Apparitions of Mary, spurred on by technology

The Internet and the Madonna

Religious Visionary Experience

on the Web

Paolo Apolito

Translated from the Italian

by Antony Shugaar

University of Chicago Press:

240 pp., $26

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The Virgin Mary has been appearing to Catholics for ages. In 1858, my namesake, Bernadette Soubirous, saw her in a grotto in Lourdes, France. The apparition asked Bernadette, a 14-year-old peasant girl in ill health, to dig in the ground at the grotto; there, a spring appeared. To this day, it flows, and pilgrims from around the world visit Lourdes to gain access to the water, which is said to have miraculous healing properties.

There have been other famous visions as well: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Fatima and recently, the sightings at Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina that began in 1981. Most happened decades and thousands of miles apart. Even with fervent word of mouth, it often took years for the world at large to be made aware of these mystical occurrences.

But in recent times, there’s been a huge uptick in the number of reported visions, thanks in large part to the Internet, contends Italian anthropologist Paolo Apolito. It could be argued that access to this powerful communication mode has brought to light only the vast number of visions that may already have been occurring. Or perhaps the Internet, by providing the faithful with a wealth of visionary stories, is fueling the exponential increase. Whatever the reason, the Marian visionary movement -- Apolito writes in his scholarly tome, “The Internet and the Madonna” -- has grown at an astonishing rate, drawing in hundreds of new seers, thousands of eyewitnesses of wondrous and miraculous phenomena, and millions of believers.

“This process has profoundly altered the very perception of religion among a substantial number of Catholics ... in a completely unexpected direction,” he says. “Indeed, it has recreated a pre-Vatican II atmosphere, and perhaps even a full-fledged ideology of rejection and opposition to modernity.” Ironically, this interest in visions has been fueled by the hallmark of modernity itself: the Internet.

Apolito considers the pervasive eclecticism that is such a distinctive feature of the Catholic visionary culture, a culture in which religious visions mix with the Internet, weeping icons with television, stigmata oozing blood with high-tech laboratories, wheeling suns with digital video cameras, mysterious clouds with futuristic telescope-mounted cameras, “divination and faxes” -- “[i]n other words, a wave of neo-Baroque religious belief combined with a massive expansion in the use of high-tech equipment and apparatus.”

Apolito visits a vast number of websites, electronic mailing lists, newsgroups and chat lines that offer a staggering volume of first-person accounts, documents, messages, miraculous photographs, videos, conversations and debates on the purported evidence. Interestingly, this wave of religious visions has been concentrated in technologically advanced nations, particularly the U.S., where the most extensive spread of visionary phenomena has been reported.

“[I]f the Virgin Mary now speaks English, she speaks it with a decidedly American accent,” Apolito writes.

From the outset, he says he takes no sides on the accuracy of these visions. He is, after all, an anthropologist whose job is to document happenings, not comment on their validity. Still, it’s interesting that in the latter half of the book, he gives many reasons the faithful may have to fear the Internet. A worshipful Web surfer risks going off course “in every moment of navigation,” he says, noting how easy it is to click on one website and end up at another place, where “the gates of erotic or pornographic hell may swing open,” or hop “out of bounds ... in[to] Protestant territory, or in circuits that are not religious in subject.” More harrowing to Apolito’s way of thinking is that the Roman Catholic Church cannot adjudicate what is legitimate on the Internet. “On the Web, there is no authority at the altar, as there is in church, answering questions of all the faithful, nor is there any authority who ends a discussion with his official observations.”

An opposite argument could be made -- that perhaps by not having an institutional authority overseeing the Web, readers have access to more diverse visionary experiences, and that those who have had visions may feel free to write about their encounters without fear of institutional reprisal. But he doesn’t make a case for this perspective.

Still, “The Internet and the Madonna” is an intriguing if dense book examining how modern technology is making a place for itself amid the most metaphysical, mysterious -- and, at times, questionable -- of phenomena.

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Bernadette Murphy, a regular contributor to Book Review, wrote “Zen and the Art of Knitting,” a work of narrative nonfiction.