Mapping the Presence of Mary: Germany's Modern Apparition Shrines

Abstract

Robert Orsi has described the persistence of belief in the ‘presence’ of Mary as ‘alternative modernity’. The most popular expressions of Catholic Marian faith are derived from the famous visions at Lourdes and Fatima. This article shows how modern apparition shrines emerged in Germany during times of crisis: the Kulturkampf of Bismarck, the Third Reich, the immediate post-war period. However, despite the continuing popularity of these shrines in Germany, they have not entered pan-European Catholic consciousness. When they emerged, the Marian apparition geography had already been established; thus the Vatican and national hierarchies were unwilling to approve them. However, grassroots faith expressed in pilgrimage has achieved diocesan recognition of the shrines, if not the apparitions, in a Catholic compromise between popular and episcopal articulations of belief in the presence of Mary.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the dioceses of Bamberg, Osnabrück, and Trier for replying to my enquiries.

Notes

Notes

1. A major reason for this is that the surviving visionary of Fatima, Lucia dos Santos, revealed her ‘secrets’ in the 1930s, after the apparitions had been authenticated by the Church in 1930. One, written down in 1944, was not revealed by the Vatican until 2000, which further increased interest in the case (see e.g. Bertone and Ratzinger).

2. The citations to Blackbourn's work are to the English edition. The German edition is used for information on events in Marpingen after 1993.

3. Pilgrimage can also be ‘inverted’ (Morgan), i.e. a shrine's pictures or statues are transported to other places, including believers’ own locales or homes, recreating the spirit of the shrine elsewhere. This is well illustrated by the journeys of the Fatima statue.

4. Ten apparitions in modern Europe have been approved by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, either formally or de facto. Four are in France: Rue du Bac (Paris 1830), La Salette (Alps 1846), Lourdes (Pyrenees 1858), Pontmain (Normandy 1871). The remainder are Gietrzwald (Poland 1877, when the town was in East Prussia), Knock (Ireland 1879), Fatima (Portugal 1917), Beauraing and Banneux (Belgium 1932–3), Amsterdam (1945–59). They complete a set of Marian shrines that is known to anyone interested in apparitions. After the canonical recognition of Beauraing and Banneux in 1948–9, no apparition in Europe was approved until 2002, when the Bishop of Haarlem–Amsterdam authenticated the apparitions in Amsterdam (1945–59) after the death of the visionary (Margry). Recent approvals of visions have been outside Europe (Japan, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Argentina, Rwanda; see e.g. the list at http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/aprtable.html, access date: 19 February 2012).