GUADULUPE HOLY OR HOAX?

GUADULUPE HOLY OR HOAX?

 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4201


The apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Guadalupe in Mexico are unique in the annals of Marian apparitions because this Lady allegedly left physical evidence behind her. The evidence is the painting of the vision made by herself in an instant of time on the cloak of the only witness, Juan Diego. This image is called the Tilma. If she did this then apparitions without this or similar evidence have to be dubious. Why give stronger proof for the Lady of Guadalupe and not the Lady of Lourdes or Pontmain or Fatima? And as for her strong evidence, why did she even bother considering that there is no evidence that the cloth and the image go back to 1531 when she supposedly presented them to the world!

The first vision took place on the site of the pagan mother Goddess in 1531. The bishop was informed that a beautiful Lady had appeared saying she was the Virgin Mother of God. The bishop asked for a sign before he would believe. His name was Zumarraga and in his writings there is no mention of visions or Tepeyac where they supposedly happened - see page 183, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986. And I add that there was no mention of Juan Diego! Accounts of images at Tepeyac at the time speak of statues being venerated there not the tilma (page 185, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986). It probably did not exist then.

In other apparitions, the Virgin gives no sign but the conviction and normalcy and rapid spiritual progress of the witness so one wonders why that did not suffice here. Please do not think that spiritual progress is a great sign for anybody would pretend to be good when the eyes of their fans are on them. The Church will shout that we must not be so cynical and why not just believe? I have two things to say. Realistically people do often pretend to be better than what they are. All we are doing is acknowledging that fact. And as for the why not just believe advice we can ask why just not believe? The Church cannot complain if we don’t believe for it is our right not to. Yet it does complain. There is no way I can stand the Church complaining – its just a sign of its intolerance. If you have an equal choice between believing a strange claim and not believing in it, evidently if you are rational you will not believe.

Jesus said that asking for signs before being willing to believe was tempting God. God does signs when he wishes and not for people who urge him to do a sign before they will believe. Here, the Virgin evidently disagrees with Jesus and the Bible and God panders to the bishop’s wish for a sign. She gives him a miracle picture and roses that bloomed out of season to boot. She must be better than God. Theologically, the visions must be ascribed to Satan which implies that Satan wants Mary to be prayed to and believed to be mother of God and ever-Virgin. They really refute Christendom and Catholicism. The perpetual Virginity and the Virgin birth are unbiblical legends. And the deity of Christ appears nowhere in the New Testament. The whole story is too similar to a Spanish legend that is much older. The place name, Guadalupe, even appears in both stories (page 31, Looking for a Miracle).

And in both stories a miracle image is provided of Mary, the vision happens to an older man on a hill, a man who had been married, a relative was granted salvation from death and a shrine was asked for (page 187, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986).

The miracle that most believers associate with the image is that the cloth supposedly should have decayed centuries ago. This claim is untrue. The favourite lie is to say it is made of cactus fibres - the cloth then should last for a decade at the most if it is.

Brother John M. Samaha, S.M. put the following on the internet when he wished to publish a scientific perspective on the tilma. "Those who subscribed to the European origin theory said the tilma could not be a local Mexican product because it has lasted so long. Local cloth made from woven cactus fibers lasts about a decade at most. The tilma is almost five hundred years old, and has been on display in public daily. People behind this theory said the tilma must be woven from European linen or cotton. Two fibers of the tilma were lent to Professor Chiment for testing. These fibers had been removed from the outer edge of the tilma when it was stored during the Mexican Revolution. The test results showed that the fibers did not come from native cactus plants, nor did they come from cotton, wool, or linen -- fibers that might have been used in Europe. Rather, the tilma seems to have been woven from hemp, a plant native to Mexico. Hemp is one of the strongest fibers known, and hempen cloth can last hundreds of years. This could explain the tilma's remarkable state of preservation." http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/meditations/samaha7.html


The image fits the tradition of forged self-portraits of the Virgin Mary and there is a picture of the Merciful Virgin that was painted in Spain that is several decades older than the Guadalupe image that looks too similar to it for the latter to have been of divine origin (page 32, ibid).
It is striking that the Virgin called herself the Virgin and Mother of Mercy in her first appearance. The Catholic missionary magazine, Far East (May/June 2003), candidly confessed the following things. The angel bearing the body of the Virgin in the picture has nearly the same wings as the wings of an Aztec god who was worshipped locally. The colour of the mantle the lady was wearing matched the blue colour worn by Aztec nobility. The picture confirmed the Aztec astrological prediction of the times that there would be a imminent new age and the lady’s hands indicate that this new age was indeed nigh. The picture then is definitely occult. 
It backs astrology which is clearly censured in the Bible and by the Church. The Church will say the picture is not sanctioning astrology but using it to get people’s attention. But the Church is only assuming that. We don’t want assumptions here. It is most likely that the lady is sanctioning astrology for we would not say the Virgin would use soft porn to get attention though she disapproves of soft porn.
The image is occult and therefore stands condemned by the strict teaching given by God in the Law of Moses to avoid any semblance of paganism. When God comes first as the Law states it is clear that keeping anything that might lead to the worship of something else is forbidden and keeping it in the name of art is no excuse. The image is of man or of Satan or of a pagan god. Did Juan lie about the apparition really being Mary?

Science and its instruments have shown that there is evidence that the Lady was sketched before she was painted and the fingers have been shortened and the irises are outlined. This tells against the idea that the picture appeared as a result of an instant miracle by the Virgin Mary. The images of the people in the room are supposed to appear reflected in the right eye. But these images are so vague that they could be anything. Such delusions show what tone that books that defend the miracle take.

The evidence is that this image was naturally painted.

The Virgin’s mantle is off-centre on the head and it hugs the sides of the face and the top floats above the top of the head. These errors betray a human origin. There is also the flaking that has taken place along the fold in the middle. A real miracle would not flake. The Lady stands on the moon which comes from the Book of Revelation which symbolises the Church as a woman on the moon. The Virgin is misidentified as the woman of Revelation which indicates forgery. Her crown was painted out. She is too short and broad. Her arms would stretch out to below her knees like a monkey if she laid them by her sides. There is an unnatural fold in the mantle next her left thigh where it bends one way and then the opposite way for no reason. And why does the angel hold her by the robes and not by the moon on which she stands? The robe even bunches up a bit under her where he holds her. But even then the bunching takes a rectangular shape which is unnatural and can’t be explained by her feet and the bunching should fit the shape of the crescent moon but it does not.

The face of the Lady is in shadow which is strange when she is so luminous that she gives of a burst of light. The pro-Guadalupe book, The Wonder of Guadalupe (page 51) states that this is because no Lady likes being stared at! But it is only a picture and moreover the Virgin appears to people to be stared at in an ecstatic state. The shadowing shows a bad choice of colouring which refutes those who say the face is a miracle painting.

The allegedly miraculous three-dimensional quality that mainly surrounds the mouth which is due to roughness in the fabric (page 132, The Wonder of Guadalupe) could just be coincidence. It does not appear on the whole face or image which it would do if it were a true miracle.

The Lady does not look very Jewish so she is not Mary’s self-portrait. Her face does not resemble the supposed face of Jesus her son on the Turin Shroud so the two miracles are in conflict. The two would have been nearly identical if Jesus inherited all his genes from Mary and had no father. The Turin Shroud is more convincing than the image of Mary so it should be taken to refute it even if it is a fake itself.

The Wonder of Guadalupe, admits on page 76 that the hands were shortened and the image was painted over to hide cracks. The sunburst surrounding the painting was repainted as were the tassels and the moon and the stars on the mantle and the brooch and the border on the mantle. Still, the book unconvincingly boasts about the ability of the image to survive damp and exposure to the smoke of burning candles and frequent kissing and handling through the years. When the forged parts of the picture are so durable why can’t the original parts naturally be the same – the argument for miraculous preservation of the picture is unacceptable. There are horizontal lines showing fading and cracks on the image. Two of them can be seen on photographs even in The Wonder of Guadalupe which run along between the hands and the sash round the waist.

Perhaps the image has been replaced a few times like the Turin Shroud was. The replacement would be intended to defeat the countless objections to authenticity by artists and researchers who examined it so the image would be improved with every new forgery. The Church could not let the original image alone so why could and would it not forge a new image when the old deteriorates? It must have been replaced if it was able to withstand so much carelessness. In 1753, the image was subjected to rapid and frantic touching, kissing and rubbing five hundred times in two hours (page 118, The Wonder of Guadalupe). Could it be that a duplicate passed of as the original was used when the public were allowed to handle the cloth so that the original would be safe?

Sceptical priests testified in 1556 that an Indian or Aztec had painted the image. Fr de Maseques named the forger as Marcos Cipac and it has been proved that there was such a painter. There was a severe persecution of Christians in the area at the time the image appeared so it could have been intended to bring in plenty of quick converts for persecutors soon give up when the intended victims become too numerous. With the bizarre errors of the image their verdict must be correct.

It is interesting that the roses which the Virgin made have rotted away. They were Castilian roses from Spain. They were unavailable in Mexico but they could have been there for the Spanish would have liked to plant the things they enjoyed in Spain in their new home. They were uncommon enough to be thought non-existent in Mexico. To nearly all simple Spaniards they would just have been roses and if Diego planned the hoax he could have managed to grow the roses out of season. Did the Bishop simply think that the roses were Castilian? They could have been the ones in anybody’s garden that look like Castilian roses. Perhaps one rose looked by chance like a Castilian rose and the rest did not but when the bishop examined that one he assumed the rest were Castilian too. It was when Diego emptied the flowers from his cloak before the bishop that it was learned that there was an image on his cloak. Perhaps the flowers were the excuse for why he had to walk about taking care not to wrinkle his cloak in case he would damage the image?

Diego claimed that his uncle who was cured by the Virgin had cocolixtle which was a fever that proved fatal to all who caught it. But was it really? Juan knew that it could not proved that it was the fever and still he paraded the cure as a miracle. The fact that he went for a priest for his uncle instead of appealing to the apparition for help has disturbed many students of the vision (page 22, The Wonder of Guadalupe). It is psychological evidence that there never had been a vision.

In December 1999, an abbot called Gullermo Shulenburg who was once associated with the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe despatched a five-page report to the Vatican stating that there was no evidence apart from legend for the existence of Juan Diego. The Vatican was enraged for it planned to canonise Diego. The abbot’s discovery has damning implications for the holy picture of the Virgin. It would mean it could be a miracle image of the Mother Goddess who was adored on the hill of Guadalupe before the Virgin allegedly appeared that has been retouched to make it look more like Mary if it is a miracle at all. The Virgin has the facial features attributed to that pagan goddess which is as good a confirmation as any about who it is supposed to be. Fr Raymond E Brown’s book, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, tells us that the image of Mary at Guadalupe is hard to examine scientifically and that the exact story about the apparitions is equally very elusive for the ancient documents contradict each other (page 98).

http://www.miraclesceptic.com/guadalupe.html
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Proof (or Not) of Saintly Existence

By PETER STEINFELS

On July 31, Pope John Paul II is scheduled to declare Juan Diego Cuauhtlahtoatzin, a humble Aztec better known simply as Juan Diego, to be a saint.

It is Juan Diego to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared in December 1531, and, when the local Spanish bishop demanded proof of the apparition, it was on Juan Diego's rough cloak that the heavenly lady miraculously imprinted her image, an image still displayed and revered in its basilica in Mexico City and now reproduced almost everywhere.

One might expect that the Rev. Stafford Poole, an American priest and author of "Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol" (University of Arizona Press, 1995), would be looking forward to July 31. He is not.

He is one of a number of scholars who do not question Juan Diego's holiness. They question whether he ever existed. Juan Diego, Father Poole says, is a "pious fiction."

David A. Brading, a Cambridge professor, author of "Mexican Phoenix" (Cambridge, 2001), a highly sympathetic study of the Guadalupe devotion, has said, "There's no historical evidence whatsoever that such a person actually existed."

The problem for historians like Father Poole or Professor Brading is that though the Guadalupe portrait and devotions surrounding it clearly date to the mid-1500's, it was not until 1648 that Miguel Sanchez, a creole priest, published the elaborate account of apparitions, Juan Diego and his miraculously transformed cloak. The same story, told more simply and movingly in Nahuatl, the native tongue, appeared a year later in a book produced by a friend of Sanchez.

Ever since then, Mexican churchmen have been trying fill this gap in the record. If these 1648-49 accounts were based, as some claimed, on oral traditions, why had not a single trace of them showed up in the huge mass of religious material, both in Spanish and in native languages, that had appeared in the intervening century? Missing documents, especially earlier versions of the Nahuatl text, were hypothesized; various explanations were offered for their absence. In 1666, depositions were taken from elderly Indians and Spaniards. (The ages of four Indian witnesses were given as 100, 100, 110, and between 112 and 115.)

Many people argued that the image, which unlike the Shroud of Turin has never been scientifically examined, could not have been created by human hands - and therefore was itself proof of the 1648 account.

Still, the questions and the controversies have persisted. Writing in Commonweal, a biweekly edited by Catholic laity, Father Poole stated, "More than forty documents are said to attest to the reality of Juan Diego, yet not one of them can withstand serious historical criticism."

Obviously the Vatican officials conducting investigations for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints do not agree. But Father Poole considers their procedures "one-sided, slanted and bordering on the dishonest." No recognized scholars questioning the traditional accounts about Juan Diego were consulted, he wrote; he found out that his own book had been criticized but he was not given a chance to reply.

Other critics have been "demonized," he said in an interview, and accused of racism or heresy. In a book he is completing he calls the canonization "a sad and tawdry spectacle that does little service to the Church's mission and credibility."

Professor Brading is on a somewhat different wavelength. In "Mexican Phoenix," he praises Father Poole and declares that the American priest with two other scholars has demonstrated that the 1649 Nahuatl account was based on Sanchez's 1648 Spanish text - "a devastating criticism," Professor Brading writes, of all theories about some earlier Indian-language source.

Still, Professor Brading is ambivalent about the battle over historicity. He is enamored of the theological creativity of thinkers like Sanchez, who conceived of Juan Diego "as another Moses and the image of Guadalupe as the Mexican Ark of the Covenant," showing that God's own mother had founded Christian Mexico.

The Guadalupe tradition has a theological truth, he says, that cannot be discerned by "ill-judged questions about historicity," but only by thinking of the image the way Eastern Orthodox Christians think of icons and thinking of the story the way that Catholic theologians now regard many of the miraculous Gospel stories about Jesus' birth.

So Professor Brading, in a letter to the London Tablet, a Catholic weekly, ended up, on the one hand, calling the story of the Virgin and Juan Diego "a sublime parable" and, on the other hand, concluding, "To canonize Juan Diego makes as much sense, and as little, as to canonize the Good Samaritan."

That leaves some important questions. First, can what Father Poole calls "a pious fiction" be transmuted by centuries of devotion into what Professor Brading calls "a sublime parable"? Second, can the church really sidestep the problem of historical fact? Christianity, after all, is notorious for considering itself a history-based religion.

THE CASE AGAINST SCEPTICS

Believers think oral tradition that allegedly goes back to the early sixteenth century, the existence of the picture, its remarkable preservation like God was protecting it, Rome suggesting the story was true by approving a Mass for the apparition in 1754 are okay evidences.  But it is wrong to even call this rubbish.   
Spanish Jesuit Xavier Escalada supposedly had a drawing of the visions dated from the 1540s.  That is a good try but again that is not documentary evidence for we don't have the drawing. "The attentive reader will easily perceive, by means of this bibliography, the abundance and variety of Guadalupan writings produced in the course of more than four and a half centuries: manuscripts starting in 1531 and, from 1610, printed documents. The manuscripts mentioned show plainly that the eminent Mexican historian, Joaquín Garcia lcazbalceta, was mistaken when he thought that there were no 16th century documents extant proving the historical event of the apparitions and the subsequent devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Even if his assertion may have corresponded to the situation at the time when he was writing (1888), it cannot, of course, be reaffirmed today" (G. Grijales -E. J. Burrus, Bibliografia Guadalupana 1531-1984).   
Believers cherry pick the data to pick what suits.  It is even argued that experts say the oral traditions were reliable despite the big time scale!  (Miguel León Portilla, El destino de la palabra. De la oralidad y los glifos mesoamericanos a la escritura alfabética, FCE, Mexico City 1996, pp. 19-71).  The material is often dated earlier than what it is and interpretations are fanciful.

The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986 page 193 states that the image was altered to fit the Juan Diego tale better. The story was woven around the image. It was popular practice in the past to put images painted on cloth in churches. The tilma is probably just another such image. The book points out that drugs were used in the area when Diego allegedly lived which makes it suspect that the story that when he was having his vision that the cactus leaves shone like emeralds and the pricks like gold could be true! (page 192).

Conclusion

The vision and miracle and of Guadalupe is nonsense.  It is no miracle when God had to make a faulty image that needed touching up! Believing scholars admit there is no documentary evidence for the story or even the existence of Juan Diego.  They use weak evidence to defend the tall tale.

BOOKS CONSULTED

Believing in God, PJ McGrath, Millington Books in Association with Wolfhound, Dublin, 1995
Bernadette of Lourdes, Rev CC Martindale, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1970
Looking for a Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books, New York, 1993
Miracles in Dispute, Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, SCM, London, 1969
Miracles, Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1937
Spiritual Healing, Martin Daulby and Caroline Mathison, Geddes & Grosset, New Lanark, Scotland, 1998
St Catherine Laboure of the Miraculous Medal, Fr Joseph I Dirvin C.M., Tan, Illinois, 1984
The Incorruptibles, Joan Carroll Cruz, Tan, Illinois, 1977
The Sceptical Occultist, Terry White, Century, London, 1994
The Supernatural A-Z, James Randi, Headline Books, London, 1995
The Wonder of Guadalupe, Francis Johnson, Augustine, Devon, 1981
The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986


THE WEB Saints Preserve Us! www.forteantimes.com/articles/159_saintspreserved.shtml

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‘Miraculous’ Image of Guadalupe

Investigative Files

Joe Nickell

Skeptical Briefs Volume 12.2, June 2002

Mexico’s Image of Guadalupe is a sixteenth-century depiction of the Virgin Mary that, according to pious legend, she imprinted miraculously on an Aztec convert’s cloak. The Indian, Juan Diego, is expected to be canonized as a saint, although new evidence confirms skeptics’ claims that the image is merely a native artist’s painting, the tale apocryphal, and “Juan Diego” probably fictitious.
The story of Juan Diego is related in the Nican Mopohua ("an account”) written in the native Aztec language and sometimes called the “gospel of Guadalupe.” According to this account, in early December of 1531 (some ten years after Cortez’s defeat of the Aztec Empire) Juan Diego was a recent convert who supposedly left his village to attend Mass in another. As he passed the foot of a hill named Tepeyac he encountered a young girl, radiant in golden mist, who identified herself as “the ever-virgin Holy Mary, mother of the true God” and asked that a temple be built on the site. Later, as a sign to a skeptical bishop, she caused her self- portrait to appear miraculously on Juan’s cactus-fiber cloak.
The legend obviously contains a number of motifs from the Old and New Testament as well as statements of specific Catholic dogma. Indeed, the tale itself appears to have been borrowed from an earlier Spanish legend in which the Virgin appeared to a shepherd and led him to discover a statue of her along a river known as Guadalupe ("hidden channel”). Moreover, the resulting shrine at Tepeyac was in front of the site where the Aztecs had had a temple for their own virgin goddess Tonantzin (Smith 1983). Thus the Catholic tradition was grafted onto the Indian one, a process folklorists call syncretism.
The image itself also yields evidence of considerable borrowing. It is a traditional portrait of Mary, replete with standard artistic motifs and in fact clearly derived from earlier Spanish paintings. Yet some proponents of the image have suggested that the obvious artistic elements were later additions and that the “original” portions-the face, hands, robe, and mantle-are therefore “inexplicable” and even “miraculous” (Callahan 1981).
Actually, infrared photographs show that the hands have been modified, and close-up photography shows that pigment has been applied to the highlight areas of the face sufficiently heavily so as to obscure the texture of the cloth. There is also obvious cracking and flaking of paint all along a vertical seam, and the infrared photos reveal in the robe’s fold what appear to be sketch lines, suggesting that an artist roughed out the figure before painting it. Portrait artist Glenn Taylor has pointed out that the part in the Virgin’s hair is off-center; that her eyes, including the irises, have outlines, as they often do in paintings, but not in nature, and that these outlines appear to have been done with a brush; and that much other evidence suggests the picture was probably copied by an inexpert artist from an expertly done original.
In fact, during a formal investigation of the cloth in 1556, it was stated that the image was “painted yesteryear by an Indian,” specifically “the Indian painter Marcos.” This was probably the Aztec painter Marcos Cipac de Aquino who was active in Mexico at the time the Image of Guadalupe appeared.
In 1985, forensic analyst John F. Fischer and I reported all of this evidence and more in “a folkloristic and iconographic investigation” of the Image of Guadalupe in Skeptical Inquirer. We also addressed some of the pseudoscience that the image has attracted. (For example, some claim to have discovered faces, including that of “Juan Diego” in the magnified weave of the Virgin’s eyes-evidence of nothing more than the pious imagination’s ability to perceive images, inkblot-like, in random shapes) (Nickell and Fischer 1985).
Recently our findings were confirmed when the Spanish-language magazine Proceso reported the results of a secret study of the Image of Guadalupe. It had been conducted - secretly - in 1982 by art restoration expert José Sol Rosales. Rosales examined the cloth with a stereomicroscope and observed that the canvas appeared to be a mixture of linen and hemp or cactus fiber. It had been prepared with a brush coat of white primer (calcium sulfate), and the image was then rendered in distemper (i.e., paint consisting of pigment, water, and a binding medium). The artist used a “very limited palette,” the expert stated, consisting of black (from pine soot), white, blue, green, various earth colors ("tierras”), reds (including carmine), and gold. Rosales concluded that the image did not originate supernaturally but was instead the work of an artist who used the materials and methods of the sixteenth century (El Vaticano 2002).
In addition, new scholarship (e.g. Brading 2001) suggests that, while the image was painted not long after the Spanish conquest and was alleged to have miraculous powers, the pious legend of Mary’s appearance to Juan Diego may date from the following century. Some Catholic scholars, including the former curator of the basilica Monsignor Guillermo Schulemburg, even doubt the historical existence of Juan Diego. Schulemburg said the canonization of Juan Diego would be the “recognition of a cult” (Nickell 1997).
However, the skeptics are apparently having little if any effect, and Pope John Paul II seems bent on canonizing “Juan Diego” who is as demonstrably popular among Mexican Catholics as he is, apparently, fictitious.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the assistance of John Moffit and César Tort who helped update me on this topic, as well as CFI staff members who helped in various ways, including Tim Binga, Kevin Christopher, Ben Radford, and Ranjit Sandhu.

References

• Brading, D.A. 2001. Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
• Callahan, Philip Serna. 1981. The Tilma under Infra-red Radiation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
• El Vaticano. 2002. Proceso, May 19, 29-30.
• Nickell, Joe. 1997. Image of Guadalupe: myth- perception. Skeptical Inquirer 21:1 (January/ February), 9.
• Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1985. The Image of Guadalupe: A folkloristic and iconographic investigation. Skeptical Inquirer 9:3 (spring), 243-255.
• Smith, Jody Brant. 1983. The Image of Guadalupe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and "Investigative Files" Columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1998), Pen, Ink and Evidence (2003), Unsolved History (2005) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC's Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.

http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/miraculous_image_of_guadalupe
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The Virgin of Guadalupe

Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe played an important role in the Catholic colonization of the Americas.  
 
by Brian Dunning

Skeptoid Podcast #201
April 13, 2010
Podcast transcript


Today we're going to travel back to the time of the Conquistadors, when Spanish soldiers marched through Aztec jungles and spread Catholicism to the New World. We're going to examine an object that is central to faith in Mexico: An image called the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is basically Mexico's version of the Shroud of Turin. Both are pieces of fabric, hundreds of years old, on which appears an image said to be miraculous. Both are considered sacred objects. But the Virgin of Guadalupe is a much more powerful icon to many Mexicans. There's hardly anywhere you can go in Mexico and not find a reproduction of the image. Its importance as a religious and cultural symbol cannot be understated, for it came from the very hands of The Most Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas.

A legend well known in Mexico tells how it came to be. In 1531, the Spanish had been occupying Mexico for about ten years. An indigenous peasant, Juan Diego, was walking in what's now Mexico City when he saw the glowing figure of a teenage girl on a hill called Tepeyac. She identified herself as the Virgin Mary, and asked him to build her a church on that spot. Diego recounted this to the Archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga (1468-1548). Zumárraga was skeptical and told Diego to return and ask her to prove her identity with a miracle. Diego did return, and encountered the apparition again. She told him to climb to the top of the hill and pick some flowers to present to the Bishop. Although it was winter and no flowers should have been in bloom, Juan Diego found an abundance of flowers of a type he'd never seen before. The Virgin Mary bundled the flowers into Diego's cloak, woven from common cactus fiber and called a tilma. When Juan Diego presented the tilma to Zumárraga, the flowers fell out and he recognized them as Castilian roses, not found in Mexico; but more significantly, the tilma had been miraculously imprinted with a colorful image of the Virgin herself. This actual tilma, preserved since that date and showing the familiar image of the Virgin Mary with her head bowed and hands together in prayer, is the Virgin of Guadalupe. It remains perhaps the most sacred object in all of Mexico.

The story is best known from a manuscript written in the Aztecs' native language Nahuatl by the scholar Antonio Valeriano (1531-1605), the Nican Mopohua. By the European watermark on its paper, it's known to have been written sometime after 1556. This was widely published in a larger collection in 1649 by the lawyer Luis Laso de la Vega. Zumárraga and Juan Diego were both dead by the time Valeriano wrote it, so where did he get his information?

A red flag that a number of historians have put forth is that Bishop Zumárraga was a prolific writer. Yet, in not a single one of his known letters, is there any mention of Juan Diego, his miraculous apparition, the roses, or the cloak bearing the image, or any other element of the story in which Zumárraga was alleged to have played so prominent a role.

Not everyone agrees. In the 2000 book in Spanish, Juan Diego, una Vida de Santidad que Marcó la Historia (A Life of Holiness that Made History), author Eduardo Chavez Sánchez gives, at some length, various quotations from letters by Zumárraga that he believes confirms the Juan Diego narrative. I found his list to be extraordinarily unconvincing, and I would honestly describe it as really desperate scraping of the bottom of the barrel to find a quote-minable quote. In fact, the only quote from Zumárraga I found that was remotely close was:

An Indian goes to Brother Toribio and all will be in praise of God.

That sounds great because he mentions an Indian talking to a Catholic figure, but there's no mention of this Indian's name, no mention in the Juan Diego stories of a Brother Toribio (that I could find), and no elements of the Juan Diego story included in this single-sentence snippet. So unless some more of Zumárraga's writings come to light, I'm going to agree with the historians who say Zumárraga wrote nothing of these events, which casts doubt on his role in something that would have been of such great importance to him.

The name Juan Diego itself suggests that the story was a fictional invention. It basically translates as John Doe, a generic everyman, whose identity is unimportant. This doesn't prove anything, since there certainly were real people named Juan Diego, but it is an intriguing element.

It is the actual image of Mary itself that tells us the most about its true history. As every schoolchild knows, Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) was the Spanish Conquistador who overthrew the Aztec empire and placed much of Mexico under Spanish control in 1521. He was born in a region of Spain called Extremadura, and grew up to revere Our Lady of Guadalupe, a statue of a black version of the Virgin Mary, at the Santa María de Guadalupe monastery in Extremadura. This statue is credited with miraculously helping to expel the Moors from Spain in the Reconquista. Cortés brought reproductions of this European image of Mary with him when he went to the New World. Her dark skin resembled the Aztecs, and she became the perfect icon for the missionaries who followed Cortés to rally the natives into Christianity.

One such missionary was Fray Pedro de Gante (1480-1572), a Franciscan monk from Belgium (born Pieter van der Moere) who learned the Aztec language and created the first European-style school in Mexico, San Jose de los Naturales. One of his promising art students was a young Aztec man with the Christian name Marcos Cipac de Aquino, one of three known prolific Aztec artists of the period. In 1555, the newly arrived Archbishop of Mexico, Alonso de Montúfar (1489-1572), successor to the deceased Zumárraga, was looking to commission a portrait of the Virgin Mary, as a sort of teaching aide to help convert the Aztecs. Montúfar found the young artist Marcos at de Gante's school. And so, in 1555, the Aztec artist Marcos Cipac de Aquino painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary, with dark skin, with head slightly bowed and hands together in prayer, on a common cactus-fiber canvas. The painting was named the Virgin of Guadalupe according to the tradition Cortés brought from Spain. Although the Extremadura statue was not in this pose, the pose was still one of European tradition. The most often cited example of Mary in this exact pose is the painting A Lady of Mercy, attributed to Bonanat Zaortiga and on display at the National Art Museum of Catalunya, painted in the 1430's. Marcos followed more than a century of European tradition.

There was a pragmatic element to Montúfar's introduction of this painting and allowing it to be worshipped. Before the Conquistadors, Tepeyac was home to an Aztec temple, built to honor the Aztecs' own virgin goddess, Tonantzin. So rather than replacing the Aztec goddess, Montúfar's plan was simply to introduce Mary by giving Tonantzin a name and a face (recall that Marcos had painted the Virgin with dark skin). This process of using an existing belief system to graft on a new one has been called syncretism. Understandably, this exploitation of a pagan idol caused discomfort among some of the Franciscan priests, while many of the Dominicans welcomed the way it helped baptize 8,000,000 Aztecs.

The primary corroborating documentation of Marcos' painting is a report from the Church in 1556, when this growing disagreement between the Franciscans and the Dominicans prompted an investigation into the origins of the tilma. Two of the Franciscans submitted sworn statements in which they expressed their concern that worshipping the tilma was leading the Aztecs to return to their traditional pagan ways. One described the image as "a painting that the Indian painter Marcos had done" while another said it was "painted yesteryear by an Indian". Appearing on the side of the Dominicans, who favored allowing the Aztecs to worship the image, was Bishop Montúfar himself. As a result, the construction of a much larger church was authorized at Tepeyac, in which the tilma was mounted and displayed.

Significantly, the 1556 report is the most extensive documentation concerning the Virgin tilma of its century, and it makes no mention whatsoever of Juan Diego, the miraculous appearance of the image, or any other element from the legend. If the miracle story did exist at that time, it seems inconceivable that it could have been omitted from this report. This strongly supports the suggestion that the Juan Diego legend had not yet been conceived. It also supports that Valeriano's Nican Mopohua was written later.

The legend did get its first boost of testable evidence in 1995, which (in a case of suspiciously fortuitous timing) was after Juan Diego's beatification in 1990, while there was still debate over whether he should be canonized (he ultimately was, in 2002). A Spanish Jesuit named Javier Escalada produced a deerskin which pictorially depicted the Juan Diego legend and has become known as the Codex Escalada. The Codex also mentioned several historical people, and even bore the signature of a Franciscan historian, Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590), dated 1548. Basically, it was the Perfect Storm of tailor-made evidence proving that the Juan Diego legend was the accepted history at the time. A little too tailor made though; no serious historians have supported its authenticity. The best analysis I've found is by Alberto Peralta of the Proyecto Guadalupe project. Based on its dubious unveiling, numerous inconsistencies, and other factors, Peralta concludes that it's impossible for the document to be authentic.

If the Virgin tilma is indeed a painting, and not a miraculously produced image, then it should be a simple matter to determine that scientifically. There are obvious signs that are hard to argue with, notably that the paint is flaking along a vertical seam in the fabric. But a truly scientific examination involving sampling of the material has not been permitted. The most notable examination was a three hour infrared photographic session by Philip Callahan in 1981, who did note multiple layers of paint covering changes to the hands and crown, but came away with more questions than answers. Callahan found, for example, that most of the entire painting seemed to have been done with a single brush stroke. He recommended a series of more tests, but the only one allowed by the Church was a spectrophotometric examination done by Donald Lynn from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The only result released of his examination was that "nothing unusual" was found.

Much has been made of the claim that figures can be seen reflected in Mary's eyes, with some even identifying these figures as Zumárraga or Juan Diego or other characters from the legend. The Church even went so far in 1956 as to have two ophthalmologists examine the eyes under 2500× magnification. They reported a whole group of figures, including both Aztecs and Franciscans. Why ophthalmologists should be better qualified to identify Aztecs and Franciscans in random blobs of pigment has not been convincingly argued. Photos taken by another ophthalmologist in 1979 have been released, and it's quite obvious that it's simply random noise. I see a dozen or so speckles; if you want to make them into Aztecs, Franciscans, bananas, or Bozo the Clown, then you'll probably also be great at spotting dozens of Bigfoots hiding in any given photograph of a forest.
The Virgin of Guadalupe is yet more one mythical story whose believers are missing out on true facts that are actually more respectful and confer more credit upon them than the myth. The image on the Virgin tilma was painted by a native Aztec artist; and the painting had not only an important role in Mexico's early history as a nation, but also a staggering impact upon its culture ever since. Mexicans with Aztec heritage should take pride in the fact that their original culture, specifically the goddess Tonantzin, was a key ingredient in the spread of modern Catholicism. The Juan Diego myth takes that away, and whitewashes part of Mexican history clean of any Aztec influence. That's a disservice to one of humanity's greatest ancient civilizations, and it's a disservice to history.

When we see the Virgin of Guadalupe image today, most people react in one of two ways: They worship it as a miraculous apparition, or they dismiss it as someone else's religious icon. Both reactions miss the much richer true history. The Virgin of Guadalupe stands not only as an invaluable work of ancient art (possibly the most popular piece of art ever created), but also as a reminder of how the conquest of Mexico was truly accomplished: Not only its military conquest, but one of history's greatest religious conversions as well.

 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4201
======================

Joe Nickell : On a Wing and a Prayer: The Search for Guardian Angels

On a Wing and a Prayer: The Search for Guardian Angels

Investigative Files

Joe Nickell

Skeptical Briefs Volume 21.3, Fall 2011

Interest in angels waxes and wanes. In 1975 evangelist Billy Graham lamented in his book Angels: God’s Secret Agents that “little had been written on the subject in this century” (p. ix). However, belief in angels went up from 50 percent in 1988 to 69 percent at the end of 1993, with 66 percent believing they were actually watched over by their “own personal guardian angel.” Fur­ther­more, between 1990 and 1993, Sophy Burnham’s A Book of Angels sold over half a million copies in thirty printings (Wood­ward 1993, 54), and many similar books were as successful.
A poll in September 2008 showed interest in the celestial beings reaching a new level. Conducted by the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion, the poll of 1,700 respondents yielded 55 percent an­swering in the affirmative to the statement, “I was protected from harm by a guardian angel” (Stark 2008, 57). Christopher Bader, director of the Baylor survey, which also covered a number of other religious issues, found that response “the big shocker” in the report. He ex­plained: “If you ask whether people believe in guardian angels, a lot of people will say, ‘sure.’ But this is different. It’s experiential. It means that lots of Americans are having these lived supernatural experiences” (quoted in Van Biema 2008).
But are these experiences really supernatural? Or are they only natural, the result of misperceptions and even misreporting? A look into the phenomenon of claimed guardian-angel encounters is illuminating.

Angel Guardians

Perhaps the earliest depiction of an angelic being, or a precursor of angels, is a winged figure on an ancient Sumerian stele. The entity is pouring the water of life from a jar into the king’s cup. Other precursors may be the giant, winged, supernatural beings—part animal, part human—that guarded the temples of ancient Assyria, thus perhaps serving as models for the concept that angels are protectors. The word angel derives from the Greek angelos, “messenger”; however, in biblical accounts, the entities not only fulfilled the role of messengers (e.g., Matt. 1:20) but also were avengers (2 Sam. 24:16), protectors (Ps. 91:11), rescuers (Dan. 6:22), and more (Burn­ham 1990, 81–82; Larue 1990, 57–61; Guiley 1991, 20).

Figure 1. Guardian angel depicted in a late nineteenth-century print (author’s collection).

In modern times, angels have been seen primarily as guardians (figure 1). “Angels represent God’s personal care for each one of us,” observes Father Andrew Greeley, a priest turned sociologist-novelist (qtd. in Wood­ward et al. 1993). This “new angelology”—the belief in personal guardian angels—is manifested not only in books but in angel focus groups and workshops, as well as angel bric-a-brac, posters, greeting cards, and so on. Ac­cord­ing to Newsweek: “It may be kitsch, but there’s more to the current angel obsession than the Hallmarking of America. Like the search for extraterrestrials, the belief in angels implies that we are not alone in the universe—that someone up there likes me” (Woodward et al. 1993).

Personal encounters with angels—related as inspirational stories—fill the books on angels. One such account appears in Graham’s book (1975, 2–3). It tells of a little girl who fetches a doctor to help her ailing mother. After caring for the woman, the doctor learns that her daughter died a month before, and in the closet hangs the little girl’s coat; “It was warm and dry and could not possibly have been out in the wintry night.”
Investigating the account, I discovered that it is a very old tale, circulated in various forms, with conflicting details (Nickell 1995, 153–55). Noted folklorist Jan Brun­vand (2000, 123–36) followed up on the tale (with some assistance from me) and demonstrated that it derived from a story told by S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), a physician and writer of prose fiction. Mitchell himself referred to it as “an early [illegible] ghost tale of [mine ?]”—a seemingly tacit admission that the narrative was pure fiction (Nickell 2011).

Encounters

Most of the currently popular angel stories are personal narratives. Among these are tales of “mysterious stranger angels,” ordinary-looking people who “appear suddenly when they are needed, and disappear just as suddenly when their job is done” (Guiley 1993, 65).

This genre includes the “roadside rescue” story, which one source admits “happens so often that it is almost a cliché in angel lore.” Essentially, “In the roadside rescue, the mysterious stranger arrives to help the motorist stranded on a lonely road at night, or who is injured in an accident in an isolated spot. Or, human beings arrive just in the nick of time” (Guiley 1993, 66). One such testimonial has come from Jane M. Howard, an “angel channeler and author.” According to Guiley (1993, 66):

One night, the gas pedal in Janie’s car became stuck, and she ran off the freeway near Baltimore. She stopped the car by throwing the transmission into park. It would not restart, and she began to panic. It was ten P.M. and she was miles from the nearest exit. She prayed to the angels for help, and within minutes, a van pulled up, carrying a man and a woman.
The woman rolled down her window and told Janie not to be frightened, for they were Christians. Even so, many people would have been wary of strangers at night. But the angels gave Janie assurances, and she accepted a ride to a gas station. She discovered that the couple lived in a town near hers, and knew her family. They pulled off to help Janie, they said, because they had a daughter, and they hoped that if their daughter ever was in distress, she, too, would be aided.

Notwithstanding such mundane occurrences, often the intervention is described so as to leave little doubt that it must have been a supernatural event. One such narrative tells of a woman’s visit to an electronics store and a young man who helped her son with some technical knowledge. The woman stated (in Guiley 1993, 65):

I was just dumbfounded. The young man wished us a nice day and left the store. A couple of seconds later, I rushed out the door to thank him, but he was gone. He literally disappeared. The store is in the middle of the block, so you would still be able to see someone walking down the sidewalk. Obviously, this was not an ordinary human. I still get chills about it.

However, we must ask: Was it really only “a couple of seconds later” or could it have been several seconds—long enough for the man to have entered a waiting car or stepped into an adjacent store?
Then there are the bedside angelic encounters, such as a story told by a Louis­ville woman in Burnham’s A Book of Angels (1990, 275–76). One of the woman’s good friends had died but seemed to linger as a “presence.” Moreover, she says,

Twice I have awakened from sleep to see something mystical. I sat up in bed to convince myself I was not dreaming.
To the right of me, hovering about five feet from the floor, was a bright mass of energy, a yellow and orange ball about six inches in diameter. I closed my eyes and reopened them. I even pinched myself to make sure I was really seeing what was be­fore my eyes, and there it remained until I fell asleep again.
I was frightened. About a year later, the same thing happened under the same circumstances. However, this time I asked questions subconsciously and they were answered. They were all in reference to my friend who had left this world. And the overall summation was, I was not to fear or worry, because I was being watched over. His protection, caring, and love were continuing, though his physical being was gone.

One immediately recognizes in this account the unmistakable characteristics of a “waking dream”—a very realistic-seeming hallucination that occurs in the state between full wakefulness and sleep. Waking dreams are responsible for countless supposed visitations by angels, as well as by ghosts, extraterrestrials, demons, and other otherworldly entities that lurk in the subconscious mind (Nickell 1995, 41, 46, 117, 131, 157, 209, 214; Baker 1995, 278).

In still other cases the percipient may simply be a classic fantasizer (Nickell 1995, 40–41, 57). Children are especially well known for engaging in fantasies. Consider, for example, this anecdote related by Sophy Burnham (1990, 4):

Once my mother saw an angel. She was five years old at the time, just a little girl in her nightie, getting ready for bed, when she looked up and saw an angel standing in the bedroom door.
“Auntie!” She pointed at the figure. “Look!” but her beloved auntie could not see.
“Go to sleep, child,” she said. “There’s nothing there.” I don’t know what her angel looked like. When I asked her, my mother’s face took on a dreamy and exalted look, simultaneously nostalgic and alight. She used words like brilliance or radiance, and I have the impression of many colors. But I have no idea what she saw.

As indicated by the aunt’s inability to see it, the angel obviously resulted from a child’s imagination and is no more credible than an eyewitness account of Santa Claus, a leprechaun, or an elf.

Stress can even produce angels in crisis situations. As psychologist Robert A. Baker observes,
there is a “well-known psychological fact that human beings, when subjected to extreme fear and stress, frequently hallucinate. These hallucinations, in many in­stances, take the form of helpers, aides, guides, assistants, et al., playing the role of Savior.” Adds Baker, “If the hallucinator also has religious leanings it is easy to understand how such a ‘helper’ is converted into one of the heavenly host, i.e., a guardian angel” (qtd. in Nickell 1995, 157–58).

Then there are stories that appear to fall into the category of urban legends. One of these features the Angel of Mons that supposedly came to the aid of British soldiers at that Belgian battlefield during World War I. Folklorist David Clarke, for his The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guard­ians, exhaustively investigated the story, finding it had been inspired by a fictional tale “at a time when the British people were desperate for news of a miracle” (2004, 241). Appearing in the London Evening News of September 29, 1914, “The Bow­men” by Arthur Machen dramatized the British routing of the Germans in symbolic terms of St. George and “his Agincourt bowmen.” Many read the story as true, prompting rumors of eyewitness accounts. Concludes Clarke (2004, 246):

In 1914, Britain was an imperial nation with a long tradition of success in combat that was sustained by belief in divine intervention. At Mons, the cream of the British Army narrowly escaped defeat at the hands of the Germans during the first month of the war. Many believed it was a miracle, and Arthur Machen’s story provided a perfect conduit for the creation and transmission of a reassuring modern legend that was based upon ancient precedents. His literary skills gave the story a resonance and power that would sustain it long beyond his lifetime. It was a legend that had an important and positive function during the war, sustaining hope, boosting patriotic optimism and shoring up faltering faith during the dark days of the Somme, Passchendaele and all the other disastrous battles that almost exterminated a generation of young men. Today the Angel of Mons remains one of the undying icons of that war and lives on as a symbol of the loss of innocence that was the legacy it left upon the British psyche. This legend re-emerged for a brief spell during the national crisis of 1940, at Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain. Maybe one day the angels will be needed again.

The concept of guardian angels, notes one writer (Willin 2008, 37), “was given a huge impetus” by the publication of Machen’s tale.

Photographing Angels

Thus far we have considered personal ac­counts of angels acting as guardians; however, if such accounts represent only what serious researchers disparage as “anecdotal evidence,” then what about photographic evidence—photos offered to support claims of angelic encounters? Unfortunately, the evidence is at best unconvincing, usually easily explainable. Many touted examples, for instance, are nothing more than simulacra, images perceived by the mind’s tendency to “recognize” common shapes in random patterns, like seeing pictures in inkblots, clouds, woodgrain patterns, and the like (Nickell 2007, 18).

Such images may also be faked. Consider the “Cloud Angel” photo circulated by Betty Malz, author of Angels Watching Over Me and other books. The picture Malz (1993) was kind enough to send me was accompanied by a brief narrative telling how a honeymooning couple had taken the photo from the window of their airplane. They had undergone severe turbulence that provoked them to pray for safety, whereupon the turbulence soon subsided and later the angel-shaped cloud appeared in one of their photos. It turns out, however, that the same picture has a long history—touted variously as an image of Christ taken during Hurricane Hugo (“Experts” 1990) and a “ghostly ap­parition” taken in 1971 by an “ordained spiritual minister” (Holzer 1993). Suspi­ciously, the cloud lacks the three-dimensional qualities of genuine cloud photographs as determined by a computer imaging expert (Nickell 2001, 200–03).

Much more recently, a few “angel” photos were included in the book The Para­normal Caught on Film by Melvyn Willin (2008, 36–37, 42–43, 46–47, 62–63). Alas, however, these range from the poorly documented to the suspiciously anonymous and are attributable to a variety of a photographic anomalies including reflections, simulacra, and other factors, as well as outright fakery.

As these narrative and photograph examples demonstrate, to many people guardian angels offer comfort in difficult times, while to others they are confirmation of deeply held religious or New Age beliefs. However, the evidence for their existence appears as ethereal, elusive, and doubtful as the alleged entities themselves.

Acknowledgments

As always, I appreciate the assistance of Timothy Binga, director of the Center for Inquiry Libraries.

References

Baker, Robert A. Afterward to Nickell 1995, 275–85.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2000. The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story! Chicago: University of Illinois.
Burnham, Sophy. 1990. A Book of Angels. New York: Ballantine Books.
CNN “Headline News.” 1993. CNN/Time/Newsweek poll cited December 18.
Clarke, David. 2004. The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians. Chichester, Eng­land: John Wiley & Sons.
Experts call “Hugo Christ” photo fake. 1990. Charle­ston, South Carolina, Evening Post (April 12).
Graham, Billy. 1975. Angels: God’s Secret Agents. Gar­den City, New York: Doubleday.
Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 1991. Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience. New York: Harper­Collins.
———. 1993. A radiance of angels. Fate (December): 60–68.
Holzer, Hans. 1993. America’s Restless Ghosts. Stamford, Connecticut: Longmeadow Press.
Larue, Gerald A. 1990. The Supernatural, the Occult and the Bible. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.
Malz, Betty. 1993. Photograph and letter to Joe Nickell, March 17.
Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, New York: Prome­theus Books. (A portion of the material for this article was taken from this source.)
———. 2001. Real-Life X-files. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
———. 2007. Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
———. 2011. The Doctor’s ghostly visitor: Tracking ‘The Girl in the Snow.’ Skeptical Briefs 21(2) (Summer): 5–7.
Stark, Rodney. 2008. What Americans Really Believe: New Findings from the Baylor Surveys of Religion. With Christopher Bader, et al. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press.
Van Biema, David. 2008. Guardian angels are here, say most Americans. Available online at www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1842179,00.html; accessed September 19, 2008.
Willin, Melvyn. 2008. The Paranormal Caught on Film. Cincinnati, Ohio: David & Charles.
Woodward, Kenneth L., et al. 1993. Angels. Newsweek (December 27): 54.

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and "Investigative Files" Columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1998), Pen, Ink and Evidence (2003), Unsolved History (2005) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC's Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.


http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/on_a_wing_and_a_prayer_the_search_for_guardian_angels
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Local Bishop confirms Medjugorje is a hoax

 Local Bishop confirms Medjugorje is a hoax
'This really is not Our Lady from the Gospel'

The bishop of Mostar-Duvno, His Excellency Ratko Peric, has once again strongly stated the obvious -- the apparitions of Medjugorje are a hoax. In fact, he goes even further, saying they were a form of manipulation from the fake visionaries and priests who benefit from the duped throngs of Catholics who visit the site. His predecessaor, His Excellency Pavao Žanic, also condemned the financial boondoggle of Medjugorje as false.

According to Jutarnji Vijesti, and translated by Total Croatia News, Bishop Peric said:
"Considering everything that this diocesan chancery has so far researched and studied, including the first seven days of alleged apparitions, we can say: there have been no apparitions of Our Lady in Medjugorje."

In describing the woman who the fake visionaries say appears, Bishop Peric says:

  "She often does not speak first, she has a strange laugh, she disappears after certain questions and then returns; she obeys the 'visionaries' and priests to come down from the hill to the church, although reluctantly. She is not sure how much time she will be visible, allows some of the visionaries to stand on her veil which is on the ground, allows others to touch her clothes and body. This really is not Our Lady from the Gospel."

Poor, ignorant Catholics who are duped into spending their time, and money, fueling the lifestyles of these so-called visionaries, need Francis to put an end to this once and for all. The Pope has recently appointed Polish Bishop Henryk Hoser to visit Medjugorje. May he turn to the true Mother of God for guidance and quash this nonsense soon.


http://www.total-croatia-news.com/lifestyle/17006-local-bishop-there-were-no-apparitions-of-virgin-mary-in-medugorje
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Catholic Apologetics : Medjugorje apparitions

Catholic Apologetics
http://www.catholicapologetics.info/catholicteaching/privaterevelation/medjugo.html 

The Medjugorje Hoax

To demonstrate briefly by means of events and quotes that the apparitions at Medjugorje, because of their banality or lack of dignity, the containing of heresy in the messages, and their undermining of Church authority, are certainly false, and cannot have come from Our Lady and Heaven.


1) Banality or Lack of Dignity.
According to the "Treatise on Mystical Theology," by Fr. Farges (1923),
"Whereas the divine vision always conforms to the gravity and majesty of heavenly things, diabolical figures will infallibly have something unworthy of God, something ridiculous, extravagant, disorderly, or unreasonable about them." 


A) Thursday, June 25, 1981: "(The seer) Mirjana asked Our Lady to leave us a sign...and the hands of Mirjana's watch turned." (book of Fr. Yanko Bubalo, p.22-25)

B) Saturday, June 27, 1981: The seers stated that the Virgin had disappeared several times because people had trod on her veil. (Bubalo, p.29-32)

C) Aug. 2, 1981: That evening during the apparition, those present followed one another in order to touch "the veil, the head, the hand, the dress" of the apparition. "At the end the Virgin seemed dirty, full of stains." (Bubalo, p.73-74)

D) Sept. 4, 1981: Seer Vicka in her diary writes: "We questioned her (the Virgin) about the man who saw Jesus in the street, when he was driving in his car. He met a man who was all bloodstained - this man was Jesus - who gave him a bloodstained handkerchief, telling him (the driver) to throw it in the river. Going on his way, he met a lady - it was the Blessed Virgin Mary; she asked the driver for the bloodstained handkerchief. The man gave a handerchief belonging to himself, but the Virgin asked for the bloodstained one. 'If he had not given it to me, it would have been the last judgment for all.' The Virgin said that that (event) was true. (report of Bishop Zanic, 1990, in whose diocese of Mostar, the apparition took place.)

E) Autumn, 1981: Jakov asked the Virgin whether Dynamo, the soccer team from Zagreb, would win the title. This gave rise, during the apparition (in the supposed presence of Our Lady) to mad laughter on the part of the other seers. (Bubalo, p.154-157)

F) Sept. 8, 1981: Jakov shook hands with the Virgin. "Dear Holy Virgin, I wish you a happy birthday." ("The Virgin Mary is Appearing in Yugoslavia," by Fr. Marian Ljubic, p. 42)

G) August 5, 1985: Mirjana says that she has received from Heaven a white sheet on which the secrets will become legible in due time. But she won't show the sheet. (Report of Fr. Rene Laurentin)

H) "One day, as she (Mirjana) was waiting for the Virgin, she saw the light, and out of the light came the devil, disguised in the features and clothes of Mary, but he had a dark, hideous face...After a while, the Holy Virgin came and said to her: 'I am sorry about that...'" ("Yugoslavia and the BVM" by Tequi)
(...who is really appearing there?)


2) An Apparition Teaching Error and Heresy
  A) Fr. Tomislav Vlasic: "Do you feel the Virgin as she who gives graces (which is the traditional Catholic doctrine of Mary, the Mediatrix of All Graces) or as she who prays to God? (true also, but in conformity with some Protestant theology and not the fulness of Catholic teaching.) Vicka: "As she who prays to God." ("Is the Virgin Mary Appearing at Medjugorje? by Fr. Rene Laurentin, 1984, p.135-136, 154)

B) The Virgin was accustomed to reciting the Our father with the seers. (But how could Our Lady say: "Forgive us our trespasses," since she has none? At Lourdes, Our Lady was careful to keep her lips closed during all the Paters and Aves, reciting only the Gloria Patris.)

C) Mirjana: "I recently asked the Virgin this question (whether many souls are damned), and she told me that nowadays most souls go to Purgatory." (book by Fr. Faricy, p. 64)
(...a comforting thought, perhaps, but opposite to the teaching of Fatima, St. Louis de Montfort, Pope Gregory the Great, St. Alphonsus, St. Anthony Claret, St. Augustine, etc., etc.)

D) Oct. 1, 1981: "All religions are equal before God," says the Virgin. (Chronological Corpus of Medjugorje, p. 317)

E) The Virgin: "I do not dispose of all graces...Jesus prefers that you address your petitions directly to him, rather than through an intermediary." (Chron. Corp. p.181, 277-278)

F) "In God there are no divisions or religions; it is you in the world who have created divisions." (Faricy, p.51)

G) "God directs all denominations as a king directs his subjects, through the medium of his ministers" ("The Apparitions at Medjugorje," by Fr. Svat Kraljevic, 1984, p.58)

H) "Each one's religion must be respected, and you must preserve yours for yourselves and for your children." (Kraljevic, p.68)

I) "The Virgin added: 'It is you who are divided on this earth. The Muslims and the Orthodox, like the Catholics, are equal before my Son and before me, for you are all my children." (Fr. Ljubic, p.71)
(...unbaptized Muslims equal to the baptized, who by this fact are the adopted children of God?)

3) The Undermining of Church Authority
  A) June 21, 1983: The Virgin states: "Tell the Father Bishop (Zanic) that I request his urgent conversion to the events of the Medjugorje parish...I am sending him the penultimate warning. If he is not converted, or will not be converted, my judgment as well as that of my Son Jesus will strike him." (Seer Ivanka writing to Bishop Zanic)

B) Dec. 26, 1983: ...But the Virgin takes the side of the chief propagandist for Medjugorje: "Our Lady prays for this work (i.e., the writings of Fr. Rene Laurentin.) May he who undertakes it do so in prayer, which is where he will find his inspiration." (Laurentin, p.105-111)

C) August 1, 1984: The Virgin says: "Make the priests read the Abbe Laurentin's book and spread it." (A Franciscan from Belgrade received this reply, when he had the seers bring up the matter to the Virgin.)

D) From August, 1984, to April, 1985, the apparitions continued to take place in the parish church despite the Bishop of Mostar's former prohibition. (A certain sign of a false apparition, when Church authority is disobeyed by the apparition itself.)

E) Jan. 1982: The Virgin states that two Franciscan priests, removed from their order and under suspension by the bishop, one of whom later fathered a child by a nun, may continue to say Mass and hear Confessions. Vicka the seer is asked "If the Lady said this, and the Pope says that they cannot..." Vicka answers: "The Pope can say what he wants. I'm telling it as it is." (from Bishop Zanic's document, 1990)
(...obedience to an apparition greater than obedience to the Pope?)

Miscellaneous:
  Medjugorje ignores the great hope of Fatima: the consecration of Russia and its conversion, followed by peace, with the triumph of the Immaculate Heart.

Dec. 8, 1984: Fr. Gobbi, founder of the Marian Movement of Priests, receives a locution from "Mary," informing him that she has been appearing at Medjugorje.
Therefore, if Medjugorje is a fraud, so are Fr. Gobbi and his locutions.

Finally, Medjugorje has heavy overtones of Charismaticism, a movement which infiltrated the Church from Protestantism in the late 1960's; Medjugorje is still in progress, as of this writing (1999), its length resembling the nonsense apparitions of Bayside, NY, and Necedah, Wisc. rather than the succinctness of Fatima or Lourdes.

A reminder to all:
The official Church teaching concerning private revelation is explained by Pope Benedict XIV (18th century.):

"[The Church] simply permits them [private revelations] to be published for the instruction and the edification of the faithful. The assent to be given to them is not therefore an act of Catholic Faith but of human faith, based upon the fact that these revelations are probable and worthy of credence.
"St. John of the Cross asserts that the desire for revelations deprives faith of its purity, develops a dangerous curiosity that becomes a source of illusions, fills the mind with vain fancies, and often proves the want of humility, and of submission to Our Lord, Who, through His public revelation, has given all that is needed for salvation.
"We must suspect those apparitions that lack dignity or proper reserve, and above all, those that are ridiculous. This last charcteristic is a mark of human or diabolical machination." 

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Medjugorje apparitions

World News | Mon May 15, 2017 | 10:58am EDT

Pope says doubts Medjugorje apparitions are authentic

Pope Francis has voiced serious doubt about the authenticity of alleged continuing apparitions of the Madonna in Medjugorje, a once-obscure village in Bosnia boosted by the pilgrim business.
"These presumed apparitions don't have a lot of value. This I say as a personal opinion," he told reporters on his plane returning on Saturday night from Portugal where he gave the Catholic Church two new child saints.

Six children first reported visions of the Virgin Mary in 1981 in a scenario reminiscent of famous apparitions in the French town of Lourdes in the 19th century and 100 years ago in Fatima, which Francis visited on Friday and Saturday.
In the following years, the Bosnian village became a major pilgrimage site, giving many visitors a renewed sense of spirituality and locals a steady source of much-needed revenue.

It also became the focus of controversy as local Franciscan priests running the site promoted their claims in such open defiance of warnings from the Vatican that some were expelled from the order and the local bishop called them schismatic.
Some of the alleged visionaries, now adults, say they still experience apparitions regularly, and that the Madonna tells them ahead of time when she will appear to them.

Many say the apparitions are a hoax.
Former Pope Benedict set up a commission of theologians and bishops to study the situation. Its report has not been published but was given to Pope Francis in 2014.
Francis said investigations are continuing into the first alleged apparitions when the reported visionaries were children or teenagers, but again made it clear that he is highly sceptical about today's claims.


"The (commission) report has its doubts. I personally am more nasty. I prefer the Madonna as mother, our mother, and not a Madonna who is the head of a telegraph office, who every day sends a message at such-and-such an hour. This is not the Mother of Jesus," he said.

"Who thinks that the Madonna says, 'Come tomorrow at this time, and at such time I will deliver a message to that visionary?'" he said.

But Francis acknowledged that some people who go to Medjugorje experience a spiritual renewal and "encounter God, change their lives."

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-pope-medjugorje-idUSKCN18A0E8



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Local bishop says ‘no truth’ to alleged apparitions in Medjugorje

• Inés San Martín
  February 28, 2017
  VATICAN CORRESPONDENT

ROME- On the heels of the arrival of a papal delegate in the alleged Marian apparition site of Medjugorje, the local bishop has reiterated what he’s always affirmed: there is no truth to the claims from a group of purported visionaries that Our Lady of Peace appears today, or that she’s ever done so, in this otherwise unknown town of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“Considering everything that this chancery has so far researched and studied, including the first seven days of the alleged apparitions, it can peacefully be affirmed: The Madonna has not appeared in Medjugorje!” Bishop Ratko Peri of Mostar-Duvno wrote on his diocesan website.

“This is the truth that we support, and we believe in the words of Jesus: The truth will set us free,” he said in a message published Feb. 26 in Croatian and Italian.
According to the bishop, the alleged apparitions, which began in the early 1980s, are nothing more than a manipulation by the visionaries and priests who work in the Saint James church that doubles as a pilgrimage welcoming center.

The post from Peric comes two weeks after the Vatican revealed that Pope Francis has sent Polish Archbishop Henryk Hoser of Warsaw-Prague on a mission for “acquiring a deeper knowledge of the pastoral situation there, and, above all, of the needs of the faithful who go there on pilgrimage, and on the basis of this, to suggest possible pastoral initiatives for the future.”

The city is a pilgrimage hub because of the reported apparitions, with millions arriving each year to climb the Mount Podbrdro, a steep and rock-strewn path that ascends to the actual location where the Virgin allegedly first appeared, and at times is believed to continue to do so.

In 1981, Medjugorje was an unexceptional farming community of some 400 Croatian families in the former Yugoslavia, and most believe it would still be one had it not been for the regular Marian messages.

As the bishop notes in his statement, the “apparitions” have been studied by several commissions: in 1982-1984 and 1984-1986 at a diocesan level, and in 1987-1990 by the Croatian bishops’ conference. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith studied the phenomena from 2010-2014 and again from 2014-2016.

The local and national commissions arrived to the conclusion that there’s nothing supernatural to the apparitions.
Many devotees believe that the original apparitions were authentic, but that the purported visionaries made up the thousands that followed “for other reasons, most of which are not religious.”

Yet according to Peric, the transcript of the cassettes of the first week of the apparitions, including conversations held between the visionaries and church personnel, allows him to “with full conviction and responsibility, expose the reasons why the non-authenticity of the alleged phenomena is evident.”

He also notes that to this point 47,000 “apparitions” have been registered, with three of the visionaries still receiving messages daily.
As proof of the non-veracity of the messages, many of which have an apocalyptic undertone, Peric noted that the woman who “appears” in Medjugore is very different from that of the Gospel and the apparitions from the Virgin Mary that the Church believes to be true.

Peric writes: “[She] laughs in a strange way, when asked certain questions she disappears and then returns, and she obeyed the ‘seers’ and the pastor who made her come down from the hill into the church even against her will. She does not know with certainty how long she will appear, she allows some of those present to step on her veil which is on the ground, to touch her clothes and her body. This is not the Madonna of the Gospels.”

The fact that she allows herself to be touched, Peric writes, gives him “the feeling and conviction that this is something unworthy, inauthentic and outrageous.”
Then there’s the fact that the woman who appears takes different forms, changing the color of her tunic, sometimes holding a child and sometimes not. Another example he gives which he says proves there’s no supernatural event in Medjugorje is the fact that during the first days of the apparitions they asked the woman for a sign to prove she was who she claimed, to which she allegedly turned the hands of the clock of one of the visionaries, Mirjana Dragićević.
This, Peric writes, “is ridiculous.”

Of the six visionaries who still see her, three claim to see her daily, even after 37 years. Two of them receive messages “addressed to the world” once a month. The other three claim to see her once a year.
Never mind the fact that according to the recordings of the first seven days, in June 30, 1981, Mary had allegedly told them that she was going to appear only three more times.
“Then she changed her mind and still ‘appears’,” the bishop wrote.

Peric concludes his post saying that taking into account what the diocesan curia has examined, they can’t but calmly affirm that “the Virgin Mary has not appeared in Medjugorje.”
Many believe that Francis tapped the Polish bishop to evaluate the pastoral situation of Medjugorje to perhaps help the Vatican take a formal position regarding the alleged apparitions, something which hasn’t yet happened, despite the two commissions sent to investigate.

Generally speaking, for the Vatican even to consider issuing a finding on a reported apparition, the revelations have to be over, and in Medjugorje they’re not. However, until the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says something, the Vatican’s preferred course is to defer to the local bishop.
Pope Francis has said little to nothing regarding the alleged apparitions in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, he’s warned against taking the Virgin Mary as “a postmistress,” delivering letters daily, often considered as a reference to Medjugorje.

However, there are other alleged “apparitions,” less well publicized but which Francis might know about, such as those being claimed in Jacarei, Brazil, where a man alleges to see the Virgin, St. Joseph and the Holy Spirit every day at 6:30 in the afternoon.

 https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2017/02/28/local-bishop-says-no-truth-alleged-apparitions-medjugorje/

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Medjugorje: A Warning

MICHAEL DAVIES
The Remnant Press

1. MEDJUGORJE: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN
by Geoffrey Lawman Co-founder of Approaches; Co-editor of Apropos;
and Editor of Fatal Star, the autobiography of Hamish Fraser.

We are hearing more and more about Medjugorje, the Yugoslavian village where, it is said, Our Lady has been appearing almost daily to some or all of six young visionaries ever since 1981. The natural question, as with all such claimed apparitions, is "Are they authentic?" To this there are three possible answers: "Yes," "No," and "We'd better wait for the Church's verdict." The third is clearly the wisest answer for any Catholic who recognizes the Church's teaching authority and the limitations of his own private judgment. Yet equally it is part of our tradition to revere Our Lady in the context of her numerous authenticated apparitions, and, historically speaking, popular devotion to any new apparition has often spread and become as it were "established" well before the Church gave its final approval.

We cannot therefore object to devotees of Medjugorje trying to enlist our support for phenomena which they strongly believe to be of God, provided their publicity is balanced and honest and they are ready to leave the last word to the Teaching Church. But they, for their part, must be equally ready to face the questions of other Catholics, possibly as devoted to Our Lady as themselves, but who have serious doubts about the events in question.

A New Type of Apparition?

One reason for questioning the events at Medjugorje is that they are so strikingly unlike all previous Marian apparitions. Which other apparitions have gone on almost daily for over 12 years and are still going on? Which others were announced a month in advance (at a charismatic congress in Rome)? Which others have been so well publicized internationally as to attract (it is claimed) 5 million pilgrims to date? These 3 features may not in themselves constitute arguments against the authenticity of the alleged apparitions (though one may well wonder what Our Lady could have found to say that needed some 26,000 appearances!), but it is clear that Medjugorje is following a pattern quite different from that of earlier (and approved) apparitions-----Lourdes, La Salette, Pontmain, Fatima or Beauraing, for example.

A 'Holiness Explosion'

Supporters point to the devotional and spiritual impact of the occurrences on both villagers and pilgrims, and it is true that the apparitions have repeatedly urged greater assiduity in prayer and fasting and regular confession, together with Bible reading, Eucharistic devotions, etc., and that these recommendations have been enthusiastically followed. However welcome this is, we should remember that it is not in itself any guarantee of holiness or even of orthodoxy, let alone evidence that the apparitions are authentic. The Church's history shows numerous cases of heretical groups noteworthy for intense devotion, prayer and fasting (the Fraticelli of the 13th century, for example). One may perhaps question the prudence of the "Lady's" subsequent extension of fasting, even partial, from 1 to 2 days per week (for growing teenagers!) and her unrealistic recommendation of up to 3 hours of prayer daily. And the frequent practice of "laying on of hands" and "the baptism of the Spirit" suggests that the "holiness explosion" claimed for Medjugorje is as much charismatic as Catholic.

Graver Reasons For Doubt

Three further, and far more serious, characteristics of the Medjugorje phenomenon -----disobedience, lying and false doctrine-----form the essential grounds for the view that Our Lady has not, and could not have, appeared there at all.

Disobedience: The diocesan bishop, Msgr. Zanic of Mostar, has on several occasions given legitimate instructions to the Franciscan priests active in Medjugorje parish, which they have consistently disobeyed. He has ordered certain priests to leave the parish, and they have stayed. He has asked that the occurrences should not be publicized, and that pilgrimages
should not be organized or welcomed (until his canonical enquiry was complete). These orders have been ignored. But the most flagrant and (to my mind) conclusive case is that involving Fathers Prusina and Vego, two Franciscans being disciplined by their superiors (and who have since been expelled from the Order). Bishop Zanic' had ordered them to leave the parish. "Our Lady", questioned by the "visionaries", is stated to have said on two occasions (19.12.81 and 20.1.82) that the bishop was "in the wrong" and that the Franciscans "should stay put"! "Our Lady" is thus shown as inciting disobedience to a lawful order of a bishop.

Lying: I can understand the indignation this word will cause to convinced Medjugorjists. Yet I honestly do not see how otherwise to describe certain behavior on the part of the visionaries Ivan and Vicka and of Fr. Vlasic: Vicka's alternate denials and admissions that she was keeping a day-to-day chronicle of the events (and her concealment of large sections of it from the bishop's commission); the unbelievable perjury of Fr. Vlasic, swearing on the cross in the bishop's presence that he knew nothing of Vicka's diary (though he had earlier supplied extracts of that very diary to Fr. Grafenauer); young Ivan's "message" regarding the great sign to come "in the sixth month", written and signed by him and lodged in sealed envelopes with the canonical commission, but which he retracted nearly 3 years later when the "messages" were opened and shown to be invalid. Ivan, by then twenty years old, agreed that the "Lady" had not objected when he wrote the "message" originally, conveniently delaying her admonition for 3 years until the day before he admitted his "mistake"! Only lack of space dissuades me from continuing this distasteful and saddening list. A whole study could be devoted to the subject, particularly if one includes the suppressiones veri and suggestiones falsi purveyed by Medjugorje's chief propagandists, Frs. Laurentin, Bugalo, and Co.

False Doctrine: Properly doctrinal statements are rare among the interminable reported words of the "Lady", but a single example of a doctrinal falsity ought to be enough to discredit any apparition. Here are two examples, both dating from 1983. In January, Mirjana told Fr. Vlasic how "Mary" was distressed by the lack of unity between Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims, since there was only one God: "You are not a believer if you do not respect the other religions, Muslim and Serbian (i.e. Orthodox). You are not Christians if you do not respect them." [This is false doctrine: we owe proper respect to non-believers, but none at all to their false religion; this would be a betrayal of Christ and His Church.] Even Fr. Vlasic was taken aback by this, but to his further questions-----Mirjana could only reply by repeating herself: ". . . lack of unity among the religions. You must respect each person's religion," adding "Keep your own for yourselves and your children." This Masonic syncretism in a supernatural message is quite inadmissible; it rules out the missionary charity whereby we try to win our neighbors over to Our Lord.

The second example is from April 1983. "Our Lady" is supposed to have dictated to Helena (a charismatic 'mystic', aged 10 or 11 years, who does not "see" the visions but hears what is said) a prayer of consecration to her Immaculate Heart. Bear in mind that these words are of the "Lady's" composition, but are intended to be addressed to her. In them we find the following:

1. . . . give me the grace to love all men as you loved Jesus Christ . . .
2. . . . give me the grace to be merciful towards you . . .
3 . . . if, by chance, I should lose your grace, I ask you to restore it to me.


To love all men . . . yes, God said we may all achieve that height of charity. But to love them as Mary loved Jesus (her God, King and Savior as well as Son), as in petition 1, is impossible and scandalous; it amounts to making gods out of our fellow-creatures. Petition 2 is just stupid, not to say insolent; she who is: "full of grace," the Queen of Heaven, has no need of our mercy. Of petition 3 one could at least object that grace is never lost by chance, but only through sin. The exercise as a whole is not impressive; whatever "Spirit" inspired it was clearly not the Holy Ghost.

Other Reasons for Doubt

A fuller critique of Medjugorje would go into other doubtful aspects which I can only mention in passing: the unedifying expatiation of "the Lady" by the Franciscans in their
dispute with the bishop over the allocation of parishes; the pretentious pseudo-science deployed to authenticate the "ecstasies" of the "visionaries" (including the use of an electroscope to measure the intensity of "spiritual energy" developed during "apparitions"!); the rather suspect discrepancies in the testimonies as to what actually happened
during the "miracle of the sun" of August 1981; the sentimental banality of so much of the interminable stream of oracles uttered by the "Lady", and the unlikely vulgarity that has marked some of the "apparitions" (outbursts of laughter, "Our Lady" touched, and even caressed by visionaries and pilgrims.) And Bishop Zanic has voiced his own suspicion that the "visions" are less likely to be hallucinations than well-rehearsed play-acting. Such a suggestion is bound to enrage supporters of Medjugorje; the fact remains that if the ever-present local Franciscans had left the young people alone and the world charismfitic movement had followed suit-----in other words, if the bishop had been obeyed-----the whole question of authenticity could have been resolved long back.

Misleading Publicity

There is one aspect of Medjugorje which I find particularly unsatisfactory; I refer to some of the material put out by the London Medjugorje Centre. It would be too much to expect, for example, that their introductory leaflet, The Facts About Medjugorje, would enter into all the minutiae of such a controversial affair, but even in such a short document one would at least have expected a more balanced account than this-----one which was just to Bishop Zanic, and which showed some awareness of the doubts raised by the apparitions. One is surprised to find no mention in it of such important issues as disobedience, lying and unacceptable doctrine, even if only to refute them.

Here are some of the facts that The Facts About Medjugorje does not choose to tell us:
-----that the diocesan canonical commission of enquiry has found (by 11 voices to 4) that the apparitions are not authentic.
-----that Bishop Zanic is speaking as the responsible bishop of the diocese (and therefore in somewhat more than "a private capacity") when he dismisses the apparitions as not authentic.
 [See text of his July 25 sermon at Medjugorje.]
-----that if Rome and the Yugoslav Bishops' Conference have put the findings of his canonical enquiry into "cold storage", the most likely explanation, to any objective observer, is the enormous influence of the international propaganda campaign orchestrated by a pro-Medjugorje pressure-group.

-----that the local Franciscans "counseling" the "visionaries" are virtually all connected with the charismatic renewal movement (i.e. a sect of Protestant, "pentecostalist" inspiration, busy "colonizing" the Church since 1967). The same is true of the 'leading theologians' cited by the leaflet: Laurentin, Urs von Balthasar, and Faricy are all avowed charismatics. As for the "several other Yugoslav bishops" who, the leaflet claims, "fully accept Medjugorje as a precious gift from God," the only name that readily comes to mind is that of Archbishop Franic of Split, an enthusiastic charismatic; the others, even the initially favorable Cardinal Kuharic of Zagreb, seem now to have adopted a waiting posture. Why did the London Medjugorje Centre feel it necessary to conceal this heavy charismatic involvement?

Two other statements in this leaflet call, I feel, for comment. Firstly: "The Holy See usually waits at least until apparitions are over before making any pronouncement." True . . . but has it ever before been faced with apparitions that continue for 12 years and show no sign of stopping? What better way of putting off any definitive verdict until these "apparitions" achieve a sort of de facto respectability through their sheer indefmite continuance?

And secondly: "Unless and until the Church condemns Medjugorje . . . we enjoy the right to have as much to do with it as we like." Even if its messages clash with Catholic teaching (as I have tried to show above)? Even if they incite priests and visionaries to reject the Church's proper authority?

No, the leaflet, The Facts About Medjugorje presents in my view a most unsatisfactory and one-sided account, which cannot help but mislead inquirers who have no access to the fuller picture. One would like to excuse this as the result of enthusiastic devotion and inadequate research-----pray God this is so-----but the fact remains that, objectively, it is a travesty of the truth in important respects, and as such should be withdrawn.

The Threat To The Church

Some readers may well be surprised at the severity of my criticism. To them, the word "Medjugorje" conjures up Our Blessed Lady, humble and hopeful pilgrimages, all that is best in Marian devotion and spirituality. I assure such readers that I could have attacked much harder and adduced even more evidence of the negative aspects of Medjugorje. But what I have written above is already sufficient to support my conviction that it is a dangerous and un-Catholic thing.

It divides Christians-----those who accept its pseudo-spiritual humbug from those who insist on a sterner, purer spirituality-----even to the point of driving a wedge between fellow-bishops: on the one side Msgrs. Franic and Ianucci, on the other Msgr. Zanic.

It devalues and discredits the cult of Mary, and thus robs modern Catholicism of its finest spiritual flower. How do we expect Marian devotion to survive a "Lady" of interminable verbosity who submits to indiscriminate "patting", incites her hearers to disobedience; and even stages a pantomime "transformation-scene" between herself and Satan? An earlier generation of Catholics would have blown this absurdity away in a gust of Chestertonian laughter, but we seem to have lost. our sense of the ridiculous in the last 20 years.

And, with the cult of Mary, Medjugorje weakens the message of Fatima, with its cardinal insistence on the conversion of Russia and of Communists as the prerequisite for any peace and progress. Medjugorje talks airily of peace, but ignores the very precise recommendations of Our Lady of Fatima and the disastrous consequences that will follow if these are not complied with.

And, with the cult of Mary, Medjugorje weakens authority in the Church, by its resistance to the legitimate authority of its own bishop, by its partisan espousal of the cause of the dissident Franciscans in their quarrel with the diocese, It could even be argued that the long duration of the phenomenon constitutes an incipient "alternative magisterium", in the sense that we shall have much less need of hierarchies, a Teaching Church for our guidance if "Our Lady" is to appear daily to give us our instructions direct from Heaven . . . a disquieting prospect for all our bishops and for the Holy See itself.

Here I must rest my case, reminding readers that in presenting arguments against the Medjugorje apparitions I am merely availing myself of the same right as that claimed by its supporters when recommending it. Both they and I are speaking in our private capacities. As is customary and proper in these cases, I willingly give the assurance that I do not intend hereby to anticipate the Church's final verdict in any way. I merely hold the opinion, again in my private capacity, that the most probable conclusion is that the matter of that verdict exists already, in the shape of the findings of Bishop Zanic's commission, filed away in the offices of the Yugoslav Bishops' Conference and the Vatican, and will be re-worded and promulgated when the Church decides that the right moment has come. 


http://www.catholictradition.org/Mary/medjugorje1.htm
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