The Encyclopedia of World Religions

282 S Mary, apparitions of

series of extraordinary experiences of seeing the Lady radiant as the sun. They received from her messages again urging prayer and repentance, as well as prophecies concerning future world devel opments (some of them revealed only much later), including war, persecution, and the fate of Russia. During the tumultuous years of Word War II and the cold war, many Catholics found these prophe cies of great interest. Many other modern apparitions have been proclaimed at sites ranging from the United States to Egypt to Japan. The most famous undoubtedly is a series of visions seen at Medjugorje, Bosnia Herzegovina, beginning in 1981. As with many of the others, the chief visionaries were children, and the messages urged repentance. It and many other recent apparitions have been controversial within the church. But the four greatest modern appear ances—Paris, La Sallette, Lourdes, and Fatima— have the full approbation of the Roman Catholic Church and have been very influential. These apparitions have important common characteristics. Most have occurred in out-of-the way places, far from centers of power or popula tion. All have come to humble persons, often chil dren, who are poor and poorly educated. They thus serve as counterweights to religion of authority and sophistication and affirm the importance to heaven of those oppressed on earth. The fact that it is a woman who appears affirms the feminine side of the divine. Psychologists such as Carl Gustav J UNG have discussed this important feature of devotion to Mary. Often, in the apparitions, Mary says that out of her motherly compassion she is restraining the righteous anger of G OD and his Son against human sin, but she cannot do so much longer; therefore humanity must repent and turn to God. Apparitions of Mary and their communications have often appeared naive on the surface, but the plain-spoken message and their coming to simple and impoverished people is part of their meaning. They have unquestionably enriched the spiritual lives of many.

Most were of chiefly local interest. The sites of a few became centers of national or even interna tional pilgrimages, such as Our Lady of Walsing ham in England (based on a vision of 1061) or of Loreto in Italy (1291). But it has been only in modern times that apparitions of Mary began to take on unique importance in Catholic Christianity. The first in the modern series must be the appearance of Our Lady at Guadalupe, Mexico, in 1531 to Juan Diego, an Indian whose account was initially rejected by the white conquerors of his country. This appari tion had far more than local significance, for in it Mary took Indian features, and the recipient of the vision was Indian. Our Lady of Guadalupe has become a major symbol of identity for Mexicans, particularly Indians, and has been recognized as patroness of all the Americas. The “Great Century” of modern apparitions of Mary, however, was approximately the years 1830 to 1930, when a series of visions in France and Portugal profoundly affected the inner life of modern Roman Catholicism. In 1830 Our Lady appeared to a nun, Catherine Labouré, at her con vent in Paris. From this event stemmed the popu lar devotion of the Miraculous Medal, a talisman worn around the neck that depicts beams of light streaming from each of Mary’s palms, as in Cath erine’s vision. In 1846 the Virgin Mary appeared to two shepherd children at La Salette, high in the French Alps. Both were very poor and neglected children, and it was a time of great hardship for peasants because of blight. Our Lady said that was because of human sin. She urged repentance and the recitation of simple prayers. In 1858 Our Lady appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, another child of poor background, at Lourdes, in the far south of France. Here also the visitor conveyed messages urging repentance, and she revealed to Bernadette a grotto whose waters would be effective for healing. Lourdes has since become a place of pilgrimage for millions, espe cially the sick, who have sometimes reported miraculous healings. From 1915 to 1917 three peasant children herding sheep near Fatima, Portugal, reported a

Further reading: Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York: Viking, 1999);