‘Supernatural’: Vatican’s big call on apparitions

The Vatican has made a huge change to “supernatural phenomena,” such as bleeding crosses, following a spate of bogus apparitions.

Pope Francis waves to the crowd as he arrives for the weekly general audience on May 15, 2024 at St Peter’s square in The Vatican. Picture: Andreas Solaro/AFP

The Vatican has announced it will change the way it approaches reports of “apparitions and other supernatural phenomena” following a spate of phony claims spurred on by social media.

The impending announcement sparked a wave of tabloid headlines earlier this week inaccurately claiming the Vatican could be making an announcement about “aliens”.

It wasn’t aliens but spirits which were the subject of the new guidance issued on Friday afternoon, local time, by the Holy See Press Office.

New guidelines lay out how the church should look at claims of crying Mary statues, apparitions of Jesus, stigmata, bleeding crosses and much more besides.

The Catholic faith has been stung by claimed religious events which have turned out to be bogus. One such “excruciating” phenomena took seven decades to dismiss as bogus, the Vatican stated.

The Church has said “profit, fame and power,” were turbocharging false claims.

Pope Francis has appeared to be sceptical of supernatural claims remarking last year that Virgin Many apparitions are “not always real”.

The church last addressed questions around discerning the validity of “presumed apparitions or revelations” in the 1978 Norms document.

The most famous such apparition occurred in the Portuguese town of Fatima in 1917, when three young shepherd children reported a series of prophetic visions of the Virgin Mary.

While the church officially recognised the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima as legitimate in 1930, it wasn’t until the centenary of the events that two of the children, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, were canonised as saints by Pope Francis.

Pope Francis at St Peter’s Square. Picture: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP

‘Profit, fame, power’

A new document has been published by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) called Norms for proceeding in the discernment of alleged supernatural phenomena.

It states that in the past too much power to declare events as religious in nature has been given to bishops which sometimes has led to the Church overturning their declarations on further investigation.

Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the DDF, said “supernatural phenomena” had many times “led to a great richness of spiritual fruits, growth in faith, devotion, fraternity, and service”.

“In some cases, they have given rise to shrines throughout the world that are at the heart of many people’s popular piety today.”

But that wasn’t always the case, the cardinal said, and any claims should be approached carefully

“In some events of alleged supernatural origin,” serious issues that harm the faithful may arise, he said.

Cardinal Fernández said “profit, power, fame, social recognition, or other personal interest,” were behind some bogus phenomena.

But there was also “doctrinal errors, an oversimplification of the Gospel message, or the spread of a sectarian mentality,” that could lead some to be “misled by an event that is attributed to a divine initiative but is merely the product of someone’s imagination, desire for novelty, tendency to fabricate falsehoods, or inclination toward lying”.

The new guidelines say reported phenomena should generally be treated as “nhil obstat”. Essentially that the church does not give its seal of approval to the claimed phenomenon but people may worship it if they wish.

The church can come to four other conclusions, from further investigation, discouragement to worship and even a declaration the event is not “not supernatural”.

The “confession of an alleged visionary or credible testimonies of fabrication of the phenomenon,” could fall into the latter category.

If a bishop feels an event is indeed supernatural and need of confirmation, then they should, “submit their judgment to the Dicastery for approval”.

But, this should only be reserved for exceptional cases, the DDF has suggested.

Lucia dos Santos, Francisco and Jacinta Marto. Picture: AFP

‘Excruciating’

The document warns off bishops declaring events to be spiritual without Vatican approval.

It cited alleged supernatural appearances by the Virgin Mary in Amsterdam from the 1950s.

For decades, whether or not this was considered supernatural went back and forth between various bishops and the Vatican before, finally, in 2020 it was deemed to be nothing of the sort.

“Thus, it took about seventy excruciating years to bring the whole matter to a conclusion,” said the cardinal.

The Vatican has been tied to UFO theories. Picture: Getty Images

‘Aliens’

News that the Vatican would be holding a press conference on “apparitions” and the supernatural sent a wave of excitement through the UFO community on Wednesday, given long-running conspiracy theories tying the Catholic Church — which operates one of the world’s oldest astronomical observatories — to aliens.

“Pope to hold press conference on aliens and the supernatural — and people are confused,” read one headline in the UK’s Daily Star.

Last year, a Pentagon “whistleblower” who claimed the US has collected crashed UFOs over the years said America retrieved one such saucer from World War II Italian dictator Benito Mussolini after getting a tip from Pope Pius XII.

David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former intelligence official, claimed the “Vatican was involved” in the first-ever mission of America’s alleged top-secret UFO retrieval program.

Mr Grusch, however, did not provide any evidence for these claims.

“1933 was the first recovery in Europe, in Magenta, Italy,” he told NewsNation.

“They recovered a partially intact vehicle, and the Italian government moved it to a secure air base in Italy until around 1944-1945. The Pope back-channelled that and told the Americans what the Italians had, and we ended up scooping it.”

Mr Grusch claimed that the Vatican was “certainly” aware of alien existence and that UFO sightings over Italy during Musolini’s dictatorship were widely known.

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— with NY Post

Originally published as ‘Supernatural’: Vatican’s big call on apparitions