Do Catholics have to believe in Marian apparitions, Eucharistic miracles, or the Shroud of Turin? Or practice devotions like wearing the brown scapular or various miraculous medals? While these practices are popularly associated with Catholicism, some might be surprised to find that they are not essential to the faith.
I was reminded of this recently when listening to a conversation between Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein about Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan). Douthat, who is an opinion columnist, not a theologian, laments a loss of supernatural awareness including “all sorts of strange things going on around us that God in His wisdom hasn’t seen fit to clarify or reveal.” For Douthat, these include “fairies,” “ghosts,” “unclassified forces,” and “supernatural events.”
Catholics do believe in the supernatural. But that doesn’t mean we are obliged to embrace Medieval folklore or superstitions that don’t correspond to what we know of the world today. God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ is much more life-giving and profound than a troubling, unpredictable world permeated by inexplicable events and mysterious forces beyond our comprehension.
The hierarchy of truths?
Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism spoke of a “hierarchy of truths”—which means that not all truths revealed by divine faith are of equal importance. For example, God’s love, the Trinity, the incarnation and redemption, and God’s revelation in scripture, are all more important than the church’s teaching on its internal hierarchical structure, or even various spiritual practices about which the church may say very little if anything.
So, a focus on what’s core, rather than what is marginal, can be helpful for Catholics in ecumenical dialogue and in their own personal spirituality.
A premodern worldview may appeal to many Catholics’ sense of mystery, and multiple folkloric traditions have inspired people to keep faith during difficult times. Nonetheless, fixation on some of these beliefs can become unhealthy and distract from the church’s core teachings.
With this in mind, understanding Catholicism’s “hierarchy of truths” and how some of these beliefs or practices fit into that hierarchy can be a helpful corrective.
Marian apparitions
More than 30 years ago, I was fortunate to attend a pilgrimage to Fatima, due to the generosity of a benefactor for whom Our Lady of Fatima was paramount. While in Fatima, the priest leading the pilgrimage repeatedly told us that Fatima was simply a reaffirmation of the gospels. He said this so often that by the end of the pilgrimage my friends and I said to each other in all earnestness, “If Fatima is simply a reaffirmation of the gospels, we need to become more familiar with the gospels.”
Yet some odd exchanges happened on that trip. When the priest shared how in 1917, Our Lady of Fatima asked the children visionaries to pray for the conversion of Russia, one participant asked why Our Lady hadn’t asked the children to pray for all the nations about to be engulfed in World War II or for the conversion of Germany, as only a few decades later six million Jews would be killed in the Holocaust.
As Mary, as well as her son Jesus, was a Jew, it seemed like a good question. The priest had no answer other than to say how powerful Our Lady of Fatima was because she saved Pope John Paul II from assassination.
Even then, as a young person, I wondered if I was “required” to believe any of this in order to be Catholic. I hadn’t yet heard of the “hierarchy of truths,” but the concept would have been helpful at that moment.
In truth, Catholics are not “required” to believe in any Marian apparitions or that Our Lady of Fatima saved Pope John Paul II from an assassin’s bullet. These are not doctrines of the church. Even after last year’s Vatican document, “Norms for proceeding in the discernment of alleged supernatural phenomena,” the highest “rating” that the church can give an alleged apparition is simply a nihil obstat—that is, a declaration that there is nothing in the apparition standing in the way of faith.
Eucharistic miracles
In the spring of 2006, when I was teaching at the University of Dallas, some of my colleagues from the biology department were asked to determine the veracity of some spectacular claims.
A boy at St. James parish in Dallas had received communion but, instead of swallowing it, became sick and coughed up the host in the restroom. When the pastor found out about this, he took the host and put it in water to dissolve. But after four weeks, the host, rather than dissolving, appeared to have turned red. Soon there were reports of a eucharistic miracle—a bleeding host.
According to the Texas Catholic, “Within hours people were coming to the church to see the host…. Fueled by telephone and e-mail stories saying a miracle had occurred, as well as media reports, curious scores of the faithful hoping to see something extraordinary began to show up.”
Bishop Grahmann, ordinary of the diocese of Dallas at the time, ordered that the host be brought to the University of Dallas biology department “for tentative identification and characterization of the object.”
The report from the biologists concluded “that the object is a combination of fungal mycelia and bacterial colonies that have been incubated within the aquatic environment of the glass during the four-week period in which it was stored in the open air.”
Bishop Grahmann wrote to the pastor, “From this conclusion the phenomenon was of the natural order and contains nothing of a supernatural nature. Thus, you need to remove yourself from any further activity surrounding this matter and its exaggerated claims.” Yet, for many weeks there was discussion of a purported eucharistic miracle.
What did the news from St. James parish in Dallas mean for the church’s evangelizing mission in the heart of the Bible belt? In times prior to biological analyses, how many eucharistic miracles were reported? How were they evaluated and analyzed? Were any of them even “real” or “authentic” miracles?
Eucharistic miracles occupy a very low position on the “hierarchy of truths.” If evangelization is called for, perhaps a life of service based in love might be a better witness to the incarnation and a sacramental view of reality.
They will know us by our love
Recognizing that there is a hierarchy of truths can help us stay focused on what is truly essential to our faith. This is especially important when it comes to educating those who are new to the faith, who might find the many traditions and devotions associated with Catholicism overwhelming or be uncertain what they are and aren’t obligated to do or believe.
This also has to do with how we view the world. Attributing all unusual or surprising events, including those with a rational explanation, to the supernatural doesn’t lead to an attitude of curiosity and wonder but to a blurring of distinctions and even a close-minded dogmatism.
As Hippocrates said centuries before Christ, “Human beings think epilepsy divine, merely because they don’t understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, there would be no end of divine things.”
Appealing though premodern Catholicism may seem to some, Jesus isn’t calling us to follow folklore or arcane devotions. He summons us, rather, to life-giving service based on love.
St. Paul exhorted Timothy to “instruct certain people not to teach false doctrines or to concern themselves with myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the plan of God that is to be received by faith. . . Some people have deviated from these and turned to meaningless talk” (1 Tim 1:3b-4,6).
“Meaningless talk” in our own day can mean superstitious deviations from the core truths of our faith and instead, in favor of the marginal or optional. As Pope Francis reminded us, the life of a Christian “apart from any extraordinary phenomena, offers itself to all the faithful as a daily experience of love.” Love, difficult and imperfect though it may be, is the mark of all who follow Christ.
Image: Unsplash/Jacob Bentzinger
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