Anyone who has spent enough time around the Catholic Church knows the type: they are variously stigmatists, exorcists, end-times prophets, levitating, bilocating, breathing forth the odor of sanctity – sometimes all at once. They claim knowledge not vouchsafed any other mortal before or since. On them and on their unique and unprecedented intimate friendship with Christ and/or the Blessed Virgin depends the salvation of the whole world. Their words and works are long on spectacle, drama, and extreme claims – and short on Scripture, tradition, doctrine, theology, and charity. The Church may condemn such works for years or deliberate for decades – either way, their content persists, especially online. And sometimes they win the favor of prelates.
The current series of posts on a Substack for which I write has been concerned precisely over the past weeks with the phenomenon of false mysticism. So I was astonished (and relieved) to see these new norms, issued the end of last week by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the signature of the Prefect, Víctor Manuel Cardinal Fernández, arriving in medias res on an issue which has caused us such disturbance.
In his presentation of the norms, Cardinal Fernández writes that “in some events of alleged supernatural origin, there are serious critical issues that are detrimental to the faithful.” He notes with concern that “some Bishops… make statements such as, ‘I confirm the absolute truth of the facts’ and ‘the faithful must undoubtedly consider as true…’,” adding that “[t]hese expressions effectively oriented the faithful to think they had to believe in these phenomena, which sometimes were valued more than the Gospel itself.” He goes on to state that:
When considering such events, one should not overlook, for example, the possibility of doctrinal errors, an oversimplification of the Gospel message, or the spread of a sectarian mentality. Finally, there is the possibility of believers being misled by an event that is attributed to a divine initiative but is merely the product of someone’s imagination, desire for novelty, tendency to fabricate falsehoods (mythomania), or inclination toward lying.
As for the norms themselves, they clearly acknowledge the challenges presented by contemporary media:
With the advent of modern means of communication, these phenomena [“alleged apparitions, visions, interior or exterior locutions, writings or messages, phenomena related to religious images, and psychophysical phenomena”] can attract the attention of many believers or cause confusion among them. Since news of these events can spread very quickly, the pastors of the Church are responsible for handling these phenomena with care by recognizing their fruits, purifying them of negative elements, or warning the faithful about potential dangers arising from them.
and have no naiveté regarding what the dangers cited might be:
The Diocesan Bishop should exercise particular care, even using the means at his own disposal, to prevent the spread of confused religious manifestations or the dissemination of any materials pertaining to the alleged supernatural phenomenon (such as the weeping of sacred images; the sweating, bleeding, or mutation of consecrated hosts, etc.) to avoid fueling a sensationalistic climate.
Bishops are enjoined to exercise appropriate discipline:
If the alleged supernatural events continue during the investigation and the situation suggests prudential measures, the Diocesan Bishop shall not hesitate to enforce those acts of good governance to avoid uncontrolled or dubious displays of devotion, or the beginning of a veneration based on elements that are as of yet undefined.
Under these new norms, the Church will go no further than nihil obstat (nothing contrary to faith and morals) in judging events of “alleged supernatural origin.” The remaining categories are prae oculis habeatur (to be kept under consideration), a probational and precautionary discernment where grace seems operative but some reservations remain; curatur (under observation), a more precautionary status applied where there are serious grounds for caution and the momentum of the faithful must be guided and led in the most wholesome direction possible; sub mandato (under command), by which the Church takes charge of a situation where an individual or individuals appear to be taking advantage of sincere believers; prohibetur et obstruatur (prohibited and obstructed), for cases damaging in their origin, their content, and/or their fruits; and a declaration of non supernaturalitate, reserved for cases of confessed or empirically demonstrated fraud.
Particularly telling is the suspension of de supernaturalitate (of supernatural origin) declarations on the part of the Church. To my knowledge, the Church’s main formal discernment of contemporary events for signs of the supernatural relates to canonization processes. A de supernaturalitate declaration would seem in effect to canonize, analogously speaking, an ongoing, actually or putatively spiritual event. Worse still, by a false but all too likely extrapolation, enthusiasts among the devout would extend this canonization to the living “visionaries” or “mystics” themselves.
Worst of all, such enthusiasms, by their immediacy and their play on the emotions, can easily come to supplant the Church and the true Christ found in the Gospels and the Eucharist, as Cardinal Fernández notes. The upshot of this is a particularly insidious syncretism, in which all the names of all the characters are the same on all sides, but meanings have been introduced which have no basis in faith, morals, tradition or history. In this way, the same Credo, the same Sacraments, and the same Scriptures can be appropriated to a materially different religion.
Particularly urgent here, in defending the faith from becoming overwhelmed by spectacle, by signs and wonders, to the detriment of truth, is the distinction between the miraculous quoad modum and the miraculous quoad substantiam – any range of signs and wonders, all the dancing lights and celestial music in the world, up to and including non-glorious resuscitation of the dead, do not differ in kind from everyday natural-order events like reading this post; however much they may defy explanation or strain our ordinary understanding of causality, they are terrestrial events which are not per se either the consequence or the proof of divine power at work. Substantially miraculous events, like the glorious Resurrection of Christ on the third day or the Redemption he won for us, form a completely different category; they are supernatural, acts of God by their very nature.
I personally grew up with an image of the Fatima apparitions on my bedroom wall, and was brought to Lourdes on pilgrimage by my parents at the age of seven. However, for whatever reason, I never took private revelations particularly seriously, either way – which extended to a fairly indulgent attitude about dubious- or absurd-seeming ones. True, the ultimate criteria are Scripture and tradition; true, also, that public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle, John the Beloved; true, finally, that there is no obligation to believe in anything said to be supernaturally revealed at any point thereafter, however pious the visionary or commended by the Church the event might be. Yet I entered adulthood with no more than the odd surmise that perhaps the real purpose of such signs and wonders was to draw skeptics and unbelievers into the Church by the evidence of their own senses – a proposition as dangerous as it is unlikely.
I somehow failed to realize at the time the moral enormity involved when people claim to be speaking in the name of God – and the damage that they do when virtually every sentence in such claims, as has happened more than once, contradicts some combination of Scripture, tradition, history, human dignity, and common sense. Yet the final insult, and the worst damage, is when they so offend against faith and reason alike and are yet tolerated – even encouraged – within the Church.
It is not appropriate to dismiss claimed private revelation, as some would do, as the realm of pious if slightly hysterical women – besides being sexist and clericalist, it is a profound scandal to those among us clinging to the Barque of Peter by the threads of a rational faith. St. Augustine, in the City of God, acclaims Christianity as religio vera: not as the religion that is the truth, or even as the religion that is true (words which ring with just authority in our ears but curdle into triumphalism in our mouths). No, our faith is religio vera as the “religion of the Logos,” as Pope Benedict XVI so often put it, the religion which is solicitous of the truth, reverent with the truth, careful in everything to honor the truth, for we worship the Truth who is also the Way and the Life. And that is the ultimate objection to fanciful mythification about the Blessed One: it’s blasphemy. And sacrilege. However it is intended, it is so in fact.
Humans crave communal support, crave novelty and diversion and entertainment. We are born needing food and shelter and care; we are hard-wired for survival and reproduction. Truth is an acquired taste – but it is truth, and the love which truth makes possible (for you cannot love what you do not know), by which we are human, and it is Christ the Truth who leads us on the path to divinization. Perhaps only from eternity will we see the full measure of what Cardinal Fernández – and his sponsor and mentor, the Holy Father – have done for the Church and for souls by this work.
Image: Adobe Stock. By shooreeq
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation.
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