In some cases accounts may have been compared and coordinated before testimony was given. For example, multiple witnesses in a small town might tell of a tall, glowing woman dressed all in white carrying an infant son and surrounded by a radiance that lit up the street the previous night. But in other cases, people standing directly beside the witness could see nothing, as in this report of a 1617 apparition from Castile:
‘Aye, Bartolome, the lady who came to me these past days is coming through the meadow, and she is kneeling and embracing the cross there – look at her, look at her!’ The youth though he looked as hard as he could saw nothing except some small birds flying around above the cross.
Possiole motives for inventing and accepting such stories are not hard to find: jobs for priests, notaries, carpenters and merchants, and other boosts to the original economy in a time of depression; augmented social status of the witness and her family; prayers once again offered for relatives buried in graveyards later abandoned because of plague, drought and war; rousing public spirit against enemies, especially Moors;
improving civility and obedience to canon law; and confirming the faith of the pious. The fervour of pilgrims in such shrines was impressive; it was not uncommon for rock scrapings or dirt from the shrine to be mixed with water and drunk as medicine. But I’m not suggesting that most witnesses made the whole business up. Something else was going on.
Almost all the urgent requests by Mary were remarkable for their prosaicness – for example, in this 1483 apparition from Catalonia:
I charge you by your soul to charge the souls of the men of the parishes of El Torn, Milleras, El Salent, and Sant Miquel de Campmaior to charge the souls of the priests to ask the people to pay up the tithes and all the duties of the church and restore other things that they hold covertly or openly which are not theirs to their rightful owners within thirty days, for it will be necessary, and observe well the holy Sunday.
And second that they should cease and desist from blaspheming and they should pay the usual charitas mandated by their dead ancestors.
Often the apparition is seen just after the witness awakes. Francisca la Brava testified in 1523 that she had gotten out of bed ‘without knowing if she was in control of her senses’, although in later testimony she claimed to be fully awake. (This was in response to a question which allowed a gradation of possibilities: fully awake, dozing, in a trance, asleep.) Sometimes details are wholly missing, such as what the accompanying angels looked like; or Mary is described as both tall and short, both mother and child, characteristics that unmistakably suggest themselves as dream material. In the Dialogue on Miracles written around 1223 by Caesarius of Heisterbach, clerical visions of the Virgin Mary often occurred during matins, which took place at the sleepy midnight hour.
It is natural to suspect that many, perhaps all, of these apparitions were a species of dream, waking or sleeping, compounded by hoaxes (and by forgeries; there was a thriving business in contrived miracles: religious paintings and statues dug up by accident or divine command). The matter was addressed in the Siete Partidas, the codex of canon and civil law compiled under the direction of Alfonso the Wise, king of Castile, around 1248. In it we can read the following:
Some men fraudulently discover or build altars in fields or in towns, saying that there are relics of certain saints in those places and pretending that they perform miracles, and, for this reason, people from many places are induced to go there as on a pilgrimage, in order to take something away from them; and there are others who influenced by dreams or empty phantoms which appear to them, erect altars and pretend to discover them in the above named localities.
In listing the reasons for erroneous beliefs, Alfonso lays out a continuum from sect, opinion, fantasy and dream to hallucination. A kind of fantasy named antoian$a is defined as follows:
Antoianca is something that stops before the eyes and then disappears, as one sees or hears it in a trance, and so is without substance.
A 1517 papal bull distinguishes between apparitions that appear ‘in dreams or divinely’. Clearly, the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, even in times of extreme credulity, were alert to the possibilities of hoax and delusion.
Nevertheless, in most of medieval Europe, 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, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany – two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import, on which Pope John Paul II, to his credit, has admitted that the Church has erred.
Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning ‘witches’ and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is Mary always ordering the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is true, some of the apparitions have taken on greater import – at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, where the Virgin was incensed that a secular government had replaced a government run by the Church, and at Garabandal, Spain, in 1961-5, where the end of the world was threatened unless conservative political and religious doctrines were adopted forthwith.