Visions of Jesus and Mary

Author Michael Freze argues that Catholic practices such as Eucharistic adoration, rosary devotions and contemplative meditation with a focus on interior life facilitate visions and apparitions.

[1] In recent centuries, people reporting visions of Jesus and Mary have been of diverse backgrounds: laity and clergy, young and old, Catholics and Protestants, the devout and the previously non-believing.

[2] Visions should be differentiated from interior locutions such as those purportedly experienced by Consolata Betrone, in which inner voices are reported, but no visual or physical contact is claimed.

The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican has published a detailed set of steps for "Judging Alleged Apparitions and Revelations" that claim supernatural origin.

[4] According to the priest Salvatore M. Perrella of the Marianum Pontifical Institute in Rome, this is the 12th Marian apparition approved by the Holy See from a total of 295 that have been studied through the centuries.

Popoff was exposed in 1987 when intercepted messages from his wife to a small radio receiver hidden in his ear were replayed on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

[6] Messages from Jesus reported by Catalina Rivas were later found to correspond to exact pages of books previously written by other authors (e.g. José Prado Flores), and published instructional literature for Catholic seminarians.

Pope Leo XIII performed the requested consecration a few days after the death of Sister Mary and called it "the greatest act of my pontificate".

According to Bishop Francesco Giogia the majority of the most visited Catholic shrines in the world are vision based, in that with about 10 million pilgrims, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico City, was the most visited Catholic shrine in the world in 1999,[16] now followed by the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fátima, in Cova da Iria, Portugal, with between 6 and 8 million pilgrims per year.

[22] In 1372, the English anchorite and saint, Julian of Norwich was on her deathbed and had been given her last rites when she reported a series of visions of Jesus, followed by a sudden recovery.

One of her visions is the subject of Bernini's famous work The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the basilica of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

[24][25] At her profession as a Capuchin Poor Clare nun in 1678, Veronica Giuliani expressed a great desire to suffer in union with the crucified Jesus for the conversion of sinners.

In 1820, Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, reported that God the Father and Jesus appeared to him in a vision in the woods near his home in rural New York.

This led to a series of other manifestations through which he claimed to receive divine instruction, authority, and power to restore the true Church of Jesus Christ to the world.

[30] The devotion was further spread from Tours partly by the efforts of Leo Dupont (also called the Apostle of the Holy Face) and influenced Thérèse of Lisieux.

[31] In December 1844, Ellen Gould Harmon (later married name White), co-founder of the Seventh Day Adventist movement, while kneeling at a prayer meeting at the house of Mrs. Haines on Ocean Street in South Portland, Maine, experienced a vision of Jesus Christ.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church, which by 2020 had 21 million modern world-wide followers, is based largely on her interpretations of Christian subjects found in her numerous writings.

One of these churches, the Basilica of St. Pius X can accommodate 25 thousand people and was dedicated by the future Pope John XXIII when he was the Papal Nuncio to France.

In 1918, while praying in the Church of Saint Mary of Graces he reported ecstasy and visions which this time left him with permanent and visible stigmata, the five wounds of Christ.

At that time, she claimed to have been given a vision of Christ himself showing his heart "slashed by the sins of mankind" and crossed by a deeper wound still, atheism.

On the first Friday in Lent 1936, Maria Pierina De Micheli, a nun born near Milan in Italy, reported a vision in which Jesus told her: “I will that My Face, which reflects the intimate pains of My Spirit, the suffering and the love of My Heart, be more honored.

[39] From 1944 to 1947 the bed ridden Italian writer and mystic Maria Valtorta produced 15,000 handwritten pages of text that she said recorded the visions of her conversations with Jesus about his life and the early church.

While the Index no longer exists, the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated in a letter of January 31, 1995 that the condemnation still "retains its moral force", and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that the visions "cannot be considered supernatural in origin."

The followers of the messages of Dozulé believe also that they are the continuation of the Three Secrets of Fátima and that they ask, for the conversion of humanity to avoid a material and spiritual catastrophe.

The teenagers reported truly gruesome sights such as rivers of blood and the visions were accompanied by intense reactions: crying, tremors, and comas.

Rydén's reported conversations with Jesus are published in a series of books called “True Life in God” and have been translated into over 40 languages by volunteers worldwide.

In a 1995 notification the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, while recognizing some positive aspects of Ryden's activities, declared that their negative effects meant that dioceses should not provide opportunities for spreading her ideas and that Catholics should not consider her writings to be supernatural.

For instance, Concepcion Cabrera de Armida's over 60,000 pages of text were never represented as visions, but as her own meditations, often in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, during Eucharistic Adoration.

In 1531, Juan Diego reported an early morning vision of Mary, in which he was instructed to build an abbey on the Hill of Tepeyac in Mexico.

The local prelate did not believe his account and asked for a miraculous sign, which was later provided as an icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe permanently imprinted on Diego's cloak where he had gathered roses.