working on Sunday (33). As Zimdars-Swartz note (by citing Kselman), the local priest, Melin, was aware of the change and actually avoided getting involved with the story so that it would have more effect coming from the children (information that he communicated to the bishop). Thereby, local priests and the bishop were well aware of the uses of the La Salette apparition story as a tool to induce piety.

With the finding of a miraculous, healing “spring” at the place of the apparition, La Salette became a famous tourist destination (35). As the stories of people’s healings spread, the Cores parish “was flooded with pilgrims” (38). The apparition thereby helped the parish gain fame and bring people to the local church, leading a skeptical observer to be suspicious of the story’s truth.

Not all elements of the story at first seem ideal for Church appropriation. Many people criticized the character of the children, particularly Melanie, as unrefined and ill manned (38). Thereby, the beacons of the Church’s message appear as lazy and sully children. At the same time, we might interpret their lowliness and role as shepherds to be reasons people may have believed them. In previous Marian stories (see 15^th century Spain), Mary appeared to lowly, uneducated shepherds – possibly strengthening Melanie and Maximin’s story as one that would be believed. Furthermore, the fact that the children did not recognize the (vaguely defined) woman as Mary may serve to weaken the effectiveness of the apparition. However, this detail fit the trend at the time for Mary to be identified by someone other than the seers (32). In this way, the children’s lack of recognition may instead make the story more credible (and likely to be used by the Church).    

It is important to note that a bishop, not local priests, finally confirmed the apparition. Surrounding the bishop of Grenoble’s two investigative commissions was a sense of panic based on Mary’s words. Explained in newspapers at the time, people across France started to fear that Mary’s prophesy about rotting potatoes, walnuts, grapes, and wheat would come true (40-41). As the commissions continued their investigations (at least one looking particularly at the details of Mary’s prophesy), many French clergy were opposed to affirming the apparitions. Why then did Bishop Bruillard formally authorize the apparition? It might be that the Church (as an institution in France) wanted to assert itself in the first years of the Second Republic (41). By building on the popular base of the apparition, the Church might affirm the now nationally spread apparition as a way to “consolidate its support and authority” (41). With this reading, it seems that the Church as a national institution used the apparition at La Salette for strategic reasons, possibly caring less about the veracity of the children’s claims. The Church’s control of the message of the apparition after its approval in 1851 further suggests the Church’s use the La Salette apparition for its own purposes (42).

            Throughout this post, I tried to entertain a skeptic’s point of view. I looked at how the La Salette apparition may have been used as local and national Church promotion. Both the story of the apparition and the national conditions during its recognition give the skeptic pause. They offer motivations for the Church to approve the apparition regardless of its truthfulness. This is not to definitively say the Church acted strategically, but that we should recognize the historical factors surrounding the Church’s decisions. These possible motivations may have affected which apparitions were “worthy of the assent of the faithful” (66).   

-MM-T

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[1] A more complete study would look at apparitions that were not approved to get a more complete picture. However, I focus on what can be seen in the example of La Salette with the caveat that they may not be representative of all apparition approvals.

Inter-Female Relationships and Apparitions

As we move to 19th and 20th century Marian apparitions it is nearly impossible to ignore that those apparitions that we have studied all feature young girls who have complicated relationships with their mothers, aunts, and other women in their lives. Not only that, but the older women in these girls’ lives were among the most notable of those who doubted the girls’ visions as genuine. Though this may have been, as we acknowledged in class, an effort to silence those who would criticize the apparitions as parroted words of family members, it is nonetheless worth noting that all three of the young girls in Zimdars-Swartz’s Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjurgorje are recorded as having problematic relationships with the women in their lives both before and after their encounters with Mary.

Zimdars-Swartz begins her discussion of Marian apparitions with La Salette; though the vision of Mary at La Salette was apparently witnessed by both Melanie Calvat and her cousin, Pierre-Maximin Giraud, Zimdars-Swartz devotes much more of her text to the former. In her biography of Melanie, Zimdars-Swartz reports: “In her autobiographies she said that when she was very young she had been rejected by her mother, told that she was no longer a member of the family, and locked out of the house for days at a time” (28). Melanie was just 14 years old in 1846 when she and Maximin witnessed the apparition, and Zimdars-Swartz notes that the girl’s troubled home life could have easily been an influence in her initial thoughts surrounding the vision: “...she had thought that perhaps the woman had a husband who wanted to kill her son… She also recalled that when Maximin had seen the woman… Maximin had thought of a woman ‘whose son had beaten her and then left her’” (31). Additionally, of those who also had miraculous encounters at La Salette, Zimdars-Swartz specifically references women such as Madame Aglot, Marie Laurent, and other unnamed girls who were suffering from illnesses that were cured from the spring at the site of the apparition (35-38). While some were healed, the sacrilege treatment of the shrine at La Salette by a local man resulted in the death of his daughter (37-38).

The presence of women in relation to Marian apparitions becomes even more pronounced in the accounts of St. Bernadette’s visions. Bernadette, like Melanie, had a difficult relationship with her mother from her infancy, when “her mother, who was then only eighteen, became unable to nurse her.” Indeed, this negligible relationship was of such fascination that an urban legend grew up around it, in which Bernadette’s mother “was dozing in a corner by the fireplace, it was said, where a resin candle fell on her, igniting her clothes and burning her breasts” (44). Bernadette is also said to have had a difficult relationship with her employer, Marie Lagues (46-47). Upon first having visions of the aquero, Bernadette was immediately dismissed by her mother and aunt (47). The others that Zimdars-Swartz names as witnessing apparitions at Lourdes are also all women; two separate groups of five women went to the grotto and reported religious experiences, and Marie Courrech became “The most celebrated of the so-called visionaries” at Lourdes (59-62, 61).

The apparitions at Fatima were, as in La Salette and Lourdes, witnessed by multiple children, though one young girl is now predominantly associated with the . Unlike Melanie and Bernadette, however, Lucia was a precocious, well-educated child; she recounts being able to manipulate those around her, telling engaging stories, and a proclivity for memorization as a young child, so much so that she entered into First Communion three years before most children (69-72). Despite this, Lucia also had a troubled relationship with her mother: “...if she was too busy to give her affection, she would give [Lucia] to her father,” Zimdars-Swartz writes (69). Like Bernadette, Lucia’s mother also reacted negatively to her daughter’s recollection of an apparition, even going so far as to deny her food and denying Lucia’s spiritual gifts after being healed when her daughter appealed to Mary on her behalf (73, 86-87, 90).

As Zimdars-Swartz suggests, the complicated and often fraught relationships that Melanie, Bernadette, and Lucia had with their mothers and mother figures could very well be why all three experienced Marian apparitions. At the same time, however, all three girls (and the other children who shared their experiences with them) had greatly varying visions: Melanie saw a regal lady, Bernadette’s aquero was a young girl about her own age, and Lucia’s lady was accompanied by grand natural effects such as lightning. Even if the girls were looking to fulfill a psychological need for a female figure in their lives, this does not explain the prominent presence of women after the apparitions were reported.

We have not seen many interactions between women in the scripture that we have focused on in class, though several moments seem relevant: Luke 1:39-45, when Mary visits Elizabeth, is one example, as are the women described before, during and after the Passion throughout the four Gospels. Perhaps most pertinent to these particular apparitions, however, is the Annunciation itself in Luke 1:26-38 and Matthew 1:18-25; while Mary immediately accepts her pregnancy when Gabriel tells her that she will bear the Son of God, Joseph is skeptical, and plans to divorce Mary until he receives his own vision. Though none of the girls featured most prominently in the apparition stories we’ve studied conclude themselves that their visions are of Mary explicitly, they all believe the apparitions to be in some way divine, never doubting what they have seen. Like Joseph, the people who hear of the girls’ visions are initially doubtful, and, in the cases of Lucia and Bernadette, some people only believe their stories after witnessing visions or other signs themselves. How does our understanding of 19th and 20th centuries apparitions change given the similarities between the young girls who received them and Mary herself? Perhaps one of the reasons these stories have survived, and, in the case of Bernadette, lead to sainthood is because the parallels between Mary and the three girls make it seem more likely that she would appear to them. After all, if Mary were going to appear to anyone, why wouldn’t it be young virgins who never doubt her divinity or the truth of her message?

-KM

Apparitions, Corinthians, and Modernity

            Whether appearing as a beautiful young woman to Juan Diego and speaking to him in his native language or as a small child-like figure to Bernadette whose mental depiction of the Virgin would have been heavily influenced by small Madonna figurines, the Blessed Virgin Mary in her apparitions takes a note from St. Paul and “has become all things to all, to save at least some” (NABRE 1 Corinthians 9:22). The Marian apparitions convince the seers in form and repeated appearances, but others also become convinced not by seeing directly but by the ways in which the seers respond to the Marian apparition and by the content of the messages which the seers relayed. Nonetheless, a more modern interpretation of the apparitions may lead us to become highly skeptical that they were actually divine, regardless of the position of the Church. In this post I would like to show how the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin become believable to the seers and other believers in addition to how our modern view of such past events may not be as objective as we would like to think.

How Mary Appears and Convinces:

            The first major Marian apparition in the 19^th century to be approved by the Church was to Catherine Laboure in 1830. Her vision of a heavenly figure labeled with the phrase, “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee,” seemed to convince others of its supernatural origin because its message dovetailed the Church’s tradition that Mary was a powerful advocate and that she was immaculately conceived, though this would officially become dogma a few years later. At both La Salette and Fatima, the apparition took the form of a beautiful woman of light whose prophesy of an upcoming famine in the former and shaking of the sun in the latter were ample evidence to convince the crowds that these were divine appearances. Most interesting were the Marian apparitions to Bernadette since her description of the appearances were out of step with the motherly image people commonly associated with the Blessed Virgin. Bernadette described the apparition as a small figure and never called it other than “that one,” and as stated before, the apparition probably took this form due to the fact that Bernadette was mostly familiar with depictions of the Blessed Virgin in the form of little Madonna figurines. It was only later that the apparition was identified as Mary and “convinced different audiences in different ways, and in this special capacity lay the essence of its success” (Harris, 82). Those who did not go to the grotto but interrogated Bernadette were convinced by her aura when speaking about her apparitions and by the message she relayed from the Virgin, “I am the Immaculate Conception,” which was in line with the dogma that had been officially declared four years before the apparitions came to Bernadette, though she could not have had any knowledge of the position of the Church on this issue. Others who actually accompanied Bernadette to the site of the apparition were convinced by the fact that during her apparitions she showed no signs of possession, could perform sensible actions, and lost physical signs of weakness that usually characterized her. Overall, we see that the apparitions convince the seers by the fact that these appearances occur multiple times in familiar forms and convince other people by the messages, signs, and body language of the seers during the apparitions.

Effects of Modernity on Examining the Past:

            While plenty of skepticism rightly surrounds these apparitions, we have to remember more broadly that perception is our reality and that modern thinking and beliefs cannot be read perfectly into past. One reason we may be so skeptical of these past apparitions is that they weren’t meant to appear to us in this time. After all, the latest Marian apparition that we studied, the appearance to Lucia and her friends at Fatima, was nearly 100 hundred years ago. In addition, someone had brought up the point that perhaps the Church was so selective in its approvals of such apparitions because while wanting as much support for its dogma on the Immaculate Conception, it only approved a total of 12 Marian apparitions worthy of belief simply in an attempt to appear selective. However, why would the Church go to the trouble to make certain apparitions worthy of belief and then declare that the Catholic populace is not obligated to believe in the very apparitions that offer the strongest empirical support for its own dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which otherwise could not be intuited except from tradition (and even then it was not always universally held the Virgin was conceived without sin)? Another thing that comes to my mind is a quote from Acts: "for if this endeavor or this activity is of human origin, it will destroy itself. But if it comes from God, you will not be able to destroy them: you may even find yourselves fighting against God." (NABRE Acts 5:38-39) Belief in Marian apparitions and belief in the basic tenets of Christianity clearly do not require the same level of obligation; nonetheless, even if we are not convinced by the fact that the Church has approved some apparitions as actually of divine origin, we have to at least recognize that our putting on of a modern historical lens to view past religious phenomena is not entirely appropriate.  

Conclusion:

            Just as Jesus made his divine presence universally accessible in the Eucharist, so too does Mary in her apparitions become accessible and believable to people on earth by taking on forms and relaying signs which are familiar to them. Regarding the authenticity of the Marian apparitions at least approved by the Church, my thoughts are in line with those of St. Thomas: “to one who has faith, no explanation is necessary; to one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

- J.B.

Investigating the Immaculate Conception: Skepticism and interpretation of the visions of children

The apparition stories we read about this week were particularly interesting in part because of the people to whom they were directed. We’ve seen all sorts of Marian apparitions and miracles this quarter that have appeared to  people of all ages, occupations, and social classes. In the three biggest apparition evens since the 1840s, however, Mary chose to reveal herself to the humblest of all possible devotees, poor rural children. Because Mary’s visions were received by such an impressionable and vulnerable group of people, we see in these apparitions a level of external skepticism and control that, while present in medieval and Renaissance vision accounts, reaches an unprecedented level at Lourdes and Fatima and sets the standard for the modern Church’s investigation of miracles.

More so than in earlier apparitions, the Mary of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries seems to favor children as witnesses of her visions. Maximin and Melanie, Bernadette Soubirous, and Lucia Santos, in addition to the Marto siblings and the dozens of later Lourdes visionaries, were all considerably younger than the vast majority of previous Christians who were purported to have seen Mary. In the miracle of collections of Rocamadour and the Cantigas, Mary appeared to or intercessed for a diverse collection of people of all ages, professions, and social classes. Most of the non-miraculous visitations, however, were received by members of religious communities, like Hildegard and Elisabeth of Schonau. In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, Mary appeared more to laity in Spain and the new world, with a preference for poor, uneducated poor people like Juan Diego and Pedro of Santa Gadea. Several visionaries of this Spanish tradition are children, like Pedro and Ines of Cubas. However, by modern times the most significant Marian visions appear to children, notably to poor children in very rural areas on the periphery of industrial, modernizing Europe. It is worth noting that the other major vision we studied this week, that of Catherine of Laboure in 1830, was witnessed by a middle-aged nun. However, as we observed in class, the reception of this miracle had more in common with earlier Marian visions and was not subjected to the sort of rigorous skepticism and external interpretation with which Bernadette and Lucia were faced.

Hand in hand with the appearance of Mary to poor, often bewildered children rather than educated religious was a new tradition of thorough and persistent skepticism in the way local church and civil authorities responded to these visions. In the past, we have seen certain visionaries were asked for proof or definitive testimony that the person or thing they were seeing was actually Mary. Thus Juan Diego goes to gather a tilma-ful of unseasonable flowers and Ines is given a lengthy questioning about the nature and form of the woman she observes.

We see this new tradition of skepticism and proof taken to extremes at Lourdes and Fatima (or, if it is not in fact a new tradition, it is better recorded at Fatima and Lourdes than it was in medieval sources). Both Bernadette and Lucia were thoroughly investigated by Church and civil authorities who occasionally seem more interested in disproving their claims about the visions then confirming them. When Bernadette first met with local priest Dominique Peyramale following her first several visions of the virgin, his response was not one of cautious consideration but outright hostility; according to Zimdars-Swartz he calls her a liar and accuses her of disgracing the town (Encountering Mary, p. 51). Similarly we hear of Lucia’s mother, adamant that her own daughter was lying, berating and threatening the child to stop proclaiming her visions and turning her over to priests who subjected them to “the harshest of ordeals” through rigorous cross-examinations and psychological ploys (pp. 83-85).

And while there were these figures, both in and outside of the clergy, who approached claims of Marian visions with harsh skepticism, there were also those who tried to project their own interpretations of the visions onto the visionaries themselves. It is notable that the first several apparitions at Lourdes refused to identify itself as the Virgin Mary. Peyramale had instructed Bernadette on March 2 to ask the apparition her name, but it wasn’t until three weeks later, on the Feast of the Annunciation, that she finally responded to the question by saying “I am the Immaculate Conception.” This was the only indication the apparition of Lourdes ever gave in over a dozen appearances to Bernadette that she was, in fact, the Virgin Mary. Bernadette had, on the instance of the first apparition, referred to the woman as “Mother of Angels” (p. 49), and it was later believed that Bernadette herself started the belief that the apparition was Mary, despite the woman’s coy refusal to speak her own name. Prior to the widespread acceptance of the woman’s identity, however, early Bernadette supporter Madame Millet had promoted the belief that the vision was a deceased village girl (p. 48), effectively stepping in to Bernadette’s spiritual experience and offering up her own explanation for what had occurred in lieu of Bernadette’s actual interpretation.

We discussed in class the possibility that local adults had manipulated the stories of these children to encourage the belief that the apparitions they saw were, in fact, the Virgin Mary. Personally, it seems unlikely to me based on the resistance these children met from some of the priests and other authority figures in their communities, that they were directly falsifying facts at the direction of adults. However, it is very clear in the popular responses at both Fatima and Lourdes, both in the alternative interpretations of events provided by adults who themselves had experienced no visions of Mary whatsoever and in the strong backlash presented by parents, community members, and local priests, it is clear that those around the visionaries were taking an unprecedented role in influencing and interpreting the testimony of these children. Though other clergy were certainly present to interpret and ask questions of the visions experienced by medieval nuns, these impoverished and generally undereducated children (excepting, of course, the poor but precocious Lucia Santos) were subjected to examination and reinterpretation to the extent that their visions took on popular narratives outside of the control of the visionaries themselves (for example, Bernadette’s discomfort with requests for blessings and miracles, p. 54).

What seems most odd, at least from a modern critical standpoint, is why the Mother of God would decide to appear not to credible, educated adults, but rather to the class of individual least likely to accurately identify and effectively propagate her message: poor children from patois-speaking towns in, effectively, the middle of nowhere. That these visions were often either appropriated by adults who felt they knew better (Madame Millet) or dismissed out of hand (Abbé Peyramale) seems the natural consequence of choosing such unlikely intermediaries.

Of course, from the skepticism surrounding these apparitions arose the system the Church uses to verify modern apparition, which has developed into a new form of devotion for an era that is, in general, more skeptical of miracles and miraculous vision. So maybe Mary chose wisely in selecting the most impressionable and least credible element of society to deliver her message to the devotees of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

- GT

The LSAT, Comparisons, and Marian Apparitions

I am currently taking an LSAT preparation course two nights a week downtown. One of the sections of the exam focuses on arguments. The test taker must analyze a few sentences or a short paragraph and either resolve, strengthen, weaken, supplement, undermine, or compare and contrast the components of the argument. One of the more common flaws in the arguments present on the LSAT is that the argument compares the components of the individual parts to the components of the whole (for instance, an Olympic team created by taking the very best player of every team in a league cannot be considered analogous to a division of a company that interviews top candidates in a field and chooses those to create a new division). Essentially, this argument flaw advises us to be mindful of the nuances of the parts of a whole rather than simply look at the similarities in our considerations.

Monday’s lecture and discussion focused on three particular personal experiences of Mary. The modern-day apparitions of La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima each seem to bear a certain resemblance to one another when considered in tandem, but to merely consider them alongside one another would be akin to comparing an Olympic team to a new division -- it only focuses on the whole rather than the parts and makes the comparison ill-suited.

I know I am guilty of falling into the trappings that many other readers perhaps also fall victim to. In reading these accounts in preparation for lecture, it proved to be slightly more difficult than I assumed it would be to parse out specific details and attempt to keep the minutiae of each narrative straight in recollecting. The stories were all different, of course, yet, not unlike the accounts of Mary as healer previously encountered, there seems to be some repetition, or at least commonalities. By lumping these tales together, this may inadvertently lead to some level of reductionism. If we as readers choose to reduce the stories to a more simplistic, narrative arc, certain trends emerge, and this can obscure the perception of the reader and make it difficult to look at the microscopic effects of the specific, particular vision.

Likewise, these similarities present an analytical problem. As implied, the various apparitions tend to blur together and create a sort of apparition genre, which means that an astute reader may look for literary significance to make and construct meaning. We bring certain premonitions and expectations to our reading. We as literary readers expect a youthful protagonist, possibly of limited financial means, who has been forced to occupy a low societal position. There is skepticism embedded within the narrative, as someone -- typically someone with means and authority -- attempts to undermine the protagonist, and therefore launches an investigation with the aim of proving the underdog wrong, perhaps intending to tarnish his or her reputation along the way (though, truth be told, there might not be much of a reputation to protect in the first place for an impoverished child). Not unlike the story of Juan Diego and the Marian apparitions from pre-modern Spain, there is a portrayal of the Church as self-serving, greedy, perhaps even tainted.

Though it is problematic to overlook the details in many, if not most circumstances, it may, at times, be useful to neglect the wisdom of the Princeton Review’s LSAT preparatory course and look at the broader, sweeping scheme of the stories. When looking at these apparition narratives in tandem -- all of which are tales that been have been confirmed as worthy of belief by the Vatican and therefore, have been validated and confirmed through a rigorous process -- the obvious question is what makes these instances three of only twelve recognized by the Vatican.

The question that remains, then, is what is the alternate storyline? If the Marian apparitions that have been verified and deemed by the Holy See to be worthy of belief are the few rare exceptions and are few and far between in number, what are we to do with these other tales? I’m interested in this question because I think that comparing a few different apparitions that have since been rejected or await confirmation could illuminate precisely why these three accounts of La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima are so compelling.

In class, I made a comment regarding the mass following that these apparitions are able to gather. That’s really what I find most interesting about these tales. The event itself is obviously interesting in that it is antithetical to the norm of daily life. However, equally astounding is that idea that a following develops and is able to sustain belief in the initial apparition itself. The construction of the magnificent shrines themselves requires continued financial assistance. The mystic of and devotion to the Marian apparition would cease to exist without the journeying to pilgrims. Word would cease to spread without a captivated public and keen interest and observation on the part of the observers. Unless there is some credibility bestowed on the vision by religious and secular authorities, the entire apparition itself is undermined. Additionally, there needs to be some sort of adherence to piety or devotion on the part of the visionary. If any of the visionaries themselves somehow falter, then the entire cult seems to lack authenticity.

Though in most cases, comparisons seem to reduce some of the detail of the individual components, in the cases of these apparitions, it seems to be vital to look at both the macro and micro. 

- LCM