“If it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary.” – Mark Twain
If Mary appears spontaneously in places not otherwise sacred, who’s to say where She’s allowed to appear and where She is forbidden from showing Her face? Who’s to say which pareidolia* is sacred and which is merely deranged?
*(If you want a miracle, try this: I spelled that word correctly the first time, without looking it up and without relying on Google’s ability to spellcheck queries. In fact, I Googled it mainly to get a correct spelling to use here. Google didn’t peep and Wikipedia concurs.)
The article strikes me as sensationalist. It’s talking about (apparently) still-unwritten future rules, and their only source for what those rules will be is some sort of “Italian online magazine.” Moreover, the Church has no power to “force” people to remain silent about anything. At most, the Church can ask that people remain quiet pending an investigation, and threaten to view them more skeptically if they don’t.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but my knowledge of the inquisition spans the context of medieval era torturing, renaissance era torturing all the way up to early 19th century era torturing. YMMV.
The CDF, obviously. They’re the outfit with the most experience in that.
As someone else mentioned, used to be that particularly lame claims of apparitions and miracles would be handled at the diocesan level with the advise to the “seer” to just be quiet and meditate prayerfully on what you thought you saw, and we’ll admonish the neighbor kids to not laugh at you. But nowadays you could have someone assemble an entire netroots movement over the latest apparition of the BVM through blogs and other media so people need to be reminded there is a procedure.
…
And y’know what? When the time comes to dissuade some of these folks, maybe CDF won’t mind reminding folks of some historic background…
Dude1: “Your Eminence, with all due respect, I received a message directly from Our Lady of the Crabcake! Who are you to say I should not continue to share it with The People?”
Bishop: "We’re the ones who used to run something called the Inquisition. You’ve heard of that, I believe? "
Dude1: "… Um, er, y’know what? … the People need not be disturbed needlessly with rash talk, really, until we know truly how to interpret this… "
Wow, they are getting ever closer to the headline “Church to stop making claims until they can be verified by a team of scientists” (Church never heard from again).
It was just a warning. Because NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!!
I cannot imagine why anyone would still be bitter about it after all these years. Oh wait. I can. The fact that I am not personally bitter about it is rather irrelevant to whether someone else feels that people have been historically wronged by organization “x”\
The more I think about this, the better it sounds. Someone seeing the BVM in their BVDs is hardly going to burnish the image of the Holy Church and should probably be advised that continence is a desirable quality in anyone who sits in a pew.
Beats the heck out of Elephant Dung BVM*…
*For the non-mackerel-snappers out there, BVM is Blessed Virgin Mary, a.k.a. the Blessed Mother, a.k.a. Mary-with-a-Cherry.
A few years back, some women in Ireland were convinced that they saw a statue (depicting the Virgin Mary) appearing to move. The news got out, and soon, thousands of people were showing up to have a look.
I did not understand this phenmenon, because:
-stone cannot move (unless you break it)
-nothing else was alleged to have happened
-I fail to see how a moving statue would provide any kid of message for mankind
later, some wag hung a sign on the statue (out of order").
This kind of devotion puzzles me-is God a guy who resorts to parlor magic to reassure his faithfull?:smack:
I’ve posted about this before, but when I was 6 years old, my mother and aunt took me with them to see the image of Jesus in an altar cloth in Shamokin, PA. It was huge news at the time, that I can remember. But I saw nothing. Even with both my mother and my aunt kneeling beside me and saying they could see it, I couldn’t.
I sometimes wonder if that wasn’t the first crack in my faith. Tell a 6-year-old he’ll see Jesus if he looks hard enough, then have him not see Jesus…seems like a slam-dunk for doubt.
It’s like a magic eye. You have to put your face about 6 inches away, relax your eyes and look through the image, then back up slowly. Some people can see magic eyes and some can’t, who are you to say the seers are wrong!
When I was preparing for my First Communion, my mother told me that how when she first received the Eucharist, she felt a rush of God’s love flood her body. I couldn’t wait for the day when I would feel the same thing.
Well, after the months of preparation, the white dress, the solemn procession to the altar, the moment came when the priest handed me the wafer. I reverently placed it in my mouth and I felt…nothing. I think my brain was hardwired for atheism.
Bricker, were you here when those events at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Lake Ridge went down? That was a few years before I arrived in the DC area and completed my conversion to Catholicism. When we moved to Lake Ridge our parish was Sacred Heart and we only went to SEAS a couple of times.