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On the Distinction between True and False Visions
that she was lying or dreaming or confused, insisted that she really
and truly had seen the vision.
In a time when nearly everyone was illiterate, before newspapers,
radio and television, how could the religious and iconographic
detail of these apparitions have been so similar? William
Christian believes there is a ready answer in cathedral dramaturgy
(especially Christmas plays), in itinerant preachers and pilgrims,
and in church sermons. Legends about nearby shrines spread
quickly. People sometimes came from a hundred miles or more so
that, say, their sick child could be cured by a pebble that had been
trodden on by the Mother of God. Legends influenced apparitions
and vice versa. In a time haunted by drought, plague and war,
with no social or medical services available to the average person,
with public literacy and the scientific method unheard of, sceptical
thinking was rare.
Why are the admonitions so prosaic? Why is a vision of so
illustrious a personage as the Mother of God necessary so, in a
tiny county populated by a few thousand souls, a shrine will be
repaired or the populace will refrain from cursing? Why not
important and prophetic messages whose significance could be
recognized in later years as something that could have emanated
only from God or the saints? Wouldn't this have greatly enhanced
the Catholic cause in its mortal struggle with Protestantism and
the Enlightenment? But we have no apparitions cautioning the
Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centred
Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany - two
matters of considerable moral as well as historical import, on
which Pope John Paul II, to his credit, has admitted that the
Church has erred.
Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and
burning 'witches' and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of
what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is
Mary always ordering the poor peasant to inform the authorities?
Why doesn't she admonish the authorities herself? Or the
King? Or the Pope? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
it is true, some of the apparitions have taken on greater import
- at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, where the Virgin was incensed
that a secular government had replaced a government run by
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