(Click photo to link to Fatima or Medjugorje web page)
Teaching of the Church on
Public/Private Revelations
Apparitions/Private
Revelations from Catechism of the Catholic Church
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FATIMA |
MEDJUGORJE
In Fatima, Our Lady of the Rosary, is an approved apparition site which took
place in 1917. The apparitions in Medjugorje as Our Lady, Queen of Peace, are considered alleged
as the apparitions are still ocurring, since 1981 in the small village. Concerning
pilgrimages to Medjugorje which take place in a private manner, the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith holds that they are permitted, on the condition that they
not be considered a validation of events in progress and which still call for examination
by the Church. Millions of people have passed through Medjugorje and many conversions and
unexplained phenomena have taken place and is continuing to this day. Other approved
apparition sites include Our Lady of
the Immaculate Conception (1858) in Lourdes, France and Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531) in
Mexico. For information (as of April 1999) concerning the status of other apparitions, visit: Apparitions.org
The Marian Information Center of Las Vegas encourages prayer and the practice of the
Roman Catholic Faith in conformity with the teaching and absolute authority of the Holy
Father, Pope John Paul II and his successors.
Public Revelation and private
revelations – their theological status
by Cardinal Ratzinger on the Theological Commentary on Fatima, Third
Secret
(Excerpted portion, June 2000)
The teaching of the Church distinguishes between “public Revelation”and
“private revelations”. The two realities differ not only in degree but also in
essence. The term “public Revelation” refers to the revealing action of God
directed to humanity as a whole and which finds its literary expression in the two parts
of the Bible: the Old and New Testaments. It is called “Revelation” because in
it God gradually made himself known to men, to the point of becoming man himself, in order
to draw to himself the whole world and unite it with himself through his Incarnate Son,
Jesus Christ. It is not a matter therefore of intellectual communication, but of a
life-giving process in which God comes to meet man. At the same time this process
naturally produces data pertaining to the mind and to the understanding of the mystery of
God. It is a process which involves man in his entirety and therefore reason as well, but
not reason alone. Because God is one, history, which he shares with humanity, is also one.
It is valid for all time, and it has reached its fulfilment in the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Christ, God has said everything, that is, he has revealed
himself completely, and therefore Revelation came to an end with the fulfilment of the
mystery of Christ as enunciated in the New Testament.
To explain the finality and completeness of Revelation, the Catechism of the Catholic
Church quotes a text of Saint John of the Cross: “In giving us his Son, his only Word
(for he possesses no other), he spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word—and
he has no more to say... because what he spoke before to the prophets in parts, he has now
spoken all at once by giving us the All Who is His Son. Any person questioning God or
desiring some vision or revelation would be guilty not only of foolish behaviour but also
of offending him, by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ and by living with the
desire for some other novelty” (No. 65; Saint John of the Cross,The Ascent of Mount
Carmel, II, 22).
Because the single Revelation of God addressed to all peoples comes to completion with
Christ and the witness borne to him in the books of the New Testament, the Church is tied
to this unique event of sacred history and to the word of the Bible, which guarantees and
interprets it. But this does not mean that the Church can now look only to the past and
that she is condemned to sterile repetition. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in
this regard: “...even if Revelation is already complete, it has not been made fully
explicit; it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the
course of the centuries” (No. 66). The way in which the Church is bound to both the
uniqueness of the event and progress in understanding it is very well illustrated in the
farewell discourse of the Lord when, taking leave of his disciples, he says: “I have
yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth
comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority...
He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jn
16:12-14). On the one hand, the Spirit acts as a guide who discloses a knowledge
previously unreachable because the premise was missing— this is the boundless breadth
and depth of Christian faith. On the other hand, to be guided by the Spirit is also
“to draw from” the riches of Jesus Christ himself, the inexhaustible depths of
which appear in the way the Spirit leads. In this regard, the Catechism cites profound
words of Pope Gregory the Great: “The sacred Scriptures grow with the one who reads
them” (No.94; Gregory the Great,Homilia in Ezechielem I, 7, 8).
The Second Vatican Council notes three essential ways in which the Spirit guides in the
Church, and therefore three ways in which “the word grows”: through the
meditation and study of the faithful, through the deep understanding which comes from
spiritual experience, and through the preaching of “those who, in the succession of
the episcopate, have received the sure charism of truth” (Dei Verbum, 8). In this
context, it now becomes possible to understand rightly the concept of “private
revelation”, which refers to all the visions and revelations which have taken place
since the completion of the New Testament. This is the category to which we must assign
the message of Fatima. In this respect, let us listen once again to the Catechism of the
Catholic Church: “Throughout the ages, there have been so-called ‘private'
revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church... It is
not their role to complete Christ's definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by
it in a certain period of history”(No. 67). This clarifies two things:
1. The authority of private revelations is essentially different from that of the
definitive public Revelation. The latter demands faith; in it in fact God himself speaks
to us through human words and the mediation of the living community of the Church. Faith
in God and in his word is different from any other human faith, trust or opinion. The
certainty that it is God who is speaking gives me the assurance that I am in touch with
truth itself. It gives me a certitude which is beyond verification by any human way of
knowing. It is the certitude upon which I build my life and to which I entrust myself in
dying.
2. Private revelation is a help to this faith, and shows its credibility precisely by
leading me back to the definitive public Revelation. In this regard, Cardinal Prospero
Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV, says in his classic treatise, which later became
normative for beatifications and canonizations: “An assent of Catholic faith is not
due to revelations approved in this way; it is not even possible. These revelations seek
rather an assent of human faith in keeping with the requirements of prudence, which puts
them before us as probable and credible to piety”. The Flemish theologian E. Dhanis,
an eminent scholar in this field, states succinctly that ecclesiastical approval of a
private revelation has three elements: the message contains nothing contrary to faith or
morals; it is lawful to make it public; and the faithful are authorized to accept it with
prudence (E. Dhanis,Sguardo su Fatima e bilancio di una discussione, in La Civiltà
Cattolica 104 [1953], II, 392-406, in particular 397). Such a message can be a genuine
help in understanding the Gospel and living it better at a particular moment in time;
therefore it should not be disregarded. It is a help which is offered, but which one is
not obliged to use.
The criterion for the truth and value of a private revelation is therefore its orientation
to Christ himself. When it leads us away from him, when it becomes independent of him or
even presents itself as another and better plan of salvation, more important than the
Gospel, then it certainly does not come from the Holy Spirit, who guides us more deeply
into the Gospel and not away from it. This does not mean that a private revelation will
not offer new emphases or give rise to new devotional forms, or deepen and spread older
forms. But in all of this there must be a nurturing of faith, hope and love, which are the
unchanging path to salvation for everyone. We might add that private revelations often
spring from popular piety and leave their stamp on it, giving it a new impulse and opening
the way for new forms of it. Nor does this exclude that they will have an effect
even on the liturgy, as we see for instance in the feasts of Corpus Christi and of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus. From one point of view, the relationship between Revelation and
private revelations appears in the relationship between the liturgy and popular piety: the
liturgy is the criterion, it is the living form of the Church as a whole, fed directly by
the Gospel. Popular piety is a sign that the faith is spreading its roots into the heart
of a people in such a way that it reaches into daily life. Popular religiosity is the
first and fundamental mode of “inculturation” of the faith. While it must always
take its lead and direction from the liturgy, it in turn enriches the faith by involving
the heart.
We have thus moved from the somewhat negative clarifications, initially needed, to a
positive definition of private revelations. How can they be classified correctly in
relation to Scripture? To which theological category do they belong? The oldest letter of
Saint Paul which has been preserved, perhaps the oldest of the New Testament texts, the
First Letter to the Thessalonians, seems to me to point the way. The Apostle says:
“Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything, holding
fast to what is good” (5:19-21). In every age the Church has received the charism of
prophecy, which must be scrutinized but not scorned. On this point, it should be kept in
mind that prophecy in the biblical sense does not mean to predict the future but to
explain the will of God for the present, and therefore show the right path to take for the
future. A person who foretells what is going to happen responds to the curiosity of the
mind, which wants to drawback the veil on the future. The prophet speaks to the blindness
of will and of reason, and declares the will of God as an indication and demand for the
present time. In this case, prediction of the future is of secondary importance. What is
essential is the actualization of the definitive Revelation, which concerns me at the
deepest level. The prophetic word is a warning or a consolation, or both together. In this
sense there is a link between the charism of prophecy and the category of “the signs
of the times”, which Vatican II brought to light anew: “You know how to
interpret the appearance of earth and sky; why then do you not know how to interpret the
present time?” (Lk 12:56). In this saying of Jesus, the “signs of the
times” must be understood as the path he was taking, indeed it must be understood as
Jesus himself. To interpret the signs of the times in the light of faith means to
recognize the presence of Christ in every age. In the private revelations approved by the
Church—and therefore also in Fatima—this is the point: they help us to
understand the signs of the times and to respond to them rightly in faith.