Chris Maunder's book is engaging and extremely thought‐provoking, written with an enthusiasm and seriousness that come across to the reader and makes them think. Consequently in this review I want to think with Maunder rather than provide an exegesis on his text.
Although it is unlikely it is nevertheless possible, the Church teaches, for there to be an authentic apparition of the Virgin Mary. Of course this is the point at which a whole host of issues immediately come crashing in. After all, the apparition happens in this world. The appearance of Mary in the secular sphere might therefore be misapprehended, misunderstood or, indeed, invented for reasons of this world and of those who claim to have witnessed it. For good reason the Church practises caution when a claim is made about an apparition.
Caution has been especially pronounced since Vatican II. As Maunder points out post‐Conciliar Mariology has been ‘ecclesiotypical’ – Mary is identified as a forerunner and member of the Church. Mary is of and in the Church. This approach is implied by the structure of Lumen Gentium, where Mary is discussed in the context of the Church. According to Maunder this was almost certainly done in order to promote ecumenism. The problem is however that apparitions, including those of the post‐Conciliar period, have tended to be of a more ‘Christotypical’ flavour, ‘in which Mary's privileges – based on her closeness to Christ and participation in his mission – are highlighted’. These ‘privileges’ are expressed in the Marian doctrines – Mother of God, Ever Virgin, Immaculate Conception, Assumption – which are not necessarily ecumenically friendly (p. 13). After Vatican II and in the context of a modernity which seemed to justify claims of secularisation and secularism (with ecumenism as a defensive attempt to find allies), apparitions of Mary became, and Maunder chooses the right words, a ‘possible embarrassment’. The Church became increasingly cautious in the context of a world which seemed to be more likely than ever to mock claims of apparitions. Between the 1940s and 2002 the Church did not authenticate any European apparition.
Only with Medjugorje in the 1980s did the Church start to become less cautious. If Maunder is right it is not hard to see why. This Mary could be contained within the Ecclesia and need not be allowed to escape to cause embarrassment. Spatial inaccessibility probably helped too. The Mary of Medjugorje posed few ecclesiotypical problems: ‘The regular deference of the Mary of these visions to her Son (whereas in visions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this was not so evident) indicated that the ecclesiotypical understanding of Mary had influenced the way in which the visionaries expressed their encounter’ (pp. 13–14). In other words, the implication of this study is that the Church will tend today to be most enthusiastic about those apparitions which do not cause embarrassment.
Of course it is at this point that secular thought begins confidently to express its doubt about apparitions. Indeed, as soon as the optic turns from the apparition to its context, certain this‐worldly continuities do start to emerge. Maunder's discussion makes them clear. The Church tends only to support those apparitions which fit in with a definite and clear narrative: the visionary must be in a trance state; more than one visionary must report the same experience; the visions recur and the community of onlookers increases; the visions must be linked to actions conveying realism. Furthermore the apparition must be linked in the first instance at least to a specific site, which can become the place of a shrine (and associated services) built by the local community. But added to this spatiality is also the temporal dimension. The authorized apparitions all tend to happen in times and places where the Church is – or perceives itself to be – threatened by external forces. The authenticated apparitions tend to be friendly to the ecclesial concerns of the day.
This last issue is worth a little expansion, because Maunder makes a very sharp observation. He notes how in the twentieth century there has been ‘a shift in the locus of vision, the sign of Marian presence, from place to person’ (p. 196). Yes the shrine at the original place of vision is important and more easily visited than ever before thanks to global travel, but now the visionary has been separated from the place, from the spatial site, of the vision. Visionaries can travel too; the ecclesiotypical message can be spread by the person, and not just by the institution of the Church. Maunder observes that the Medjugorje visionaries take Mary with them: ‘While their home parish remains important and central, they experience visions wherever they go in the world’ (p. 196). Secular thought – and especially sociology – would likely identify this as a rather obvious transformation. According to sociological common sense the contemporary person is an individual who has been disembedded from traditions and institutions and who is therefore fated to try to make reflexive sense of self and the world – the visionary not the vision, the spirituality not the spirit.
Consequently the question is this: are apparitions of Mary becoming part of a more general and loose spirituality that stretches beyond the Church? Or put another way: even as apparitions become more ecclesiotypically‐friendly, will they seep beyond the Ecclesia and into a spirituality which is individualizing and even antithetical to the ecclesia itself? But will Mary then be no more than a safe, ‘nice’, My Lady of Me? I have no idea. Neither do I know if I have put the questions as clearly as I might. Despite the ostensible specificity of its concern, Maunder's book raises major and slowly‐detonating thoughts.
