Author tells how Vatican separates faith, fiction

“The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions and Miracles in the Modern Age” by John Thavis; Viking (276 pages, $27.95)

By Peter Smith

Tribune News Service

For legions of Catholics, and not a few church bureaucrats, the supernatural is as real and present as it was for their medieval forebears.

In “The Vatican Prophecies,” veteran Catholic journalist John Thavis explores their world of Marian apparitions, relics, exorcisms, doomsday visions and other purported encounters with the supernatural.

Thavis, who for nearly three decades was Vatican bureau chief for Catholic News Service, unfolds the elaborate processes the church employs for scrutinizing the allegedly miraculous. The church accepts enough science to avoid unchecked superstition, but it also affirms the supernatural when it concludes there’s no other explanation.

“In an age in which Christianity is supposed to be the faith of reason, many are still fascinated by the possibility of miracles, apparitions, encounters with the devil and other signs of the supernatural,” Thavis writes.

Balancing faith and reason “has increasingly occupied the Vatican’s time and resources,” he writes. “In a sense the Vatican is engaged in vetting the supernatural and filtering ‘wondrous’ experiences, to minimize anything it judges unorthodox, superfluous, excessive or bizarre. At the same time, of course, Rome cannot be seen as placing limits on divine intervention.”

Echoing that approach, Thavis takes such investigations seriously but is jaded enough to spice his work with gently irreverent prose.

Claims of appearances of the Virgin Mary and other miracles have come in so fast and furiously that the Vatican itself can’t screen them all and is increasingly trying to get local bishops to make their best judgments. But in a mass-communication era, a shrine or event can become an international sensation long before the vetters get their boots on.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where reports of regular appearances of the Virgin Mary since 1981 have transformed a dusty village into an international destination for multitudes of pilgrims.