Vatican tightens rules on supernatural claims in the digital age

“The church rejects false mysticism,” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, head of the Vatican’s powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which issued the new guidelines, told reporters Friday.

Some supernatural events have obtained the status of high Catholic lore, such as the 1858 sighting of Mary in Lourdes, France, by the 14-year-old who would become Saint Bernadette. In 1917, the prophecy of three shepherd children who said the Virgin Mary appeared to them at Fatima, Portugal, led to the “Miracle of the Sun,” when those gathered reported the celestial body dancing in the sky.

Both cities remain sacred — and highly lucrative — pilgrimage sites for millions of Catholics.

Previously, rulings on the validity of such sightings were the purview of bishops and could take decades for final determinations. But with today’s technology, wild claims of mystical experiences are spreading faster and further than ever before.

“I think they figured out how the internet revolution has reshaped Catholicism,” said Massimo Faggioli, a Catholic theologian at Villanova University. “It used to be that someone would say, ‘I saw the Madonna,’ then the local newspaper would drop by, then the national one, then maybe an international one. Now anyone who has a mobile phone and is savvy enough can cause a sensation.”

The Vatican on Friday said that bishops had too often bought into false claims. Other times, confusion reigned, because a prelate’s successor might contradict a previous ruling, leaving the faithful guessing.

Now, those determinations will be left to the Vatican’s department of doctrine — formerly known as the Office of the Inquisition — and the faithful will not be compelled to believe in such claims.

“Everyone is free to believe in this — or not,” Fernández said.

In fact, the Vatican said it will largely do away with definitive declarations of such events as officially “supernatural” — although, in exceptional cases, a sitting pope may still make such a declaration.

Early in his papacy, Francis — who hails from Latin America, where a more mystical form of Catholic worship thrives in some quarters — was seen to embrace the esoteric side of the church, including exorcisms and the power of saintly relics. But he has also expressed deep skepticism at some apparition claims. In 2017, for instance, he cast doubt on the Medjugorje Apparitions, or claims by six young Bosnians to have seen the Virgin Mary.

“I would rather believe in ‘the Mother Madonna’ … and not ‘the Madonna who is head of a telegraph office and sending daily messages,’” the pope said then.

False claims can also fan divisions. In one Italian town 30 miles northwest of Rome, a claim of apparitions of the Virgin Mary were recently declared “non-supernatural” by a local bishop, but not before crowds of worshipers drawn to the spot insisted they were channeling divine messages against same-sex marriage and abortion.

New guidelines were “long overdue,” said Mathew Schmalz, a professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.

“Claims of the supernatural are increasingly common,” he said. “Every Catholic prayer group seems to have a visionary who talks to Mary.”

He added that “making a claim of a supernatural revelation can be a powerful way of challenging Church authority in a covert way.”

Neomi De Anda, an associate professor of religion at the University of Dayton, a Catholic school, said she sees the new guidelines as motivated by trying to both protect people from supernatural scams and keep them focused on church teaching.

“The Catholic Church wants to guard against people raising these events. Mary appears on a tree, and then suddenly people come every day or every month, and people think it’s the way to salvation,” she said. “There are groups who take these phenomena and make them greater than the teachings of the church, than the spreading of the gospel message, and it becomes a schism.”

Almost all cases will now be assigned into six new categories offering varying degrees of guidance to the faithful. The most accepted phenomena will be labeled as “nihil obstat,” in which a bishop will be encouraged to “appreciate” the pastoral value of a vision, and will be permitted to promote it, but without expressing “certainty” about its “supernatural authenticity.” The most discounted will be categorized as “declaratio de non supernaturalitate,” and bishops will be told to publicly declare the claimed phenomena as not supernatural.

Michael O’Neill, a miracle researcher who appears on the Catholic news channel EWTN, said only a handful of alleged visions in the 20th century received the approval of a local bishop.

Although the new streamlining could suggest a lack of confidence in local dioceses, many church scholars suggested that bishops may appreciate being relieved of having to make the contentious determination of whether something is truly supernatural.

“I expect bishops will welcome these new guidelines because having a supernatural apparition in their diocese is always something that can cause problems,” Schmalz said. “But I also expect that many Catholics will ignore them since the desire to experience, or claim, the miraculous is so strong.”

Boorstein reported from Washington.