The Church recently confirmed that the alleged apparitions reported by Angelik Caruana were not supernatural.

The same could be said about the “Marian” apparitions at Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje. The hallucinatory nature of the subjective visions reported by an adolescent girl and by peasant children at these sites becomes obvious when you view, on Google Images, the original wretched locations where the alleged apparitions took place.

Instead of appearing in one of the hundreds of churches and “sanctuaries” dedicated to her, including the ones at Zabbar and Ta' Pinu, the Mother of God is alleged to have appeared at Fatima on an oak tree – a tree associated with Celtic paganism; at Medjugorje, on a heap of stones at a desolate hillside; and at Lourdes, inside a hole in a bleak escarpment.

The original barren locations of the alleged visions were later altered and embellished beyond recognition to attract credulous pilgrims. At Lourdes, they placed a doll-like statue of Mary inside the hole to suggest to the credulous that she had appeared there. Remove the statue, and all you see is an empty hole!

The film, The Song of Bernadette, was reviewed as follows in a local newspaper on 22 February, 2012: 

“In 1858, Bernadette, an adolescent French girl, had a vision of a beautiful lady in the city dump. She never claimed it to be anything other than this but the townspeople all assumed it to be the Virgin Mary.” The “townspeople” themselves never saw the subjective visions of the adolescent girl. 

Even if many people claim to have witnessed an event contrary to our ordinary experience of nature, we should hesitate to believe them. All phenomena, including inexplicable cures, are natural phenomena. Only credulous people ascribe them to the subjective visions of adolescent girls and of peasant children.

As for the so-called “miracle” of the sun at Fatima, an ophthalmologist observed: “If you stare at the sun long enough, you are going to see bizarre visual phenomena.”

John Guillaumier

St Julian’s