From MARY MOTHER OF THE SON:
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Various Problems Arising from Fake and False Private Revelation
Numerous questions and problems arise from the fact of private revelation. The first and most obvious one is that a great many alleged private revelations are fake or false. Note the distinction between “fake” and “false.” A fake private revelation is a deliberate deception. An average Evangelical (and, for that matter, an average Catholic) is typically ready to assume that a claimed private revelation is fake, and there is good reason for that. The world abounds with charlatans claiming miraculous powers and looking for fame, money, sex, or power. They are found in all religious traditions. The rule of thumb regarding fake revelation is: There’s a sucker born every minute. Don’t be one of them. Trust God and keep an eye on your wallet.
But keep an even closer eye on the teaching of the Church. Not all fake private revelation is after your wallet. Sometimes it’s after your soul. The devil does indeed come to us as an angel of light. And he always seeks to turn us away from the teaching of Holy Church toward the worship of some creature (it matters little which creature). Therefore, a private revelation that sets itself up against the public revelation of the Church or the authority of her pastors is, by definition, not to be accepted, because God cannot contradict himself.
But not all false private revelation is fake. A “revelation” can be false although the person experiencing it may seriously believe it’s legitimate. In such a case, the person claiming the revelation isn’t a crook or a liar, he’s just mistaken. But sincerity doesn’t guarantee immunity from the harm a false revelation may cause. People who mistake the exit ramp for the on ramp of the freeway also believe they’re going the right way. That doesn’t mean they don’t experience painful and even fatal consequences as a result of their error. People can be sincerely wrong.
For instance, somebody may take seriously a false revelation claiming that blood transfusions are sinful. As long as you and your loved ones are in good health, such a blunder is only a quirky notion. But if you (or worse still, someone in your care, like a child) are involved in a car accident, your commitment to a false revelation could spell the difference between life and death.
There’s a Weirdness in God’s Mercy
Complicating things further is the fact that sometimes the recipient of false private revelation—in the strange providence of the God who writes straight with crooked lines—receives real grace. An example of this can be seen in the story of a Baptist woman named Diana Duyser who believed (I am not making this up) that a grilled cheese sandwich she bit into in 1994 was a sign from God, because she saw the face of the Blessed Virgin in it:
The strange story began some 10 years ago, when Duyser prepared the sandwich for breakfast. She placed a slice of Land O’ Lakes yellow American cheese between two slices of Publix white bread and cooked it on a non-stick pan. She then took a bite from the corner and saw what she describes as the face of Mary staring back from the bread. She spit out the bite and screamed for her husband.
“It scared me half to death,” said Duyser, a housewife and amateur doll maker.
Duyser told friends and neighbors, and the story spread throughout metro Miami. She kept the sandwich in a small plastic container and padded it with cotton.
“All those years, whenever I’d get real down, I’d go in and say things to her and make sure she was still there,” Duyser said. “Sometimes my husband would come in and say, ‘What is this lady trying to say to us, this Virgin Mary?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know, honey, unless she wants us to put her out there and show the whole world.’”
Duyser said the past decade has been blessed because of the sandwich. She won $70,000 at a Florida Indian casino and attributes it to the sandwich.[1]
As you might expect, the reaction from most people (including Catholics) was justifiably skeptical:
“This is just so dubious that I would say the chance it’s any kind of legitimate miracle is almost zero,” said Father Ernan McMullin, a well-known author and professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University.[2]
Many casual onlookers needed no further evidence of fakery after reading that Duyser auctioned the sandwich off “for $28,000 on eBay. The buyer, Golden Palace online casino of Las Vegas, plans to tour the sandwich worldwide to generate publicity for its company and raise money for charities.”[3]
But a closer look suggests Duyser, however mistaken she may be about the supernatural origin of the sandwich, acted in good faith. In addition to holding on to the sandwich for ten years, she parted with it only out of desperation:
“She is unbelievably sincere, which is about 100% of the appeal of the sandwich,” [Golden Palace spokesman Monty] Kerr told the Register.
“She talks to the sandwich like it’s a person. She definitely believes in God and believes this is something important. She wept when she had to give the sandwich up.”
Recently, however, the Duysers fell on hard times. Her 52-yearold husband, Greg—a former air conditioning technician—was diagnosed with terminal emphysema, and the couple has no health insurance. They live on a $1,153 monthly disability check.
“We had always intended on selling her at some point,” Diana Duyser said. “We wanted her to go to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, or a museum, and I thought we’d get a couple hundred bucks. We decided to try eBay, and I think she was watching over us. Now people everywhere will see her, and that was my goal.”
This month, the Duysers are traveling the United States in a luxury RV the casino bought, displaying the sandwich everywhere. Kerr said the casino has heard a few complaints from faithful who believe the promotion is sacrilege, but not many. He said most Christian faithful appear deeply moved by the sandwich.
A Miami Herald reporter drove the sandwich to Las Vegas, after the casino bought it, and showed it to a variety of people along the way. Some were amused; others fell to their knees and cried.
Weird? You bet. A genuine private revelation? That’s not so easy to determine. On the one hand, if you grill enough cheese sandwiches and you can get burn patterns resembling anything from a woman’s face to a picture of the Space Needle.
But does that make Duyser a liar? There’s no evidence of that. She obviously believes. Indeed, she believes so sincerely she is, as of this writing, contemplating joining the Catholic Church—because of the sandwich:
“I’ll be going to a Catholic church, to visit, and I’ll see how it goes,” says Diana Duyser, 52. “Mary came to me, and she touched me, and there isn’t much that’s ever said about Mary in the Baptist church.”
Duyser said she knows little about Catholicism, but she understands that Catholics know Mary as the sinless mother of God.[4]
Duyser’s story highlights exactly the sort of conversion that makes Catholics cringe and critics of the Catholic faith whoop with glee. But I simply note that Christian history—Protestant as well as Catholic—is full of people who have found the motivation to follow Jesus in very strange and very commonplace things. That’s why it’s not so easy to simply dismiss this story as obviously not authentic private revelation—because in the end the sandwich appears to have done what private revelation is supposed to do: point Ms. Duyzer to the public revelation. And, indeed, a modern skeptic might see in Augustine’s “pick it up, read it” voice a very simple “natural explanation” (“It was just a kid playing a game next door!”) that overlooks the fact that for Augustine the incident was a divine invitation, even if it did have a completely “natural explanation.” That’s because Augustine, while a supernaturalist, did not separate nature and supernature into separate, watertight compartments. He took it for granted that things with natural explanations could still be signs from the God who is in control of nature. In other words, he believed in providence.
Similarly, car accidents, like burn patterns on a grilled cheese sandwich, are everyday phenomena, yet when a young Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope St. John Paul II, was hit by a car and survived:
He spent the next two weeks in the hospital, recuperating and pondering the peculiar ways of Providence. That he had survived this incident seemed a confirmation of his priestly vocation.[5]
God is not proud. He’s willing to meet people at their growing edge, and it’s difficult for us mortals to make hard and fast judgments about what natural or supernatural means he might employ to do so. Anything from a miracle of hearing in a Seattle hospital to a child’s voice to a car accident to a grilled cheese sandwich may be used by him to get through to us.
Revelation Is Not Dependent on Our Intellectual or Moral Perfection
To make matters still more complex, recipients of real divine assistance can even be lacking in brains, emotional stability, or morals and still, by divine providence, land on their feet. As St. Paul notes:
God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God (1 Cor. 1:27–29).
And so, however sensible it is to note that a claimed revelation is being reported by a scoundrel, a fool, a basket case, or an ignoramus, it’s not automatic disproof of God’s involvement. If all the other evidence points to the truth of the thing, simply dismissing it ad hominem is a poor way to proceed. Indeed, it’s often to blind oneself to a crucial fact in favor of the sign. So, for instance, the risen Christ is reported to have been seen first by a woman from whom seven demons had once been driven out (Mark 16:9). On its own, this would not appear to be a promising psychological profile for a witness. But the interesting thing is that the Church preserved this bit of testimony despite the fact that a woman and a former victim of demonic possession is exactly the witness you would never invent if you were trying to make a case to a first-century Mediterranean patriarchal culture. In short, the Church acts as though it’s preserving a historical memory, not inventing a story.
Another demonstration of how God’s grace isn’t dependent on how smart or saintly we are is found in Genesis, when God condescended to help Jacob even though Jacob’s Bronze Age ignorance of genetics had filled his mind with all sorts of bogus notions about animal breeding and his questionable ethics had not exactly put God in his debt.
The story goes like this: After ripping off his brother Esau’s inheritance, Jacob had himself been ripped off by his uncle Laban. Jacob wanted nothing more than to get away from Laban, but Laban held most of the family assets. So Jacob cut a deal with Laban and promised to take only the speckled and spotted sheep, every black lamb, and the spotted and speckled among the goats as his wages. Laban agreed. So Jacob, operating under the solidly wrong Bronze Age assumption that an animal’s coloring depends on what its mother sees as it’s conceived, pulled the following “trick” on Laban:
Then Jacob took fresh rods of poplar and almond and plane, and peeled white streaks in them, exposing the white of the rods. He set the rods which he had peeled in front of the flocks in the runnels, that is, the watering troughs, where the flocks came to drink. And since they bred when they came to drink, the flocks bred in front of the rods and so the flocks brought forth striped, speckled, and spotted. And Jacob separated the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks toward the striped and all the black in the flock of Laban; and he put his own droves apart, and did not put them with Laban’s flock. Whenever the stronger of the flock were breeding Jacob laid the rods in the runnels before the eyes of the flock, that they might breed among the rods, but for the feebler of the flock he did not lay them there; so the feebler were Laban’s, and the stronger Jacob’s. Thus the man grew exceedingly rich, and had large flocks, maidservants and menservants, and camels and asses (Gen. 30:37–43).
The point of this story isn’t that Bronze Age ideas about animal breeding are revealed by God to be good science. The point is that God condescended to help Jacob despite the man’s ignorance of genetics, because he had plans for Jacob (and because Laban had been unjust to Jacob, who deserved his wages). God didn’t grant Jacob’s desire for restitution because striped and speckled sticks make goats bear striped and speckled kids, but because God’s mastery of the universe is so subtle that he can work within real genetic laws and the ignorant notions of Bronze Age men. Similarly, God can and does grant private revelations to people who may be as deeply ignorant or wrong about all sorts of things in their lives as Jacob was about genetics.
More tomorrow.
[1] Wayne Laugesen, “Our Lady of Lunch? Alleged Culinary Apparition Stirs Emotions,” National Catholic Register, January 16–22, 2005.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 71.
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