French Church rejects claims of Marian seer

BY DAVID V BARRETT
THE CLAIMS of a French visionary that she was speaking the words of the Virgin Mary have been rejected by the Catholic Church.
Since 2006 the woman, known as Marie-Pierre, has regularly attracted over 700 people from across France, and even from Switzerland, Belgium and Spain, to monthly sessions in a hangar in Vallet, near Nantes in western France. In her talks, which were available on CD and on the internet, she would call the crowds “my children” and tell them to “follow what my son Jesus tells you”.
But last December the diocese suspended her activities and instructed priests not to attend them.
Following an eight-month theological inquiry into what were known as the Cenacles of the Messengers of Love, the vicar-general of the Nantes diocese Fr Denis Moutel last week said that the language of Marie-Pierre’s discourses did not always accurately reflect the words of Christ.
He said: “That does not mean they are wrong, heretical or unorthodox, but they cannot be seen as a mystical expression of the word of Christ or the Blessed Virgin,” said Fr Denis Moutel. But he accepted that Marie-Pierre and two men who regularly accompanied her genuinely believed that the Virgin Mary spoke to them.
Marie-Pierre’s supporters have compared her sessions to the apparitions at Medjugorje in Bosnia, on which the Church has not made an official pronouncement. Robert Thuaud, an organiser, said: “What the diocese is saying is the Church has not seen the Blessed Virgin but it does not rule out it could happen.” There are hundreds of cases of private visionaries claiming to receive messages from Jesus, the Virgin Mary or other saints, but the Church acknowledges very few of them as genuine.