Tuesday, May 03, 2005
THE MEDJUGORJE DECEPTION CONTINUED
Once the apparitions began taking place in the church, a genuine piety developed around them, fostered by the preaching of Fr. Zovko. As E. Michael Jones states it:
On one hot afternoon in June, something happened in a small village in Croatia; on a similar afternoon in July, [when the apparitions moved to the church] the local church and community absorbed that event into itself by validating it as real. In effect, the latter event is the more significant. In a sense, the significant point in the whole story is not that certain adolescent girls would claim to have certain experiences, but rather how the population in general and the clergy reacted to these claims. (THE MEDJUGORJE DECEPTION, p. 89)
Some time ago while I was researching the places where speaking in tongues occurs outside of Christianity, I came upon the book SALEM POSSESSED by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. The book unpacks the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1600s. Regarding glossolalia, in speaking of the girls who first manifested symptoms of having been bewitched, the authors write:
as for the "foolish, ridiculous speeches which neither they themselves nor any others could understand," do they not suggest, in inchoate form, the Pentecostal gift of tongues which would figure so prominently in later revival outbreaks?
Even the more obviously painful symptoms which the girls manifested in their "fits"--the convulsive paroxysms, the hysterical muscular spasms--foreshadow the characteristic behavior of "sinners" in the agonizing throes of conversion. (SALEM POSSESSED, p. 89)
E. Michael Jones makes the same association. Using the book THE DEVIL IN MASSACHUSETTS by Marion Starkey to make the claim, he reinforces the fact that it was the community and not the actual event of the manifestation of supernatural experience that validated the event. He refers to it as "mass hysteria" and notes that a similar occurrence in the Middle Ages followed a condition of chaos. (p. 89)
In fact occult manifestations do seem to proceed from a chaotic situation, whether the chaos is in the political or religious realm. In speaking of the rise of occultism in Europe, James Webb describes the cultural melieu out of which it was formed:
[A]s man advanced to greater mastery of the physical, so his always precarious hold began to slip upon the more intangible aspects of his relationship with the universe. His society, his awareness, his methods of thought, and most importantly the conclusions he reached, were all changing round him. What is more, they could be seen to be changing; and this was frightening.
The Industrial Revolution reconstructed the European economy. Man's relations with man were altered; the distribution of population changed; communications improved so that news became not merely of parochial interest; and the very geographical barriers to speedy travel began to disappear. The scientific method resulted in Darwin's theory of evolution and the application of critical standards to accepted notions of history and religion....Ever since 1789 the threat of social revolution had terrified the guiltier consciences of Europe. (THE OCCULT UNDERGROUND, p. 6-7)
In the Church, since Vatican II, the faith has undergone momentous change. A time of chaos has resulted, making the faithful ripe for a tumble into occult manifestations, and we have certainly seen them develop. Dr. Jones writes:
By now the parallels betwen Medjugorje and Salem should be apparent. Adolescent girls started both phenomena, but the crucial turning point came when the clergy, influenced by the general atmosphere and the pressure of the crowds which they had, in effect, helped create, validated the girls' experience as genuine. The girls, surprised by the reaction of the crowd, became too scared to back out. The only safe route was to press on with the assistance of the clergy, whose personal needs were also satisfied by the alleged supernatural phenomena. (THE MEDJUGORJE DECEPTION, p. 91)
In SALEM POSSESSED, the authors ask the critical question:
How would the girls have responded if their ministers, their neighbors, or their families had interpreted their behavior as the initial stages of a hopeful religious awakening? (p. 27)
I think that Jones gives us the answer in his book on Medjugorje.
Turning back to Salem, the authors answer their own question:
The parallel is underscored if we turn a full 180 degrees and examine, from the perspective of 1692, the first mass outbreak of religious anxiety which actually was interpreted as a revival: the so-called "Little Awakening" which began in the western Massachusetts town of Northampton in 1734. Here, as in Salem Village, a group of people in the town began, unexpectedly and simultaneously, to experience conditions of extreme anxiety. They underwent "great terrors" and "distresses" which threw them into "a kind of struggle and tumult" and finally brought them to "the borders of despair."...
In Northampton in 1735 as in Salem Village a generation earlier, the young played a central role. In both episodes, the catalyst was a group of young people who had taken to spending long hours together, away from their homes. In Salem Village, these gatherings began as fortune-telling sessions and soon took a scary turn; in Northampton, they started as "frolics" but were soon transformed, under the influence of the town's young minister, Jonathan Edwards (later to become the greatest theologian of his era), into occasions for prayer and worship. (SALEM POSSESSED, p. 27-28)
What I find especially unsettling is that the phenomena almost appear neutral, and defined solely in terms of audience reaction, so to speak. Which almost subtracts God from the picture entirely, making it a man-centered event by which man psyches himself up into religious intensity, prompting the question "Is any of this religion stuff really real?" If we can so easily trick ourselves, what else have we tricked ourselves into believing? If the Church can put a positive label on Medjugorje, calling it the work of the Holy Spirit, or whatever, what else has the Church baptised that was not authentic?
Belief in the authenticity of Medj. was permitted in the name of overcoming communism. Hope was maintained that the same thing which happened in Poland would be repeated in Yugoslavia. Branding Medj. a disapproved apparition would have dashed that hope to pieces. But Medj. was not Gdansk. Poland is largely Catholic. Yugoslavia was a mixture in approximately equal proportions of Catholic, Orthodoxy, and Islam; and each faction opposed the other two.
Now that the Church has allowed belief to continue this long, how can She gracefully withdraw from approval of Medjugorje? The Ostpolitik of the recent administration has plunged us into a hellhole.
Bishop Zanic's episcopal commission was in session in Mostar in 1985. The commission attempted to sort out conflicting stories about a promise by the Gospa that a sign would be given, a shrine will be dedicated in Medjugorje in 1982 to commemorate the visions. Now in 1985 no sign had taken place. Bishop Zanic wrote a letter to Rene Laurentin, the main worldwide promoter of Medj., in January 1985 stating:
If the Madonna leaves a sign on the hillside as the seers and Father Vlasic have said and written innumerable times, which the whole world knows about and now awaits, I have already publicly announced and have also written that I would crawl on my knees from Mostar to Medjugorje, and I now add that I would beg the pardon of all humanity, of you, the seers and Father Tomislav Vlasic. If I see you after the gift of the sign, I will fall on my knees and kiss your feet. You have this on my oath, and you can publish wherever you please. This would be my indescribable joy and that of all the Church, the happiest day of my life. (p. 102)
He never did it because the sign failed to appear.
One year later, Zanic wrote to Laurentin. The knees of his trousers were still intact, but he was predicting that the "apparitions," which he now considered clearly a fraud, were going to lead to religious war in Yugoslavia. (p. 102)
The rest, as they say, is history. The war developed, and it interfered with pilgrimmages to the apparition site.
