Medjugorje and the Supernatural
Science, Mysticism, and
Extraordinary Religious Experience
DANIEL MARIA KLIMEK
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Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity
Simone Weil
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Silence of the Birds 1
1. The Young Woman on the Hill 12
The Messages of Medjugorje 19
Visions of the Afterlife 23
Near-Death Experiences: A Comparative Study 28
More Questions on the Afterlife: Deceased Persons and Reincarnation 38
The Question of Other Religions 39 Secrets of Medjugorje 41
2. Public Revelation and Private Revelation: How the Catholic Church Discerns the Supernatural 45
Private Revelations and the Development of Doctrine 48
Official Norms for Evaluating Apparitions or Revelations 52
First Criterion of Discernment: The Visionary 54
Second Criterion of Discernment: The Theological Content of the Revelation 55
Third Criterion of Discernment: Spiritual Fruit and Healthy Devotion 61
Testing the Religious Ecstasy 62
Intervention of Competent Church Authorities 62 Medjugorje and the Church 63
3. Mysticism in the Twentieth Century 71 William James and the Study of Mysticism 72
James’s Four Marks of the Mystical State 74
A Pragmatist’s Approach: Discerning the Fruits of Experience 75
Respecting the “More” of Religious Experiences 78
Challenging the Limitations of Rationalism 79
The Authority of Mystical Experiences 82
Evelyn Underhill and Mysticism 82
Underhill’s Defining Marks of Mysticism 87 Categories of Visions (Visionary Phenomena) 94
Corporal Visions 95
Imaginative Visions 95
Intellectual Visions 96
Passive Imaginary Visions 96
Symbolic Passive Imaginary Visions 97
Personal Passive Imaginary Visions 97
Active Imaginary Visions 98
Active Intellectual Visions 100 Categories of Voices/Locutions 100
Intellectual Locutions 101
Imaginative Locutions 102
Exterior Locutions 102
Mystical Experiences and Visionary Experiences: Understanding the Nuances 102
Critiques of James and Underhill 106
Critiquing James: Hermeneutical Fallacies 106
Critiquing Underhill: Hermeneutical Reductionism 110
The Case of Maria Valtorta 113
The Case of Therese Neumann 114
Underhill’s Reductionism 114
A Holistic Approach: The Case of Gemma Galgani 118
4. The Great Debate 121
Perennialism 122
The Perennial Invariant 123
The Perennial Variant 124
The Typological Variant 124
Constructivism 125
Complete Constructivism 127
Incomplete Constructivism 128
Catalytic Constructivism 129
Developments in the Debate: The Pure Conscious Experience and the New Perennialism 131
The Epistemological Question: A Kantian Hermeneutic or a “Kantian” Misreading of Kant? 134
The Bigger Picture 143
An Attributional Approach 147
Religious Experience and Reductionism 159
Neurological/Psychiatric Reductionism 160
Psychoanalytical Reductionism 163
Secular-Sociological Reductionism 166
Moving Toward Neuroscience and New Methodology 168
5. Medical and Scientific Studies on the Apparitions in Medjugorje 171
Scientific Teams Investigate 172
Behavioral and Psychological Studies 172
Neuroscientific Studies 178
The Question of Hypnosis and Self-Suggestion 179 Studies on Ocular and Visual Functions 181 Studies on Auditory and Voice Functions, and Sensitivity to Pain 183
Subjective or Objective Experiences? 186
The Results 189
6. Medjugorje’s Uniqueness: A Different Case Study for Neuroscience 194
Contribution to Discourses on Religious Experience 198
Epileptic-Seizure Interpretations 199
Interpretations of Hysteria 201
Interpretations of Hallucination 206
Methodological Considerations 208
Interpretations of Freud 212
7. Learning from Shortcomings, Moving Forward with New Methods 218
Epistemological and Hermeneutical Considerations 219
Deconstructing Taves’s Naturalistic Approach: Important Implications 221
The Myth of Secular Neutrality? 235
Escaping an Ontological Prison: Beyond the Dogma of Metaphysical Naturalism 238
Components of a Different Method 252
An Inductive Constructive-Relational Approach 254
Etic and Emic Perspectives 258
Criteria of Adequacy 260
The Constructive-Relational Approach in Medjugorje 263
Conclusion: Contributions to the “Eternal Battle-Ground” 265
Significance of the Medjugorje Studies 271
Epistemological Contributions to Studying Religious Experiences 272
Hermeneutical Contributions to Studying Religious Experiences 273
Contributions to the Criteria of Adequacy 277
Ontological Contributions to Studying Religious Experiences 278
Reconciling Religion and Science 279
Acknowledgments
i am incredibly grateful to Cynthia Read at Oxford University Press for supporting this book and for all the hard work that she and her staff put into its production. A much earlier draft of the book began as my doctoral dissertation. I would like to thank the Rev. Dr. Raymond Studzinski, O.S.B., my dissertation director, for guiding the original work with patience, earnestness, and great insight. Thank you also to Dr. William Dinges, the Rev. Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, the Rev. Dr. John P. Beal, and Dr. Kurt Martens for their interest in my work and for their helpful advice. Thank you to my religious community, the Franciscan Friars of the Third Order Regular of the Province of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, for all the friars who have supported and encouraged me in this work. I would particularly like to thank Br. Gabriel Mary Amato, T.O.R., who provided the time, support (and coffee!) that I needed to finish the very first draft during my postulant year with the friars. Thank you to the Rev. Thomas Acklin, O.S.B., Ph.D., for wisdom and life-transforming guidance in both my spiritual and academic life. I am grateful to Br. Marius Strom, T.O.R., for assistance in helping me with technical matters. I wish to acknowledge gratitude for my family, especially for my mother Janina, my father Szymon, and my brother Konrad, for loving support.
Researching and writing about Medjugorje one enters a world of authors, journalists, bloggers, filmmakers, pilgrimage and conference organizers, all dedicated to the topic. To all the friends, colleagues, and interlocutors with whom I have had the pleasure, these past years, of discussing the topic of Medjugorje, with great gratitude and love, I thank you.
To the memories of Fr. Sean Sullivan, T.O.R., and Fr. Michael Scanlan, T.O.R., I dedicate this book.
Introduction
The Silence of the Birds
i t S ound S like something out of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien, master storytelling at the grandest level. And yet it is not a fairy tale. It is not Narnia, nor Middle-earth, but an actual place: a mysterious, Slavic village hidden in between the mountains of Central Europe where miraculous and supernatural things are said to happen. A village where children experience the supernatural on a daily basis, not through their imaginations but—they claim—through direct divine intervention; a village where a heavenly visitor brings messages from another realm—messages from above, messages that answer some of life’s greatest questions: What is the meaning of life? What happens when a person dies? Does God exist? Is there an afterlife? What happens to people of different religions? Is salvation open to all?
It is a village of visionaries, apparitions, weeping statues, dancing suns, rosaries mysteriously turned gold; a village, in a time when secularism permeates much of the Western world, where religious and priestly vocations flourish; a village where lives are transformed, where healings and miracles are said to happen, where millions of pilgrims have traveled from all corners of the earth, hoping to encounter a touch of the divine in a place where, it is said, heaven meets earth.
The village is called Medjugorje, located in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the former Yugoslavia. The greatest claim connected to Medjugorje, one that is at the center of the events there and from which everything else stems, is that the Virgin Mary began visiting Medjugorje in 1981 and has, through her chosen visionaries, returned every day since for over thirty-five years now, communicating important messages to the world. It is a bold and
monumental claim. It began with six Croatian youngsters—five teenagers and a ten-year-old child—all reporting to experience daily visitations from the Virgin Mary. Three of the six seers claim to continue to experience daily apparitions of the Mother of Jesus over thirty years later, as adults. The reputation of Medjugorje has transcended popular piety or geographical boundaries and has reached the West, even touching popular and elite culture. National Geographic dedicated the cover story of its December 2015 issue, titled “Mary: The Most Powerful Woman in the World,” to the topic of Marian apparitions and devotion, featuring Medjugorje prominently. The late U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia once mentioned Medjugorje in a speech he gave to the Catholic legal society, the St. Thomas More Society, while being honored with the Man for All Seasons Award. The popular late-night comedian Stephen Colbert mentioned Medjugorje while discussing his Catholic faith, and specifically the topic of Marian apparitions, with the actress Patricia Heaton, a fellow Catholic, on the Late Show. Hollywood actor Martin Sheen, known for many important film roles and for playing the president of the United States on the television series The West Wing, has not only traveled to Medjugorje but has also played the role of Father Jozo Zovko, the Croatian Franciscan priest who was pastor of the parish at Medjugorje when supernatural events in the village were reported to begin in 1981. Similarly, Jim Caviezel, chosen by Mel Gibson to play the role of Jesus Christ in the 2004 epic film The Passion of the Christ, has made pilgrimages to Medjugorje and has claimed that without the significance of Medjugorje in his life he would never have been able to portray Jesus. Loretta Young, the glamorous starlet of both television and film in the 1950s and ’60s, traveled to Medjugorje as a pilgrim in the ’80s and explained, in an authorized biography, that Medjugorje gave her life meaning.1
What is it about this village that is so special, that has attracted so much attention? And, can the supernatural events associated with Medjugorje be taken seriously? Pope John Paul II, himself a believer in the apparitions of Medjugorje, once articulated what he believed to be at the center of its appeal, explaining: “Today’s world has lost its sense of the supernatural, but many are searching for it—and find it in Medjugorje, through prayer, penance, and fasting.”2 As the events in Medjugorje unfolded, other mysterious happenings, alleging a supernatural origin, became associated with the site.
In 1994, Don Pablo Martin, a Spanish priest, was the parish priest of Saint Agostino’s Church in the Pantano district of Civitavecchia in Italy.
Don Pablo, making a pilgrimage to Medjugorje in September of that year, bought a sixteen-inch, white plaster statue of the Virgin Mary as a souvenir from the village. The statue would one day gain international attention and be recognized under the name La Madonnina, meaning “Little Madonna.” In his spiritual life, Don Pablo had a strong devotion to the renowned Capuchin friar and priest Padre Pio (1887–1968), the Italian mystic who was famous for the stigmata, purportedly supernatural wounds corresponding to the crucifixion marks of Jesus’s body. In Padre Pio’s case, the stigmata wounds appeared on his hands, feet, and side. Pope John Paul II would canonize the Italian stigmatic in 2002 as a saint. This devotion is noteworthy because Don Pablo credits Padre Pio’s intercession with helping him select that statue from Medjugorje. It was Padre Pio who assured him, according to Don Pablo, that “the most beautiful event of his life” would result for selecting that statue.3 How exactly Padre Pio did this Don Pablo did not specify, though it can be assumed that Don Pablo was referring to spiritual discernment through prayer, as Padre Pio had been dead since 1968; and as it is the practice of many Catholics to pray for the intercession and guidance of the saints. It merits attention that even when Padre Pio walked the earth and greeted pilgrims in his friary, in San Giovanni Rotondo, he made what is believed to be a prophecy about the coming of the apparitions in Medjugorje. Mary Craig reports that a few years before the apparitions began, Padre Pio had told a group of pilgrims from the diocese of Mostar, “The Blessed Virgin Mary will soon be visiting your homeland.”4 The parish of Medjugorje exists within the Mostar diocese.
Don Pablo decided to give the statue of the Madonna as a gift to a particularly devout parishioner in his church, Fabio Gregori. Gregori was a family man who was an electrician by trade. It was on the evening of February 2, 1995, the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, that Gregori— planning to attend the rosary service at Saint Agostino’s Parish—was told by his alarmed, six-year-old daughter that the statue of the Madonna was crying in their home. Coming up to the statue to see for himself, Gregori saw red streaks on the Madonna’s cheeks, and he reached out to touch the flowing substance with the tip of his finger. He described in that moment “a great blast of fire” surging through his body as he touched the red substance.5
Many more people would also witness seeing this phenomenon— the weeping statue—in the following weeks, including then bishop of Civitavecchia, Gerolmo Grillo, who initially declared his skepticism
about the claims. The bishop remained skeptical until the statue of the Madonna cried a tear of blood in front of him, his sister, her husband, and two religious sisters visiting from Romania. Bishop Grillo appeared on a national newscast in prime time on April 5, 1995, testifying to this occurrence, which had transpired three weeks before, on March 15. Before that moment, not only was he skeptical about the whole situation but he was also hostile, initially requesting Don Pablo to destroy the statue. The priest refused to do so. The bishop also reached out to the police to investigate the Gregori family and sent his own physician to take a sample of the alleged blood from the statue to test it. The doctor reported back that the tears did, indeed, constitute blood. Bishop Grillo then took the statue to Rome for it to be tested by two more, separate teams of physicians. They also confirmed that the substance from the weeping statue was blood.6
Laboratory tests showed the DNA from the blood to be that of a male in his mid-thirties, which eventually led Bishop Grillo and much of the faithful to the conviction that this statue from Medjugorje was shedding the blood of Jesus Christ.7
Skeptics took a different perspective on the matter, alleging that the blood must belong to Fabio Gregori and that this must be nothing more than an elaborate hoax. Many conspiracy theories began to arise. Giovanni Panunzio, the head of an Italian group in Sardinia known for exposing religious frauds, argued that the most likely explanation was a “blood-filled syringe, encased in the plaster and attached to a small battery that could be activated by remote control,” or perhaps, “the culprits had employed special contact lenses that would expand and release liquid when exposed to heat.”8 These theories were disproven when separate CAT scans run on the statue—at the behest of Italy’s largest consumer protection agency (Codacons), the public prosecutor’s office, and the Catholic Church— showed that the weeping Madonna did not contain any hidden devices, none being found in the statue.9
The case of the inexplicable weeping statue from Medjugorje acquired so much attention in the Italian press that, in addition to the Church, state officials and public agencies also got involved in investigating the matter. The public prosecutor’s office charged a criminal complaint of pious fraud against Fabio Gregori, the state attorney’s office even seizing and sealing up the statue during their investigations. The outcry against these actions was loud in Italy as protests ensued, people taking to the streets against the state’s intervention. At the suppression of the statue, the Vatican made a very public gesture of support for Gregori and the cause of the weeping
statue. This came, journalist Randall Sullivan explains, when John Paul II “dispatched his close friend and fellow countryman Cardinal Andrej Maria Deskur to Civitavecchia to address Gregori’s congregation at an Easter Mass, where the cardinal presented Fabio a blessed copy of La Madonnina, and compared what was taking place to events in Poland during 1967, when communist authorities had sequestered the revered Madonna of Czestochowa in Krakow.”10 The allusion to the Polish icon refers to the most famous image of the Virgin Mary in Polish Catholicism, which was a national symbol and, for a while, was confiscated by communist officials as a politically motivated act of suppression.
Though taking many years to be resolved in the courts, on March 20, 2001, Judge Carmine Castalado, who was hearing the pious fraud case brought against Gregori by the public prosecutor’s office, announced his ruling on the matter, concluding that there was “no trickery” found by Gregori or anyone else connected to the statue of the weeping Madonna.11 Indeed, no natural explanation, or one implying fraud, was ever found in the case of the weeping statue, despite years of investigations performed by state officials, by a Church commission, and by private and public groups that hoped to expose the matter as a hoax—groups who have had a history of successfully exposing frauds.12 The February 6, 1997, issue of the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero explained that the opposite of fraud had been deemed as an explanation for the phenomenon by a panel of theologians, stating: “A statue of Our Lady of Medjugorje that cried tears of blood on 14 occasions in early 1995 after being brought from the Marian Sanctuary of Medjugorje to the Italian port city of Civitavecchia was judged ‘supernatural’ by a panel of Italian theological experts, who had spent nearly two years studying the controversy.”13 There have, however, been mixed reactions from Church authorities on the status surrounding the statue, another theological commission expressing the opinion that supernatural origins could not be confirmed—which was not a denial of supernatural origins but was a recognition that it could not be determined.14 Bishop Grillo’s belief in the supernatural origins of the weeping statue was announced on April 6, 1995, in the Italian news daily La Stampa, which reported: “Bishop Grillo has disclosed to the press without any further reservation that the Blessed Virgin Mary’s weeping is a miracle!”15 What was not widely known is that Pope John Paul II, during these years of controversy surrounding the weeping statue, venerated the Virgin of Civitavecchia and requested that the statue be brought to the Vatican. In a recent book on the entire matter titled La Madonnina de Civitavecchia,
Bishop Grillo revealed these facts, even including as evidence in his book a letter signed and dated by John Paul II speaking to a meeting between the two men. It was on June 9, 1995, that John Paul II’s personal secretary and longtime confidant, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, asked Bishop Grillo to bring the statue of the weeping Madonna to the Vatican.
When the statue was brought to the Vatican, John Paul II venerated the Madonna, praying before the statue and, after his prayer, placing a crown on the head of the Virgin—a crown that the pope himself brought for the occasion.16 Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged his predecessor’s devotion to the weeping Virgin Mary. In 2005, Benedict addressed the Italian Bishops’ Conference on the matter, sharing with them that John Paul II had venerated the weeping statue of Mary.17 At the end of this meeting, Benedict greeted Bishop Grillo with enthusiastic words, declaring that the Madonna of Civitavecchia will accomplish great things.18
Bishop Grillo was no stranger to the things that were already being accomplished. The Madonna’s tears did not come in vain, for the phenomenon began to be associated with fruits of faith, ranging from conversions to reported miracles. In February 2005, Bishop Grillo declared that the shrine in Civitavecchia which was dedicated to the weeping Madonna had become a center of evangelization. He was especially impressed with the remarkable transformation that the city of Civitavecchia underwent owing to the influence of the weeping statute. Before the miracle of the statue came to the city, Bishop Grillo noted, Civitavecchia “was considered ‘the Stalingrad of Latium’—60% communist, an anti-clerical and anarchic city.”19 Today, Civitavecchia is a place of pilgrimage and prayer, becoming a sacred site venerated by millions—to the point that Italian tourist brochures began referring to the city as “the doorway to Rome.”20 In October 2006, one year after Benedict XVI announced to the Italian Bishops’ Conference that his predecessor venerated the statue of the weeping Madonna, a very curious occurrence took place, something that had not happened in years: the statue from Medjugorje began to shed tears again.21
The supernatural is a mysterious realm, one that many believe in and one whose existence many others doubt. It is a topic, furthermore, that makes many uncomfortable.
There are those who even feel the need to attempt to disprove any claims of the supernatural when they are made. Such was the case with Dr. Marco Margnelli, an Italian neurophysiologist and an ardent atheist who traveled to numerous locations trying to disprove claims of mystical phenomena—he traveled, for example, to San Giovanni Rotondo in 1987,
years after the death of the famous friar, to try to disprove the stigmata of Padre Pio.
A year later, in the summer of 1988, Dr. Margnelli traveled to Medjugorje, hoping, he admitted, to find “any evidence that would contradict it or expose it as a fake.”22 He would be in a perfect position to examine the ecstasies of the visionaries during their claimed Marian apparitions, having authored a work on altered states of consciousness, an area of expertise for Dr. Margnelli.23 Dr. Margnelli conducted an array of medical tests on the visionaries and gradually came to the conclusion that, during their apparitions, the visionaries do in fact enter into a “genuine state of ecstasy.”24 While acknowledging that as a scientist he could not judge whether the apparitions are authentic or not, he did admit that “we were certainly in the presence of an extraordinary phenomenon.”25
Dr. Margnelli was a witness in Medjugorje to a number of events that baffled his beliefs, one of which included the seemingly miraculous healing of a woman from leukemia. What moved him most personally, however, was the behavior of the birds before and during the apparitions.
Before the apparitions of the visionaries would begin in the church rectory, where they met in those days to experience their daily apparitions, there were hundreds of birds outside in the trees, chirping and cooing, being incredibly—at times, deafeningly—loud. Until the exact moment that the apparitions began, that is: the second the visionaries dropped to their knees and went into ecstasy, the moment that it is believed they encounter the Virgin Mary, every bird outside would go completely silent.
This was something that stayed with Dr. Margnelli for a long time. But that absolute silence of the birds not only remained with him, it also haunted him, he admitted. It was a few months after returning to Milan from Medjugorje that Dr. Margnelli became a practicing Catholic.
e xperience S like the weeping statue from Medjugorje and the silence of the birds, the latter an occurrence that many pilgrims have reported, can be identified as “concurring phenomena,” as they are events related to the primary phenomenon, the alleged Marian apparitions. Such events can have strong influences on many lives, often inspiring faith and devotion. As John Paul II reflected, such events represent something deeper for people that the modern world cannot offer: an encounter with a higher reality, a touch of the supernatural. Questions, however, arise. Can the supernatural be real? Can such occurrences be investigated or authenticated? Can claims of supernatural experiences be empirically tested by science?
Like Dr. Margnelli, countless of doctors and scientists from various countries have traveled to Medjugorje to investigate and study the apparitions of the visionaries. Throughout the past three decades, the Medjugorje visionaries have been subjected to an extensive amount of medical, psychological, and scientific examination, even while experiencing their apparitions. Neuroscience has been used prominently, as electroencephalograms (EEG) have been applied on the visionaries to study their ecstasies, the altered state of consciousness they enter during their apparitions, by observing what is happening inside their brains as they undergo their mystical experiences. Scientists and journalists have noted that this is the first time in history that visionary experiences have been subjected to such meticulous and in-depth study through modern scientific technology. The results of these studies do not only shine light on the experiences of the Medjugorje visionaries but can also make a contribution to understanding popular theories about past religious experiences and to debates surrounding their authenticity.
An academic debate about extraordinary religious experiences has emerged in recent decades. Two main groups of scholars have been at the center of this debate. One of these groups, recognized as “constructivists,” are scholars who have emphasized the role of language, tradition, and culture in constructing mystical experiences, pointing first and foremost to human construction in the religious experience.26 This constructivist hermeneutic challenges the classic interpretation of religious experiences, known as the “perennialist” perspective. The perennial philosophy has argued that mystical experiences cannot be reduced to human construction but, at their core, they share certain characteristics that transcend culture, language, or time period, pointing to a shared spiritual experience among devotees that indicates an encounter with something higher: with the transcendent.
In the 1990s, a new group of scholars, led by Robert K. C. Forman, renewed the perennialist perspective with a “new perennialism” that presented a hermeneutical challenge to constructivist scholars. This “new perennialism” centers on presenting a “pure consciousness” experience, a documented experience of mystical union that people have reported whose fundamental tenets question the epistemological assumptions of a constructivist interpretation.27
Eventually, after twenty years of debate between the two sides, Forman and co-author Jensine Andresen published an article calling for scholars of religion to put down their swords in the “methodological war that has
been waging between constructivists and perennialists in the study of religion.”28 Instead, they recommended that scholars explore new disciplines of study, particularly research on consciousness, in order to make methodological progress on this subject. Forman and Andresen recommended exploration into fields like cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology. They explained:
The study of religion will benefit greatly from a more interdisciplinary consideration of how consciousness and subjective experiences, including religious ones, may actively influence, and be influenced by, human physiology. To undergo a vision of any divine form, or even to believe that we are having such a vision, will no doubt effect our heart rate, our blood chemistry and pressure, our serotonin levels, etc. It is high time that we studied how, and how much. It is time for scholars of religion to leap with both feet into the discussion of consciousness, spirituality, and the role of direct experience as important and creative elements of human religions. . . . We must explore the nature of spiritual experiences in more detail by drawing more guidance from consciousness studies. We must learn how physiology connects with spiritual experiences by increasing research on the biology of religious experience. We must examine the implications of research on the biology of religious experience for views on the “validity” of those experiences.29
As a response to Forman’s and Andresen’s challenge, an exploration of the various neuroscientific, psychological, and medical studies associated with the Marian apparitions of the Medjugorje visionaries will be pursued here. Combining these studies with debates on mysticism can exponentially increase our understanding of extraordinary religious experiences, making a significant contribution.
The first part of this book will examine a brief history of the apparitions in Medjugorje, concentrating on the earliest days when the visionaries first claimed a supernatural encounter with the Virgin Mary. Chapter 1 will also explore the messages of Medjugorje that the visionaries report the Madonna has given them—many of these messages are meant specifically, they explain, to be transmitted to the world. We will also explore visions of the afterlife that the visionaries have said to receive as part of their experiences, testifying to realms that purportedly exist in the hereafter where every human being ends up after death. We will consider whether such
claims can be empirically examined, especially through the emerging science of studying near-death experiences.
Chapter 2 will examine the theology that the Catholic Church has developed in understanding and articulating the differences between forms of revelation. The chapter will further observe how the Church investigates a claim of supernatural phenomena such as apparitions or revelations, noting the various dynamics that are involved. A very brief examination of Medjugorje’s current status within the Church will also be considered, given the unique case that Medjugorje presents to the Church as an ongoing apparition site.
Chapter 3 will move into examining the history of interpretation regarding religious and mystical experiences throughout the twentieth century, beginning with the influence of William James and continuing to James’s contemporary Evelyn Underhill. James and Underhill constitute two of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century who wrote about mysticism; James was probably the most significant person in prompting the academic exploration of mysticism among scholars, while Underhill is the most significant person in introducing mysticism to a popular audience, particularly to the English-speaking world, with her work. We will see how both James and Underhill used discourses on mysticism. Underhill has studied visionary experiences and other such extraordinary religious phenomena (including locutions, or auditory phenomena) under the umbrella of “mysticism,” as she acknowledges that mystics throughout history have recorded experiencing visions, apparitions, and voices or locutions. Underhill’s study will be essential to our discourse of visionary experiences, as Underhill outlines in impressive detail the variations and intricacies of visionary experiences, providing an explanation of the multidimensional manner in which such phenomena are encountered.
A topic that needs to be addressed is the relationship (often an intertwining one) between extraordinary religious experiences, mysticism, and visionary experiences. Frequently it is impossible to study one of these subjects without giving due attention to the other, as each is intrinsically connected and at times terminology overlaps. Mystical experiences are recognized as a type of religious experience. Visionary experiences can be traced back to some of the earliest writings on mysticism, specifically mystical theology that, in the Greek and Christian traditions, has for centuries recognized three types of visionary experiences: imaginative, intellectual, and corporal visions.30 Marian apparitions qualify in the third category as corporal visions, the definition of which we will explore in depth in the third
chapter. Therefore, having their roots in mystical theology, discourses on visionary experiences such as Marian apparitions cannot avoid the essential subject of mysticism.
Chapter 4 will continue the hermeneutical history with a closer examination of the perennialist–constructivist debate. The underlying issues that are at stake in the discourse will be considered, as will the various implications behind the methodological approaches applied by scholars from each side. This hermeneutical history will also dialogue with the work of modern scholars who reduce extraordinary religious experiences to natural or pathological explanations.
Chapter 5 will examine in detail the major scientific studies conducted on the Medjugorje visionaries and their apparitions. The various scientific data will be examined by presenting the procedures and results of studies that have been carried out by four major teams of doctors and scientists. Chapter 6 will consider the importance of the Medjugorje studies in relation to reductionistic theories on religious experiences that attempt to explain such experiences through a natural or pathological interpretation. Chapter 7 will explore what contributions the Medjugorje studies can make to epistemological and hermeneutical debates about studying religious experiences.
Medjugorje constitutes a unique phenomenon in being a modern case of alleged Marian apparitions, thus of visionary experiences, that have been empirically investigated with advanced medical, psychological, and neuroscientific studies while transpiring. This will be the first time that the scientific studies in Medjugorje will be placed into conversation with prominent thinkers who have written about extraordinary religious experiences. The results of such a unique case study can make an important contribution to the philosophical, methodological, and hermeneutical understanding of extraordinary religious experiences, and can have significant consequences on ways to move forward in the study of religion and related disciplines. In short, the case of Medjugorje affords a rare opportunity to understand a deeper dimension of extraordinary religious phenomena like visionary experiences through empirical examination.
