[Apparitions]
Dear Fr Donagh,
…. these are very dark times we’re living in and I'm asking myself why people don’t heed the messages from Our Lady especially at Medjugorje…. Why is all this killing and destruction? Have people no faith? What could be plainer than the warnings Our Lady is giving every day in Medjugorje, appearing to those people and telling them to pass on the message…. She appeared to the children at Fatima when things were very bad. Do you think she might be appearing to the wrong people? Why doesn’t she appear to the people who are doing all the bad things? I'd like to know what you think about that…. Ellen
Dear Ellen,
These are scary times indeed. Wars are such a senseless loss in every way: loss of life, loss of infrastructure and property, destruction of the environment, and loss of faith, hope and love…. Every war is evidence that nobody ever wins a war. Both sides lose.
War is such a colossal evil that it’s bound to engage the religious mind. The prophet Isaiah lived about eight centuries before Christ, but even he was not the first to dream about a war-free world. “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4). In due course the Prince of Peace was born, and the world has just celebrated his birth once again. The New Testament leaves no doubt about the mind of Jesus: “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he said, “for they shall be called children of God” (Mt 5:9); and when Peter was about to resort to violence, he told him “Put your sword back into its sheath, for all who take up the sword will perish by the sword” (Mt 26:52).
That should be enough, without any apparitions or messages. Our first reaction to all accounts of visions etc. should be scepticism, I believe. We don’t need them. But why then are people always looking for them?
The horrors of war—the grief, the exhaustion, the danger—intensify the imagination and send some people into an accelerated search for meaning. The preternatural explanation always appears the quickest and easiest. In the opening weeks of World War I, the story of the apparition of Angels at the Battle of Mons spread like wildfire. But it was soon discredited. Near the end of the same war you had the apparitions at Fatima (1917). These, unlike the other, have been “approved” by the Catholic Church. But that is simply a declaration that there is nothing in them to contradicts faith or morals. We are quite entitled to view them with scepticism. We may believe in them if we want to, but no Catholic is obliged to believe in them.
It occurred to me that the Ascension of Jesus has a bearing on this. Let’s look at it briefly. The Ascension is referenced in three passages of the New Testament: Acts 1:9–11; Luke 24:50–53; and Mark 16:19. After his death, Jesus had been appearing to disciples for forty days. “After his suffering, Jesus presented himself to the disciples and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). Then the day came when he withdrew from their sight. First he reassured them: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Then “He was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight” (verse 9). Henceforth he would be present to them through the Holy Spirit. But they were still attached to his visible form, and they remained looking up at the sky. “They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky?’” (Acts 1:11). They would no longer need to look for signs and wonders and apparitions; henceforth Jesus would be present the them through the Holy Spirit living within their being, and not through apparitions from the outside.
That closes down forever the need for apparitions and the like. Physical sight is not superior to faith. In John’s gospel Jesus made that clear. “Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed” (Jn 20:29).
I suppose the reason Our Lady does not appear to warmongers and such people is that their entire wavelength is taken up with the business of war; they have no tender side, and so they are closed equally to the Holy Spirit within them and to every tender impulse from without.
When you pray the glorious mysteries of the rosary, Ellen, and you come to the second, the Ascension, thank God that you have no need to look up at the sky anymore, because you have within you God’s Holy Spirit, grounded here on earth through the heroic life death and resurrection of Jesus.
Donagh