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Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Marian apparitions

In my last post, the comments turned to visitations and visions of the Virgin Mary. I thought I'd write a little about the shrine of Lourdes, where, since 1858, there have been 66 verified miracles, as an example of such appartitions.

First, how does the Church feel about Marian visions? Wikipedia writes ...

According to the doctrine of the Catholic Church, the era of public revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle and when the New Testament was finished. A Marian apparition, if deemed genuine by Church authority, is treated as private revelation that may emphasize some facet of the received public revelation for a specific purpose, but it can never add anything new. At most the Church will confirm an apparition as worthy of belief, but belief is never required .... John Paul II's particular devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary was indicated in his coat of Arms ... He also visited many of the most famous alleged apparition sites, notably Fatima, Lourdes, and Knock, and according to some reports may have experienced another visitation on his last visit to Lourdes in 2003.


- John Paul II's Coat of Arms

Every year, Lourdes is the place of mass pilgrimages - it's estimated that 200 million people have visited the shrine since 1860. I recently read an article from the Tablet about the shrine. Here are some bits from it ...

What pulls them (the pilgrims) is the story at the heart of Lourdes: the image of a 14-year-old, poverty-stricken, asthmatic girl kneeling in ecstasy in a muddy grotto, her face utterly absorbed by a conversation with a lady only she could see. The veracity of Bernadette’s 18 visions in 1858 can never be “proved” – she was the only one who saw the lady – but despite the most formidable pressures brought on her to deny the events, Bernadette stuck to the truth of her experience, never embellishing it and never seeking to profit from it. The most diligent historical research has uncovered no lies, deceit or subterfuge.



At the heart of Lourdes today remains healing. The lady who appeared to Bernadette made no mention of cures, only that people should come and wash in the spring. But the stories of healings began almost as soon as Bernadette uncovered the spring to which the lady had directed her. And they continue to this day in increasing numbers, according to Lourdes’s “miracle doctor”, Patrick Theillier, head of the Medical Bureau. It was set up in 1883 to assess the reports of sudden, inexplicable cures as result of bathing in the waters or praying at the Grotto .... “Nowadays we have broader sense of pathology as psycho-spiritual,” he (Theillier) says .... “There’s a climate of trust here, of tenderness, which has everything to do with the presence of Mary, the presence of the feminine, of the mother.”

With all the interest in Marianism, there's a question that arises, one I read in another article elsewhere. Someone asked ... if we (Marian Catholics) could explain exactly what devotion to the Blessed Virgin contributed to our spiritual life, and why we were not satisfied to go straight to Our Lord with our petitions. In my further reading, I was able to come up with possible answers.

If nothing else, Mary exemplifies two things ... motherhood and generosity of spirit. At the time of the early church, there were those who believed Jesus was only divine, a strictly spiritual being. An emphasis on Mary as Jesus' human mother helped to show his human nature which we share with him. And then there is Mary's choice of response to God's request, through the angel Gabriiel ... Mary agreed, held nothing back. This is significant if you imagine that she had a true choice, free will. Mary cooperated with God, who needed/desired her contribution ... human/divine interdependance.

Like us, Mary was human, and it may be her human act of freely chosen relationship with Jesus/God that make people turn to her in reverance.




15 Comments:

Blogger Deloney said...

Hi there, you. Do you know the Leonard Cohen song called "Song of Bernadette"? I've never heard Leonard himself do it, but Jennifer Warnes does it. Apparently Aaron Neville does too, and a few others. These are the lyrics:

There was a child named Bernadette
I heard the story long ago
She saw the queen of heaven once
And kept the vision in her soul
No one believed what she had seen
No one believed what she heard
But there were sorrows to be healed
And mercy, mercy in this world

So many hearts I find, broke like yours and mine
Torn by what we have done and can't undo
I just want to hold you, won't you let me hold you
Like Bernadette would do

We've been around, we fall, we fly
We mostly fall, we mostly run
And every now and then we try
To mend the damage that we've done
Tonight, tonight I just can't rest
I've got this joy inside my breast
To think that I did not forget
that child
That song of Bernadette

So many hearts I find, broke like yours and mine
Torn by what we've done and can't undo
I just want to hold you, won't you let me hold you
Like Bernadette would do

4:37 PM  
Blogger crystal said...

Thank you, Deloney ... those are beautiful lyrics.

5:11 PM  
Blogger PV said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

12:24 AM  
Blogger PV said...

This comment is not about Lourdes.
This comment is about a fragment from the post concerning Marian catholics (strange name if you ask me).

This is the fragment:
"if we (Marian Catholics) could explain exactly what devotion to the Blessed Virgin contributed to our spiritual life, and why we were not satisfied to go straight to Our Lord with our petitions."

So they are not satisfied to go directly to Our Lord.
Do you notice something? That here the emphasis is on the human person who was not satisfied to go with the petition to Our Lord.

I think that it is dangerous to give priority to any saintly and/or holy figure other than Our Lord.

For me this sounds like a dangerous way of putting things.In this way Mary is separated from Jesus and placed in a position that is not justified. Our Lord is pushed back in a secondary position.

12:26 AM  
Blogger crystal said...

Paula, there seems to be a difference in attitude between Catholics and Orthodox / Protestants, according to an article I read at the Tablet, anyway :-). That quote you mentioned was made by an Anglican to a Catholic.

I don't think Catholics "worship" Mary instead of Jesus/God, but they do appreciate her specialness - a human being, but the mother of God.

For myself, I'd prefer to speak to Jesus or the Father, but maybe some people feel intimidated by them or maybe they feel a kinship with Mary's human-ness or the fact that she's a woman, rather than a man. It doesn't work for me, but I wouldn't want to say it's wrong.

1:09 AM  
Blogger crystal said...

PS - if you're intersted, here's an article by Thomas Merton, titled Understanding Catholic Devotion to Mary

1:24 AM  
Blogger PV said...

Crystal, i think that even after i will join the RCC i will not be able to change my attitude toward Mary. See my last posts.:-).

It is not the Catholic normal devotion that i do not like but the exaggerations of the Marian Catholic devotion. Even this name of Marian Catholic is strange for me.

1:38 AM  
Blogger crystal said...

I just made that expression up for ease of explination ... don't know if there is such an animal as a "Marian Catholic" per se :-)

2:02 AM  
Blogger PV said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

4:44 AM  
Blogger Jeff said...

Crystal,

I think you've summed it up perfectly. Lourdes is an entirely different phenomenom from Fatima. The simplicity and directness of Bernadette, without guile and without grandiose embellishment, lends her a certain credibility. She never even came right out and claimed that the woman she saw was Mary. She just described what she saw. Then of course, there is the history of cures associated with Lourdes that you have mentioned.

You're also right in what you say about doctrinal matters. Although St. Augustine and St. Jerome had some issues around sex (that's a whole different topic), The Marian doctrines in the Catholic Church (such as her perpetual virginity and Immaculate Conception) are really about Jesus. They are all about building a fence around the doctrines concerning the humanity and the divinity of Christ rather than having to do with making Mary a goddess figure.

In the scriptures, Jesus is clearly giving his mother to not only St. John at the foot of the cross, but to all of us. Again, you made reference to Mary's freely given "yes". Mary is human, and she is the most perfect human saint for us to emulate. She freely consented to conform her will to God's. She was not an incubator; not just another young girl impregnated against her will in a world where women had little control over their lives.

Intercession? Yes, I do think we can offer prayers for her to intercede on out behalf. Just as we can ask our friends to pray for us, we can ask the saints to pray for us too. We are "in Christ", and they are "in Christ". They are part of the cloud of witnesses that has gone before us. There is nothing wrong with that.

Having said all that, I do think there are some people who go overboard with Marian spirituality, as Paula has pointed out (Paula, are you Eastern Orthodox? I think they have a nicely balanced view concerning Mary). I think that there are a lot of poorly catechized Catholics who actually do turn into her into a goddess, and even go beyond that. It is quite a spectacle in some latin countries to see people argue about their respective virgins... "Ah, the Virgin of Villafranca is nothing... The Virgin of Palacios is much better", and so on. Some people have been brought up feeling much more comfortable approaching their mothers for love and attention than their fathers. I think their spirituality is a reflection of that.

Another thing worth noting is a key difference between progressive and traditional approaches to faith. IMO, progressives are pretty sef-sufficient,and what they are looking for is spirituality. Traditionalists, on the other hand, are often looking more for practical help. Intercession. Salvation.

3:51 PM  
Blogger PV said...

Yes Jeff, I am Eastern-Orthodox intending to enter the Catholic Church.:-).

5:42 PM  
Blogger PV said...

Jeff you say:
"progressives are pretty sef-sufficient,and what they are looking for is spirituality.
Traditionalists, on the other hand, are often looking more for practical help. Intercession. Salvation."

I think that I enter in the progressive category because I want a deep relation with God, that would be spirituality, but i am not at all self-sufficient.:-).I need intercession as well.

6:35 PM  
Blogger crystal said...

Jeff - thanks for all the info. I'm a convert who slept through RCIA classes, so I'm never sure if what I'm saying is orthodox or something that's going to make me anathema :-)

Sherri - thanks for the kind words. I think you're right that praying to Mary is like praying to saints. Sometimes I ask St. Ignatius to say a prayer for me, just as I ask the Jesuit who was my spiritual director to do so. It's not exactly that I think it will help more, make more of an impression on God, but it makes me feel like I'm part of a family, in a way.

Paula - don't worry about how things will be if you become a roman catholic ... everyone has different feelings about practically every issue. I know catholics who don't even believe Jesus was God, and I know others who are very conservative ... there's a place for everyone, I think, but just don't tell the Pope I said so :-)

7:14 PM  
Blogger Jeff said...

Paula,

Good point. Don't we all? :-D

7:22 PM  
Blogger PV said...

Crystal, not a word to the pope.:-).

12:26 AM  

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