Marian Interventions in the Wars of Ideology: The Elastic Politics of the Roman Catholic Church on Modern Apparitions

摘要

Since 1945, the Western world has recorded a sharp increase in Marian apparitions and messages, which in terms of frequency, content, structure and representation differ from those of previous centuries. The often oppositional content is actively disseminated by traditionalist and fundamentalist Catholics and devotees, and generates cults and shrines which turn away from or disassociate themselves from the Catholic Church. On the basis of two related and much discussed cases, Amsterdam's cultus of The Lady of All Nations and the devotion to the Queen of Peace at Medjugorje, this paper investigates the manner in which these two Marian interventions are articulated and interpreted by the visionaries, and how these interventions relate to the ideological wars which have dominated ecclesiastical politics, and the politics of the Christian world, since the Second World War. When the Roman Catholic Church fails to get such processes of religious divergence under control, it appears that because of the success of some of these cults the ecclesiastical hierarchy ultimately finds itself forced, willingly or not, to join in or converge with the heterodox and previously rejected opinions. In this way the Church increases the significance of conservative and traditionalist thought and practice within its faith community.