The most illuminating books about visions of the Virgin Mary

I love Warner’s work because her books address big questions about belief and meaning, such as those behind beloved fairy tales or the heroic history of Joan of Arc. 

In this book, Warner traces shifting legends about the Virgin Mary buried in theological debates, literature, and art over 2000 years of Christianity. Warner reminded me that, although the Gospels seem full of Marys and Mariams, Scripture offers little information about the mother of Christ, which has allowed generations of believers the freedom to envision her as they saw fit. 

I came away from the book wondering why the Virgin’s appearance and wardrobe have not changed much over 2000 years. She is always a beautiful, usually young woman wearing droopy robes and a veil, sometimes a crown or halo, and often carrying a book or a baby. Maybe it’s so the faithful can recognize her when she descends in a cloud of light or appears in the burn pattern of a grilled cheese sandwich (sold on eBay for $28,000 in 2004.)

I thought religious apparitions went out with modern secularization, but Zimdars-Swartz’s engrossing report set me straight. I admire Zimdars-Swartz for not trying to persuade readers that apparitions are real or fake. Instead, she documents a growing trend in modern apparitions of the Virgin that began in 1830, when Mary appeared to Catherine Labouré in the Convent of the Sisters of Charity in Paris. After that, Mary began appearing to select visionaries in public places all over 19th-century Europe, speaking mostly to powerless women and children.

Zimdars-Swartz leads us through the famous serial apparitions at Lourdes, Fatima, Garabandal, and later outside Europe: Zeitoun, Kibeho, Lipa, Phoenix, and elsewhere. At Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, The Mother of Christ still appears daily to some of the six teenagers who first saw her in 1981 and has delivered some 40,000+ fairly repetitive messages so far. 

The Catholic Church has never officially approved the apparition at Medjugorje, nor most other reported apparitions of the Virgin. Church officials recommend that all purported visionaries be evaluated for physical and medical health before any religious judgments are rendered, but the discernment of visions is not a scientific process.

I live in southern California, where la Señora de Guadalupe appears all around us in bright murals on grocería walls, on t-shirts and jackets, as tattoos, even as dangling air fresheners. According to the earliest legend, included in this volume, she first appeared in 1531 to a peasant named Cuauh-tlahtoa—a.k.a. Juan Diego—on the hill of Tepeyac, at the edge of modern Mexico City.

The site was sacred to Tonantzin (the local name for a mother goddess), but Mary emerged there at dawn in her bright green and red gown amidst a flowerful garden that resembled the paradise of the Aztecs. It took a miracle for Juan Diego to persuade the Archbishop of Mexico City that the Virgin wanted a shrine built on the hill; he turned up at the episcopal palace one December day with his cloak full of out-of-season roses. When he spilled the flowers at the bishop’s feet, an image of the Mother of God remained imprinted on the fabric. Today, the cloak (tilma) hangs in the cathedral at Tepeyac.

Devotees used to believe that Juan Diego told the story that was kept orally, but it was first published in 1648 by the Spanish priest Miguel Sánchez and, the year after that, translated into  Nahuatl by Luis Laso de la Vega, the keeper of the shrine at Guadalupe. Although Catholics have long revered Juan Diego as a saint, he was not canonized until 2002 because historians aren’t sure that Juan Diego really existed. Tell that to the ten million pilgrims who visit the shrine every year.

Okay, this book by a famous Irish writer is not really about apparitions of the Virgin, but it grabbed me by the guts and wouldn’t let go, and Mary’s appearances do help drive the bloody plot.

It tells the story of a lad named Francie who grew up in small-town Ireland in the 1960s. His fragile mother breaks down and commits suicide; his father is a brutal alcoholic; in reform school, a priest abuses him; his only friend abandons him; and he’s tortured by the mother of a would-be friend, who calls Francie’s family “pigs.” Let’s just say that she comes to regret those words. Meanwhile, Francie chats frequently with the Virgin, who does a lot of cursing, although she also shines like all historical apparitions of the Virgin.

In the film version, directed by Neil Jordan, the Virgin was played by Sinead O’Connor because, Jordan suggested, “She looks like the Virgin Mary.” What’s not to love?

I adored the film version of this book when I was about ten, and I still remember the saintly Bernadette limping around the monastery, refusing treatment for her deathly disease. The novel’s author was a Czech Jew who left 1930s Vienna and found refuge in the town of Lourdes, where Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin in 1858.

As thanks, he wrote this tearjerker about Bernadette and the beautiful lady who appeared to her eighteen times in a grotto outside town. Word got around, and both religious and civic officials challenged Bernadette’s story, mostly because she was uneducated and came from a wretched family. They threatened her with hell and an insane asylum. Yet hundreds of people seemed to be miraculously healed by the waters of the grotto, and most of the skeptics were persuaded. Werfel romanticizes Bernadette’s life, but the story follows the visionary into a convent where she eventually develops a tubercular tumor on her leg, refuses to take the curative waters, and dies praying to the Virgin. She was canonized in 1933.

There was also a film made in 1943 starring Jennifer Jones as Bernadette. It won four Oscars and the hearts of little girls across America.