On a morning in 1531, a decade after the brutality of the Spanish conquest, a Nahua peasant walked through the hills near present-day Mexico City. The man’s name was Juan Diego, and he had recently been baptized into the Catholic faith. As he walked, he heard some unusual birdsong; he looked for the source of the music and found a woman shining with light.
Juan Diego dropped to his knees. The woman addressed him as Juanito, the nickname his intimate friends and family called him, and referred to him as the “smallest of my children.” Today, many people of Mexican descent continue to revere this woman—Our Lady of Guadalupe—because she saw their unique value as a people. She affirmed their dignity before God.
The woman told Juan Diego she was the “mother of the true God for whom we live” and that she wanted a house built on that hill. From that home, the woman promised Juan Diego, she would display God’s love, compassion, help, and defense to his people.
“The translations you see sometimes online say a temple or a church,” says Jeannette Rodriguez, a theologian who has studied the Virgin of Guadalupe. “And that’s not what she said. She wanted to build a casita, a house, a home.”
Guadalupe offers us a glimpse of who Mary is, says William Calvo-Quirós, a professor and program director of Latino/a Studies at the University of Michigan. “The Virgin of Guadalupe is not just [an object of] devotion but is really this kind of woman who has been accompanying this community,” he says. “Mary is a woman who loves the community. She will adapt to [be] what people need.” In Guadalupe, Juan Diego—and Mexico as a whole—met Mary the mother, a woman who seeks out the poor and lowly, the smallest of her children, to bring them a message of compassion and solidarity.
The devotion surrounding the Guadalupe apparition is one of the most pervasive and far-reaching of all Marian devotions. Like other appearances of Mary throughout history, it occurred at a nation’s turning point, when a new Mexican identity was forming. “In many ways, the apparition of the Virgin always happens in this period when a nation is redefining who they are,” says Calvo-Quirós.
In times of transition, Mary arrives
Scholars point out that Marian apparitions tend to occur in places of crisis, violence, and transformation. In the case of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mary’s appearance became a unifying event in a tumultuous moment in Mexican history. It birthed a shared devotion that united the Mexican people.
Similar stories come from all over the world. In 1798, during the Tây Sơn rebellion in the Vietnamese province of Quảng Trị, people fleeing for their lives saw a beautiful woman standing in the forest. She was holding a baby, and she comforted them, promising to be with them. Today, this apparition is referred to as Our Lady of La Vang, and a church stands where she appeared.
Our Lady of Donglü—also called Our Lady of China—is another Marian visitation that happened during political unrest, this time the Boxer Rebellion in China at the end of the 19th century. She helped protect Catholic Chinese people who were fleeing persecution by the government. Then, during the Cold War, Mary appeared in Nicaragua, warning humanity to avoid another world war. Mary seems to appear in our world when we are most in need.
At times, the church has used Marian apparitions to raise up traditional gender roles or further particular political viewpoints. For instance, some church leaders like to highlight Our Lady of Fátima’s admonitions about modesty. And yet the historical narratives of Mary’s appearances consistently highlight her solidarity with the vulnerable. For this reason, they are also associated with movements of liberation. “I personally see the apparitions of Mary as part of this long process of humanity’s evolution [within] a larger plan that is about loving and caring for everybody, beyond their faith, beyond their class, beyond all these kinds of constructions,” Calvo-Quirós says.
What makes a Marian apparition?
The Catholic Church believes that a Marian apparition is a supernatural appearance of the mother of God on Earth to encourage, fortify, and comfort believers. According to oral tradition, Mary’s first supernatural appearance took place in Spain in 40 C.E. Mary, who according to tradition was still alive and living in Jerusalem at the time, appeared on top of a pillar to the apostle James during a low point on his missionary journey. She encouraged him to continue his work carrying the gospel into the world and asked him to build a church on the site.
Since then, countless people have met the mother of Jesus in visions and dreams. Apparitions have been reported everywhere from Rwanda to Japan, from Venezuela to India. These reports range from the absurd—such as seeing Mary in a piece of toast—to the profound.
But only a few of these stories are familiar to most of us. Even fewer are formally recognized by the Catholic Church. Our Lady of the Pillar is one of only 16 Marian apparitions the Vatican has recognized, and only 25 of Mary’s earthly appearances have been approved by local bishops. Even when these visions do receive official approval, Catholics aren’t obligated to believe in apparitions (although many do, as evidenced by fervent devotions and pilgrimages around the world).
Marian apparitions and church approval
Although Mary’s messages to individuals are categorized as private revelations, they can quickly tip into public devotion. When this devotion reaches a mass scale, the church intervenes to investigate. “We only hear about these big [apparitions] where people have a message for others,” says Gloria Falcão Dodd, a research professor for the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton. “There are many [sightings of Mary] where people have just a message for themselves, and we don’t even hear about them.”
In May 2024, the Vatican published an updated set of guidelines for what constitutes an apparition. “Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena” details guidelines for assessing an apparition’s authenticity, as well as criteria for identifying if a supernatural event is beneficial or harmful to believers. (Points in favor: credible witnesses, unpredictability, and the orthodoxy of the message. Points against: generates division, doctrinal errors, and the gain of profit or power by witnesses.) The guidelines affirm that only the pope can give the official “supernatural” stamp of approval, though Catholics are free to believe in apparitions that qualify for the highest category of authenticity.
These guidelines are designed to protect against hoaxes, false teaching, and weaponizing so-called messages to control people. But the guidelines are not foolproof. Throughout history, groups devoted to particular apparitions have ignored church guidelines altogether, claiming, for example, special insight from Mary in order to manipulate others.
Problematic appearances
Even in the case of approved Marian apparitions, devotion can easily warp. Groups devoted to the appearance of the Virgin at Fátima have tried to force acceptance on others, even though belief in any apparition is not obligatory. An especially controversial apparition is Mary’s alleged appearances at Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since 1981, people have reported visions of Mary as well as instances of miraculous healings at the site, but the church has never approved these supposedly supernatural events. What’s more, groups connected to the Medjugorje apparitions were banned (in other words, the Catholic church no longer recognizes them as ecclesial organizations) after being found guilty of spiritual abuse. (In September 2024, Pope Francis said that the devotion could have “positive fruits,” though he still did not declare it authentic.)
Deirdre de la Cruz, associate professor of Southeast Asian Studies and History at University of Michigan, studies Christianity in the Philippines and the impact of Marian apparitions there. In an article for the Conversation, she writes: [“Priests and bishops] readily accept diversity in how believers venerate Mary. But they also must remain vigilant against phenomena and messages that contradict the church’s teachings and threaten to undermine their authority.”
De la Cruz adds that an apparition’s public impact determines whether priests or bishops step in to investigate. In her article, she describes how in the early 2000s, a woman in the Philippines claimed to channel Mary while in a trance state. Her neighborhood prayer group gathered around her to hear what Mary had to say. The Archdiocese of Manila knew about the woman’s claims, de la Cruz writes, but because the devotion was contained to a small group of believers, no one intervened. Several years prior, however, a prophecy claiming Mary would appear in the town of Agoo generated such a frenzy that tens of thousands made a pilgrimage to the site of the alleged apparition. The scale was massive enough that the presiding bishop launched an official investigation, which concluded that the whole event had been a fraud.
A mother to everybody
Authentic, church-approved appearances of Mary share common elements. When the mother of God appears, her presence often generates miracles of healing. Her messages encourage the visionaries to pray and do penance, both for themselves and on behalf of others. In addition, she encourages believers to build up the faith of others—sometimes by literally building a church, as in the story of Guadalupe, and other times by sharing the love of God in word and action.
The apparition of Mary in Lourdes, France includes all these elements. In 1858, a teenager named Bernadette, from a notoriously poor family, encountered Mary near a grotto, a site that served as the town’s trash dump. “The Lady,” as Bernadette called her, was holding a rosary. After appearing at the grotto several times, the woman identified herself to Bernadette, asked for a chapel to be built on the site, and instructed her to dig a hole and drink from the spring that appeared there. The spring at Lourdes quickly became a site of miraculous healings and global pilgrimage. The story of Mary’s appearance there continues to offer hope and comfort to people who experience sickness, chronic pain, and disability.
Mary on the margins
If the messages of Marian apparitions share certain traits, linked by what Jesuit Father James Martin calls a “striking sameness,” so too do the visionaries themselves. The mother of Jesus tends to appear to the very people about whom her Magnificat spoke. She shows up in places like the town dump. She commissions and comforts the lowly, appearing to individuals who are on the periphery of society, those who often lack wealth, social status, or education: refugees from war, an impoverished teenager, an Indigenous peasant, shepherd children. Many times, Mary appears to young people. Throughout history, shepherds have received more than their share of apparitions. (Think of the shepherd children at Fátima or the children who beheld Our Lady of La Salette in France.)
The types of people to whom Mary appears underscore her care for the vulnerable. “In the Virgin Mary, there is, overall, this kind of predilection in [her] apparitions toward those who are more vulnerable or who are more poor,” says Calvo-Quirós. “The Virgin . . . tends to have a predilection for those who traditionally we don’t see because they’re invisible. I guess maybe because if you’re a mother, you care for those who are more like this.”
In 1879, Mary appeared in Knock, Ireland to 15 lower-class men, women, and children. They stood in the rain and beheld a silent apparition of Mary, Joseph, and John the Evangelist praying before a lamb on an altar, flanked by angels. This apparition instilled hope among poor and persecuted Catholics. In 1933, in the depth of the global Great Depression, Our Lady appeared to 11-year-old Mariette Beco in a small Belgian village and introduced herself as the “Virgin of the Poor.” And in Italy in 1953, in the bedroom of a woman plagued by illness during her pregnancy, a plaque of the Madonna wept real human tears. “Mary’s care for the marginalized people can be seen in almost every apparition,” says Dodd.
But while Mary shows a preference for those who are marginalized and vulnerable, she doesn’t exclude people who are materially rich. The story of Mary’s appearance to Alphonse Ratisbonne, a wealthy Frenchman of high social standing,
is one of the more dramatic conversion stories in apparition history. “I think she sees the rich like Alphonse Ratisbonne as being poor [spiritually],” says Dodd. “She does not discriminate. . . . I think Our Lady’s just a good mother to everybody.”
Weaponizing Marian apparitions
Particularly in the United States and Europe, an authoritarian flavor pervades devotion surrounding Marian apparitions. There’s a sense that Mary shows up to issue instructions and that the point of such appearances is behavior modification among believers: more penance, more prayer, more piety. For instance, in the Fátima narrative, when Mary appeared multiple times in 1917 to three shepherd children in a Portuguese village, she showed them a vision of hell and told them to pray the rosary for the conversion of sinners.
For Portuguese fascist groups, the popular devotion that sprung up around Fátima became a political tool, and the apparition became tightly linked to a sense of Portuguese national identity that bolstered the Salazar dictatorship. Even today, discussions of Fátima continue to emphasize Mary’s ostensible hellfire warning that “certain fashions will be introduced that will offend Our Lord very much.”
The tendency to use Mary to enforce behavioral codes isn’t limited to apparitions, of course. Throughout the centuries, Mary has been used as a tool for submission to patriarchal norms and upheld as an impossible-to-meet ideal. Among certain strains of Catholicism, she is elevated as a model of piety and feminine perfection, used to coerce women toward unrealistic standards or to limit them to the domestic realm. Understanding the person of Mary, says Calvo-Quirós, means understanding “how [her] image has been used to oppress other women . . . how it has been said, ‘You need to be this type of woman, and therefore if you don’t do this type of thing, you will be contained.’ ” But just as there are multiple ways of seeing Mary, so there are multiple ways of viewing her apparitions—including through a liberatory lens.
Marian apparitions bring Christ to the people
Perhaps more than anything, Mary’s human life offers a vision of the mother of God as someone who companions and empowers the downtrodden. Mary suffered and experienced oppression. “When you talk to women, especially in developing countries, who live under these kinds of conditions, there’s a natural tendency to connect with and feel like Mary understands them,” Rodriguez says.
During her time on Earth, Mary existed on the periphery of society. She was young and unmarried when she became pregnant with Jesus, a poor woman living under Roman occupation in an overlooked village. After Jesus’ birth, she fled to Egypt with her family as a refugee. Then, when her son became an adult, she watched him be publicly humiliated and put to death; she remained with him at the foot of the cross even as many of his other followers fled. “From the time she stood at the foot of the cross, [she] has aligned herself with the persecuted, the condemned, [even] the one put to execution,” says Dodd.
Beyond being a woman well-acquainted with suffering and oppression, Mary was also a leader of the early church, the first person to join Jesus in his revolutionary work. During the wedding at Cana, Mary prompted her son to perform his first public miracle, effectively inaugurating his ministry. She remained an apostle through her public show of discipleship at the cross and beyond the resurrection in the early church.
Many people see Mary both as a companion in their suffering and a co-laborer in the fight for liberation. She is a mother they can turn to for solidarity and a patron saint they can invoke for strength. During Cesár Chavéz’s 1960s march for farmworkers’ rights, he held a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe; she was a symbol of protection and a focal point for Chavéz’s call to nonviolence and self-sacrifice. In the 1970s, in Chile and Argentina, where authoritarian governments kidnapped and “disappeared” dissenters, Mary came to be known as Madre del Desaparecido—Mother of the Disappeared; she was a source of both comfort and courage to the many mothers who lost their children during this time.
Bringing Christ to the people
Several governments have recognized how dangerous Mary’s influence can be to their rule; during Britain’s rule over India, for example, the government banned Mary’s Magnificat from being recited or sung, viewing its message—of God casting down the mighty, raising up the lowly, feeding the hungry, and sending the rich away empty—as subversive and dangerous.
Even her apparition at Fátima, often wielded as an authoritarian tool, can be viewed as a message of empowerment and inclusion. At Fátima, Mary doesn’t only give a lecture; she asks the children to build a church. This request, argues Dodd, is crucial to understanding Mary’s desire to commission her children and extend God’s liberating love. “Mary is interested in bringing Christ to the people,” she says. “To have a church built means the Mass will be said and the Eucharist, Jesus’ presence—body, blood, soul, and divinity in the blessed sacrament—is made available to others.” Building a church where people can receive the Eucharist means inviting them to take Jesus into their bodies and carry the presence of Christ out into the world.
In appearing to her children and asking them to carry God’s presence to others—just as she herself did as an unwed teenager—Mary empowers humans to also become something like a mother to Christ. Seen through this lens, the purpose of a Marian apparition can be understood as something much larger and more compelling than admonition, instruction, or even comfort. Her message, Dodd says, is meant to ripple outward beyond the visionaries to reach people both inside and outside the church.
Here is another way of telling the story: At Fátima, as with her other appearances, Mary invites her children to become agents of God’s healing love in the world. She commissions them to bring Christ to the people. And they do this by carrying with them the presence of someone who walked with the poor, aligned himself with the vulnerable, and set the oppressed free. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, Mary’s message is “at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary.” Her message is not “sweet, nostalgic, or even playful” but a “hard, strong, inexorable song about the power of God.”
This article also appears in the December 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 12, pages 10-15). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Jory Mertens/artbyjory.com
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