Peter Costello
An image of Mary holding Jesus after his death on the cross Our Lady of the Nations: Apparitions of Mary in 20th Century Catholic Europe
by Chris Maunder (Oxford University Press, £25.00)
Marian shrines are of great antiquity. At Knaresborough near Harrogate in England a small shrine, dedicated to Our Lady of the Crags, still survives. Built by John the Mason in 1408, and now the property of the Ampleforth Trust, it is maintained by a group of volunteers. It is very typical of the little shines and oratories that were once scattered across Catholic Europe, evidence of the popular devotions of the past.
One of those volunteers is the author of this book. Chris Maunder is a Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at St John University and an expert in the Marian tradition. I mention these details to establish that this interesting book is the work, not of a sociologist or psychologist, but a Catholic scholar of popular religion with a passionate personal interest in Marian shrines.
Since the early 1980s he has been conducting serious research on the theme. I emphasis serious, as much of what is written about Marian apparitions and shrines all too often falls far short of what a scholar would like to have.
Royalist cause
In his preface, he mentions a Catholic book shop in Paris with shelves of popular Marian materials which he was able to utilise for his PhD. (If this is the bookshop I suppose it to be, it was also dedicated to promoting the royalist cause in France – which is about as far right as you can go in France and remain respectable.)
But this book is also sustained by material gathered from a wide variety of academic and historical sources. It will be read and utilised by everyone interested in the manifestations of popular European Catholicism, whatever their point of view.
In this book, part he says of a stirring of the “collective academic unconscious” in the topic, he surveys Marian apparitions across Europe in the last century. Shrines and visionaries are indicators of the presence of Mary. The question he wants to answer is “why Mary mattered so much in the wake of the Great War and Nazism”.
In preliminary chapters he deals briefly with apparitions between 1830 and 1917. He discusses Sister Lucia’s commentaries on war and peace, before proceeding to discuss Catholic interpretations of visionary events, and the role of women and children as visionaries – visions often gave a voice to the voiceless and the marginalised.
The BVM remains an important source of consolation and hope in what are, to many, frightening times.
Its central chapters deal with the European situation between the wars, with information on many out of the way events. However, the special value of the book is not what it has to say about Lourdes or Fatima, or indeed Medjugorje, but the many lesser and little known shrines that are less renowned and less visited, but which are often (in the present writer’s experience) more moving.
The author observes that many devotees while rejecting most aspects of modern civilisation – to the extent that some refuse to have a TV at home – are happy to utilise its benefits, such as improved travel, ease of communication, and the internet – through which these days traditional religion finds a route directly to the wider world uncircumscribed by the hierarchy.
Irish readers will read with interest the chapters devoted to the events across the island in the 1980s. The author stresses the levels of social anxiety present about the state of society, fears concerning peace in North Ireland and of crop failures in 1985.
But what emerges here, and in the other chapters is the dichotomy between poplar religion – the author even speaks of the visionaries as “popular theologians” – and the official Church. Everywhere the Church has maintained a distance, greater or less depending on circumstances, with the visionaries and with the shrines which were established and maintained afterwards.
Presence
“Generally,” the author concludes, “the Church prefers the honouring and marking of the bare presence of the Virgin Mary to the messages of urgency that accompany the visions. For this reason, the 21st Century will see a continuation of the balancing act between official Catholicism – which emphasises scripture, tradition, and reason – and popular Catholicism – which has an expectancy that the contemporary world is the special time chosen by God for the unfolding of apocalyptic events.
Several shrines across Europe have been accepted as diocesan sanctuaries which the Church remains uncommitted to the founding apparitions that gave rise to them. Future pronouncements about 20th Century apparitions, such as Medjugorje, will probably reflect this spirit of compromise and achieve a circumscribed accommodation of popular devotion into the Catholic canon.”
This might almost mean a return of such small shrines as that the author helps keep active in Yorkshire, a sort of “people’s church” of the future. Catholicism will not disappear, but it may not be one that parish priests will favour.