AS USUAL, I wrote this column based on the information I got from the UK magazine The Tablet. “Mary in early Christian Faith and Devotion” is the title of a book of Stephen Shoemaker.
Chris Maunder is the author of another book on the Blessed Virgin. He gives an overview of European apparitions from the most famous like Fatima in Portugal to much less well-known events.
For example, in a chapter on Nazi Germany, he sets out brief accounts of a number of apparitions, with a table indicating the places, dates and names of the visionaries involved. All of the latter were critical of the Nazi Government, explicitly or implicitly, and some were impersonal.
During the Cold War, the threat of atheistic Communism pressed upon Catholics in several countries. Visionaries who received popular support often articulate, the theological or moral views of many ordinary Catholics, and may also influence more official theologians.
An example of this is Ida Peerdeman, the Dutch woman who had a series of apparitions of the “Lady of all nations”, beginning in the 1950s. Among the messages she received was the revelation that the Virgin Mary was Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate.
Many readers will remember a campaign mounted in the 1990s to encourage Pope John Paul II to define these titles as official dogma. This campaign was led by theologians, but it was inspired in no small part by the visions of Amsterdam. I mention here that Amsterdam is the place where I was born in 1933.
Many Catholics have heard the tradition that the risen Christ appeared to his mother. St. Ignatius of Loyola refers to it, for example, in the Spiritual Exercises. There is undisputed evidence that this belief was held in the fourth century in both the Eastern and Western Churches, but Shoemaker presents evidence suggesting that the tradition probably dates back at least two centuries earlier.
He argues that the cult of Mary emerged in the Church concomitantly with the cults of other saints, but rapidly became much more widespread and developed. On this point it seems that the evidence Shoemaker supplies does not entirely support his argument. Rather, it suggests that she held an exceptional status, quite unlike other saints, from an earlier period.
For example, the second-century gospel of Pseudo-James tells of her miraculous conception by St. Anne, her presentation in the Temple, and her giving birth without loss of her physical virginity. St. Irenaeus – also in the second century – speaks of Mary as the “New Eve”, making her parallel (though subordinate) to Christ in the work of salvation.
Shoemaker presents this evidence and more, but does not seem to acknowledge that it marks out the Mother of God as someone whose contribution to the work of salvation is uniquely important above any other saint.
And that, surely, is why people through the ages and into the present day have continued to believe that she appears to them and to trust in her words. Most famous is Our Lady of Fatima.
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