The Second Part of our Series on Private Revelation

From MARY MOTHER OF THE SON:

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Evangelical Reactions to Marian Apparitions

Evangelicals tend to reject Marian apparitions in one of four ways:

They are chalked up to (a) mental instability, (b) stupidity, (c) human deception, and/or (d) demonic deception. Admittedly, there is a lot of grist for such views. Scarcely a month goes by without somebody reporting that the Virgin Mary has shown up in a carpet stain in Bugtussle, Oklahoma. And the world certainly has its share of people with a screw loose who are certain the Virgin is taking time out of her busy schedule to command them to be louder and more flamboyant kooks.

But, of course, the argument that “some people who claim to see the Blessed Virgin are crooks, fools, or nuts, therefore everybody else who claims to see the Blessed Virgin is a crook, fool, or nut too,” is somewhat wanting in logic. It’s the same as saying, “Some claims of miracles are bogus, therefore the apostles’ claim to have seen the risen Christ is bogus, too.” This illogical argument gets even harder to sustain when we get to Marian apparitions that the Catholic Church has approved after rigorous investigation, as at Lourdes or Fatima. But not a few Evangelicals reject even those miracles in refreshingly blunt, evidence-free terms like this:

Satan wants the followers of the Whore Church of Rome to ignore Jesus Christ and follow “Mother Church.” Satan wants the average Catholic to have little or no interest in the Word of God. The problem is, if there is no other source of revelation, then the Catholic believers may actually open a Bible and learn the truth. Satan and the Pope don’t want that, so Mary, a pagan demonic apparition of a woman, is brought in to replace the Word of God and Jesus Christ.

This particular quote was pulled at random from the ironically-titled website, “Blessed Quietness” which is, as of this writing, one of over 459,000 sites to choose from when you Google the terms “Mary demonic apparition.” And that number gives you something of the flavor of Evangelical opinion concerning Marian apparitions approved by the Catholic Church. Just as “everybody knows” that Marian doctrine and devotion are “baptized paganism” without ever having to prove it, so “everybody knows” that Church-approved Marian apparitions are either the result of a human conspiracy to bubble people out of their money or, worse still, they are actual manifestations of the demonic as “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). For many Evangelicals, no further investigation is needed. True stories like Marie Bailly’s are often summarily dismissed with Zola-esque ruthlessness as “lying signs and wonders” produced by lucre-hungry clerics or the lying powers of fallen angels. The possibility that the Blessed Virgin actually appeared to anyone is almost never seriously entertained by Evangelicals.

The Harvard Law of Divine Behavior

The Catholic Church, faced with the same evidence confronting Alexis Carrel, Emile Zola, and the owners of the “Blessed Quietness” website, takes a different approach to claims of the supernatural that continually pop up across the world. A wry quip originally applied to laboratory animals by scientists at Harvard can be adapted to the basic Catholic principle governing the possibility of miracles in our own time:

Under carefully controlled experimental conditions, God will behave however he likes.

If God wills it, he can send the Blessed Virgin Mary to appear to children at Fatima or Lourdes; heal a dying person right in front of Alexis Carrel’s or Emile Zola’s eyes; cause a consecrated Host to turn to human cardiac tissue bleeding type AB blood at Lanciano;[1] guide a woman to a crash site via dreams; or do whatever else he likes. He’s God, after all. And he’s already shown himself ready, willing, and able to permit apparitions of saints in glory such as Moses and Elijah, who appeared on the Mount of Transfiguration (Luke 9:28–36). So there’s no particular reason he can’t or won’t do the same with Mary or some other saint. If our theories about how the universe is supposed to work are outraged by that, then we had better adapt our theories to reality.

At the same time, of course, the Church recognizes that God’s penchant for doing whatever he feels like without asking our opinion makes life complicated for us. She also recognizes that not only human beings but fallen angels are liars. Finally, she recognizes that there is, between the two poles of “genuine private revelation from heaven” and “demonic deception from the pit of hell,” a huge cast of decent, well-meaning, saintly, loopy, devious, malicious, dumb, mentally ill, and gullible characters in the world. So the Church has applied considerable thought to this problem and created a number of tools for dealing with claims of the supernatural, including the phenomenon known as Marian apparitions.

Public and Private Revelation

There are two kinds of revelation. The first, called “public” or “universal” revelation, is the deposit of faith entrusted to the apostles by Christ and handed down to the Church in the form of Sacred Scripture and Tradition. This kind of revelation ended with the death of the apostles, is protected by the charism of infallibility so the Church will not lose track of it, and must be believed by all the faithful. As the Church herself makes abundantly clear, “No new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 66).

However, in addition to this there is what the Church calls “private revelation.” Marian apparitions are a species of private, not public, revelation. Private revelation is an intimate form of communication. It doesn’t reveal new things to the Church. Rather it helps makes public revelation “present” to us today, and helps guide us in living out that public revelation. Its recipients are not protected by the charism of infallibility. But it often knocks the wax out of our ears so that we hear the gospel, perhaps for the first time in our sin-dulled lives. It’s often, so to speak, the “spark” that jumps the gap from public revelation to the inner sanctuary of the human heart, quickening the word of God for us by the power of the Spirit. The variety of such private revelations is limited only by the imagination of God.

Two Examples of Private Revelation

Let me give two illustrations of what I mean, one obscure and one famous (and neither having anything to do with Mary). The first concerns a woman I worked with back in the late 1980s. “Betty” was a lapsed Catholic who was diagnosed with diabetes and had to be hospitalized in Seattle. They got her blood sugar under control and kept her in for a day or so to make sure all was well. She was at that stage of recovery where she was well enough to be bored, but not quite well enough to be released. As she was laying around in her hospital bed one Sunday morning, she heard what she took to be a radio in the next room. She focused on the sound and realized she was hearing a Mass. She hadn’t been to Mass in years but, having nothing else to do, she listened. She heard the readings, the homily, the prayers of the people—(including a prayer for the repose of Fr. So and So’s soul, and, finally, a prayer for her own recovery.)

Betty’s mother was associated with St. Martin’s College, a Benedictine school about fifty miles south of Seattle, so Betty figured the Mass was being broadcast from there. The next day, Betty’s mom visited, and Betty thanked her, saying she’d heard the Mass and appreciated the prayers. Betty’s mom was confused. “What do you mean you heard the Mass?” she asked. Betty answered, “I heard it on the radio yesterday.” Her mother replied, “We don’t broadcast our Mass.” They checked with the priest who celebrated it. There had been no broadcast. Yet Betty was able to describe the homily, the prayers, and all the details of the Mass at St. Martin’s. The priest told her, “It would appear you were given a rather extraordinary gift!”

The second illustration involves one of the greatest saints in the history of Christianity, Augustine. Feeling great anguish over his lifelong struggle with his half-heartedness toward God, he cried out to God from the depths of his weakness and frustration at his own sinfulness—and God answered:

I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl—I know not which—coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.” Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard how Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: “Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” By such an oracle he was forthwith converted to thee.

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.[2]

Some Things to Notice about Private Revelation

A couple of things are worth noting here. The first is the curious smallness of these epiphanies. No parted seas. No big explosions. They’re both intensely personal experiences. Not for nothing does Scripture refer to revelation as a “still small voice” (1 Kgs. 19:12). The recipient of the private revelation will often be the only person aware of what has happened. But for that person the whole cosmos has changed. Vistas have suddenly opened before him and he has the chance to follow God into a new world transformed by the living presence.

Or not. For, of course, our free will isn’t taken away by a private revelation. Augustine responded with all his heart to the mysterious invitation extended him. As a result, God led Augustine to change the entire course of history in what is arguably (after St. Paul’s) the second most important conversion in the annals of western civilization. But my friend Betty walked away from her private revelation. Though she was very concerned that I believe her story and not think her crazy (and I do believe her), she nonetheless remained an ex-Catholic even after this with the silly excuse, “If God really loved me, why do I have diabetes?” When she said this, I thought, “Sheesh, lady! What do you want? An engraved invitation? We are, after all, talking about a Church founded on a man who was crucified.” But despite what I thought, she exercised her free will to ignore the astonishing gift she’d been given.

Another point to note is that real private revelation always points back to public revelation, just as public revelation illumines and completes private revelation. For that reason, private revelation never takes precedence over public revelation—ever. Augustine’s private revelation took him straight to Sacred Scripture and the public revelation of the Church. Betty’s, likewise, as impressive an invitation from God as you could ask for, was an invitation not to some new revelation, but to come back to Mass. Through the history of the Church, all authentic private revelation, however weird (and some stories are doozies), has always had essentially the same message: Repent of your sins, believe the teaching of the Church, say your prayers, be good, love God and your neighbor, receive the sacraments—in a word, believe and live the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s because there’s no new light to give. There’s just the good old healthy daylight of Jesus, but it’s often falling on eyes that need their scales removed. The apostles handed the light who is Jesus on to the Church two thousand years ago and the Church has been handing that light down ever since by the power of the Holy Spirit. Private revelation sheds no extra light. It just peels scales off of our eyes so that we can see the only light there has ever been: Jesus Christ.

More tomorrow.

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[1] You can find out more about this and similar phenomena in Eucharistic Miracles by Joan Carroll Cruz (Charlotte: TAN Books, 2009). Curiously, all the Church’s approved Eucharistic miracles involving the precious blood of Christ turn out to have type AB blood.

[2] Augustine, Confessions, 8:12. (Mineola: Dover, 2012).