Conversely, authentic mystics have shown obedience at times of great difficulty. In his September 1, 2010, General Audience, Pope Benedict lauded the obedience of St. Hildegard von Bingen, who later became one of the Doctors of the Church:
As always happens in the life of true mystics, Hildegard too wanted to put herself under the authority of wise people to discern the origin of her visions, fearing that they were the product of illusions and did not come from God…. This is the seal of an authentic experience of the Holy Spirit, the source of every charism: The person endowed with supernatural gifts never boasts of them, never flaunts them and, above all, shows complete obedience to the ecclesial authority.
The widely practiced and well-known devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus stems from the revelations of Jesus to the French nun St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in a series of apparitions from 1673 to 1675. On one occasion, Jesus told St. Margaret Mary to do something, but her superior did not approve it. Jesus reminded her:
Not only do I desire that you should do what your superior commands, but also that you should do nothing of all that I order without their consent. I love obedience, and without it no one can please me.21
And later Our Lord told her:
Listen, My daughter, and do not lightly believe and trust every spirit, for Satan is angry and will try to deceive you. So do nothing without the approval of those who guide you. Being thus under the authority of obedience, his efforts against you will be in vain, for he has no power over the obedient.22
Obedience played an important role in perhaps the most famous instance of the Church’s changing its stance on the assessment of private revelation — the universally approved and widely celebrated Divine Mercy devotion, originating in visions of Christ and the Virgin Mary as received by Polish nun St. Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938). Initially prohibitions were placed on the messages of the apparitions by the local bishop and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This condemnation was finally lifted in 1978 through the work of St. John Paul II, who later not only canonized St. Faustina but also established a feast on the General Roman Calendar. Celebrated on the Sunday after Easter, the feast day includes specific indulgences that are granted under the usual conditions. These great honors and devotions occurred only after many years of obediently ceasing public celebration or distribution of the message found in Faustina’s Diary. St. Faustina wrote about the challenges of pride: “Satan can even clothe himself in a cloak of humility, but he does not know how to wear the cloak of obedience” (Diary, par. 939).
St. Padre Pio, the famous Capuchin friar from Pietrelcina, is another exemplary model of obedience. Because of the need to investigate his tremendous mystical gifts, reportedly including the stigmata, bilocation, and the ability to read souls, and because of the public curiosity surrounding those gifts, Church authorities suppressed his ability to say Mass publicly. St. Pio was obedient until his death in 1968 and was canonized in 2002.
For all the many instances of inauthentic or invalid devotions and miracle claims being shut down, throughout history in countries around the world, Church authorities have validated hundreds and even thousands of reports of miraculous events. The majority of the occurrences that have any level of ecclesiastical sanction enjoy a traditional mode of approval. That is, if they occurred in the era prior to the Council of Trent (1545–1563), their approval typically was rooted in enduring tradition resulting from popular acclaim and a strong sensus fidelium, or universal acknowledgment from the faithful. It wasn’t until the beginning of the seventeenth century that miracle claims were more rigorously investigated and began to rely on science in addition to the prayerful discernment that had marked investigations of the past. In establishing an event as having supernatural character and being worthy of belief, the bishops and their investigative commissions hope to use scientific inquiry and modern technology to arrive at these difficult decisions with moral certitude that the alleged miracle cannot be attributable to natural causes or human delusion. But even if science cannot offer explanations about the phenomena that often purported divine messages, Christian faith cannot accept “revelations” that claim to surpass or correct the revelation of which Christ is the fulfillment, as is the case in certain non-Christian religions and also in certain recent sects that base themselves on such “revelations.”
Chapter 3
Miracle or Fraud? — How the Church Decides
Not everything is in fact a miracle. Quite popular are claims of an image of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the saints seen in a light, a shadow, or a discoloration. The most infamous example is the 2004 sale for $10,000 of a grilled-cheese sandwich that bore the likeness of the Virgin Mary. Science classifies such imagery as a form of pareidolia, a false perception of an image due to what is theorized as the mind’s oversensitivity to perceiving patterns. Whereas the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe miraculously “painted” on the tilma of St. Juan Diego in 1531 on Tepeyac Hill in Mexico is perhaps the greatest prodigy in the history of the Church after the time of the Gospels, there is only one instance of a naturally occurring stain resembling the Virgin Mary that has ever been approved by ecclesiastical authorities. On January 17, 1797, in Absam, Austria, a permanent image inexplicably impressed on a glass window was declared miraculous by the local bishop.
An instance of a bleeding host or statue needs to be treated with a different level of attention and intervention than a case of a person who allegedly bleeds from the wounds of Christ. In the case of the Eucharistic miracle, the host is typically confiscated by Church authorities to perform scientific tests that can easily ferret out a hoax from an authentic miracle. In some rare cases, actual human blood or heart muscle has been found to be present with the host.
In cases of the stigmata, by which a person is allegedly joined in suffering with the crucified Christ, blood oozes from the person’s hands, feet, side, and forehead. These persons are kept under close medical observation to see the spontaneity of the bleeding and to ensure that the persons are not self-inflicting the wounds with sharp implements or acid. If there is no scientific explanation for a person’s stigmata, the Church will not publicly declare the authenticity of the occurrence, as it is tantamount to the canonization of a living person in the eyes of some of the faithful. Some of the Church’s greatest saints, such as Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena, have been stigmatics, but the wounds themselves are not a guarantee of holiness.
Those who bear the wounds of Christ are still subject to the same temptations and failings as the rest of us, but when a stigmatic publicly falters, there is the potential for great scandal. One of Catholicism’s great modern saints, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, as mentioned in the last chapter, exhibited these wounds but was censured by the Vatican and prohibited from publicly saying Mass in order to allow Church authorities to assess the many miracles and phenomena that surrounded him.
In the case of incorruptible bodies that are preserved in some state of perfection well beyond the time of death, the former Sacred Congregation of Rites had given official recognition to several preservations as miraculous. In general the Church has been reluctant to use the incorruption of a body as a miracle in a sainthood cause, with the notable exception of St. Andrew Bobola, whose corpse survived rough handling during several translations and still remained perfectly fresh for more than three hundred years.23
The Vatican is generally very cautious and can be extremely slow to approve miracles of any sort. For example, in 2008 the Church finally gave formal recognition to the 1664 apparitions in Le Laus, France, and the first formal approval of an apparition in the United States came in 2010, when the visions experienced by Belgian farmworker Adele Brise in 1859 in Wisconsin were solemnly approved. In the 1947 case of Bruno Cornacchiola, a poor Italian tram worker who received a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary on his way to assassinate the pope, the