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By Root 1963 0

such apparitions were greeted warmly by the Roman Catholic clergy, especially because the Marian admonitions were so congenial to the priesthood. A pathetic few ‘signs’ of evidence - a stone or a footprint and never anything unfakeable - sufficed. But beginning in the fifteenth century, around the time of the Protestant Reformation, the attitude of the Church changed. Those who reported an independent channel to Heaven were outflanking the Church’s chain of command up to God. Moreover, a few of the apparitions - Jeanne d’Arc’s, for example - had awkward political or moral implications. The perils represented by Jeanne d’Arc’s visions were described by her inquisitors in 1431 in these words:

The great danger was shown to her that comes of someone so presumptuous to believe they have such apparitions and revelations, and therefore lie about matters concerning God, giving out false prophecies and divinations not known from God, but invented. From which could follow the seduction of peoples, the inception of new sects, and many other impieties that subvert the Church and Catholics.

Both Jeanne d’Arc and Girolamo Savonarola were burned at the stake for their visions.

In 1516 the Fifth Lateran Council reserved to ‘the Apostolic seat’ the right to examine the authenticity of apparitions. For poor peasants whose visions had no political content, the punishments fell short of the ultimate severity. The Marian apparition seen by Francisca la Brava, a young mother, was described by Licenciado Mariana, the Lord Inquisitor, as ‘to the detriment of our holy Catholic faith and the diminution of its authority’. Her apparition ‘was all vanity and frivolity’. ‘By rights we could have treated her more rigorously’, the Inquisitor continued.

But in deference to certain just reasons that move us to mitigate the rigour of the sentences we decree as a punishment to Francisca la Brava and an example to others not to attempt similar things that we condemn her to be put on an ass and given one hundred lashes in public through the accustomed streets of Belmonte naked from the waist up, and the same number in the town of El Quintanar in the same manner. And that from now on she not say or affirm in public or secretly by word or insinuation the things she said in her confessions or else she will be prosecuted as an impenitent and one who does not believe in or agree with what is in our holy Catholic faith.

Despite the penalties, it is striking how often the witness stuck to her guns and, ignoring the encouragements offered her to confess that she was lying or dreaming or confused, insisted that she really and truly had seen the vision.

In a time when nearly everyone was illiterate, before newspapers, radio and television, how could the religious and icono-graphic detail of these apparitions have been so similar? William Christian believes there is a ready answer in cathedral dramaturgy (especially Christmas plays), in itinerant preachers and pilgrims, and in church sermons. Legends about nearby shrines spread quickly. People sometimes came from a hundred miles or more so that, say, their sick child could be cured by a pebble that had been trodden on by the Mother of God. Legends influenced apparitions and vice versa. In a time haunted by drought, plague and war, with no social or medical services available to the average person, with public literacy and the scientific method unheard of, sceptical thinking was rare.

Why are the admonitions so prosaic? Why is a vision of so illustrious a personage as the Mother of God necessary so, in a tiny county populated by a few thousand souls, a shrine will be repaired or the populace will refrain from cursing? Why not important and prophetic messages whose significance could be recognized in later years as something that could have emanated only from God or the saints? Wouldn’t this have greatly enhanced the Catholic cause in its mortal struggle with Protestantism and the Enlightenment? But we have no apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centred Universe,