Impatience at lack of vision

Some 5,000 devotees of 'unofficial' apparitions gathered in Pittsburgh. John O'Leary reports
WHILE Fatima and Lourdes have entered the church's canon, other reported seers of Jesus and his mother remain on the fringes of the church, scrutinised if not wholly approved of by the Vatican as in the case of Medjugorje in Yugoslavia, or ignored altogether like Christina Gallagher, an Irish mother of three, who tells of seeing for several years "a beautiful lady in mid-air" with messages for the Pope and the world.
While respect and devotion to Lourdes .and Fatima are encouraged by the church — many of the English and Welsh bishops will visit the French town over the summer with diocesan groups — official pilgrimages to "unofficial" shrines are frowned upon, and those who make them regarded as at best jumping the gun and at worst trying to force the Vatican's hand.
By contrast, devotees of apparitions worldwide found a warm welcome last month at a conference in the American city of Pittsburgh. It played host for a weekend to over 5,000 visitors, all of them firm believers in apparitions that the Vatican has yet to pronounce upon.
But what is it that inspires so many people to such acts of faith in the face of the apathy and often hostility of the rest of the church?
Among the participants at the Pittsburgh conference — eight out of ten were women and the majority of advanced years — two principal theses were advanced for the renewed fervour worldwide for apparitions. Firstly the church, since Vatican 11, had demoted Mary. As Mrs Gallagher's spiritual director and the former dean of Ireland's Maynooth seminary Fr Gerard MeGinnity put it, when the Holy Spirit is most active, as at the great reforming council, the counterspirits respond with renewed vigour. At Medjugorje, said Fr McGinnity, "Our Lady is balancing the picture".
And, secondly, Vatican It itself was seen as having thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Our Lady might help put things right, participants felt, in reaffirming such enduring values as the power of prayer in changing hearts.
Speakers at the gathering, which went without the blessing of the local bishop Donald Wuerl, included Mrs Gallagher, Egyptian Vassula Ryden who claims to have been guided by visions of Jesus for 10 years,
and Nicaraguan seer, Bernardo Martinez, who has for over a decade been receiving messages from Our Lady. Some of the major supporters of the authenticity of the apparitions at Medjuroje in war-torn Yugoslavia also addressed the meeting — reporting in the process that despite Rome's doubts, over 100 bishops had visited the Bosnian town in 1990.
Although to cynical observers the stories that were the standard fare of this gathering were too fantastic to be credible in a world that, armed with scientific knowledge, increas ingly believes it is master of its own destiny—Mrs Gallagher's claim of "four weeks of unmitigated torture" while she suffered, Padre Plo-like, the wounds of Christ's passion, for instance — they are surely no more so than the details of Lourdes or Fatima.
Perhaps what the participants at the Pittsburgh conference lack is patience — the wait for the Vatican to scrutinise apparitions can be a long one. But with the messages received predicting such imminent catastrophe for the world, the capacity for patience being stretched too far was understandable.
Some of the new visionaries had received the backing of their bishops, but others clearly feel that the institutional church has turned its back on them.
This was certainly the message that Christina Gallagher conveyed from Pittsburgh to Jesus, she told the conference, when he appeared to her during the gathering.