The Vatican on Friday sharpened its rules for investigating supernatural events such as visions of Christ or the Virgin Mary, saying that overactive imaginations and outright “lying” risked harming the faithful.
The new norms allow for a more “prudent” interpretation of events that generally avoids declaring them outright a supernatural event.
They were published by the Holy See’s powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and approved by Pope Francis.
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“In certain circumstances not everything is black or white,” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, who leads the dicastery, told journalists.
“Sometimes a possible divine reaction mixes with ... human thoughts and fantasies,” he added.
The history of the Catholic Church is filled with episodes of strange or unexplained phenomena involving religious statues or other objects.
The new guidelines come two months after the Church said that a series of widely reported miracles attributed to a statuette of the Virgin Mary — including making a pizza grow in size — were false.
The new rules provide more guidance to bishops, who until now have been left relatively free to determine the authenticity of such visions on a case-by-case basis. It is the first time they have been updated since 1978.
Underscoring the complexity of the issue, the Vatican has completed only six cases of such alleged supernatural events since 1950, with one taking about 70 “excruciating years,” the document said.
In the most serious cases, to avoid confusion or scandal, the dicastery would ask the local bishop to state that belief in the phenomenon is not allowed, and explain why.
Faster responses by the Church are needed because such phenomena are “taking on national and even global proportions” as they spread via the Internet, the dicastery said.
Most recently, the Italian diocese of Civita Castellana in March declared that alleged miracles from a statuette of the Virgin Mary in the town of Trevignano Romano outside Rome were “non-supernatural.”
A self-professed visionary, previously convicted for fraudulent bankruptcy, had said her statuette cried tears of blood and made a pizza multiply in size.
Pilgrims flocked to the town after her proclamations, while some donors to a charity she founded said they had been duped.
The diocese said the affair had shaken the faith of many churchgoers.
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