Fr. Rene' Laurentin, who studied apparitions of Mary, dies at age 99

Apparitions! An interesting & difficult topic. This is from The Washington Post, so no pay wall. Excerpts below the link. The Faranda family guru, the late Fr. Benedict Groeschel, would appreciate this.

Father Laurentin, a French theologian who died Sept. 10 at 99, was perhaps Catholicism’s preeminent scholar of contemporary miracles and Marian apparitions. A student of the French philosophers Jacques Maritain and Henri Bergson, he combined a sense of academic rigor with a religious faith shaped by World War II, when he was captured by Nazi forces in Belgium and imprisoned for five years.

“He possessed the solidity of the theologian, the seriousness of the historian [and] the agility of the journalist,” wrote Lourdes rector André Cabes in a statement on his death.

Father Laurentin specialized in Mariology, the study of the Virgin Mary, but his columns for France’s Le Figaro newspaper and his scores of books often ranged far afield. He investigated the story of Richard Thomas, a priest in Texas who supposedly multiplied tins of condensed milk to feed the masses. And he studied the claims of Greek Orthodox evangelist Vassula Ryden, whom Father Laurentin called “the most authentic mystic living in the world today.”

But he was best known for his studies of Lourdes, which he began in the early 1950s after the town’s presiding bishop, Pierre-Marie Théas, urged him to take on the project with the admonition “Lourdes needs only the truth.”

******

Yet Father Laurentin, whose expertise was increasingly put to use as reports of apparitions increased in the 1980s and ’90s, resisted placing an outsize emphasis on Mary. “Mary is the model of our faith, but she is not divine,” he told the New York Times in 2000. “There is no mediation or co-redemption except in Christ. He alone is God.”

****

Father Laurentin was often asked whether he believed in particular apparitions, a contentious question for a priest, let alone a bishop — the first person charged with adjudicating claims of supernatural occurrences.

The church, Father Laurentin wrote in one essay, used four criteria to grant recognition to a supernatural occurrence: whether the message of the apparition is in accordance with Christian teachings; the seer is “sincere, credible, coherent and disinterested”; acts of healing or physical signs of a supernatural presence occur; and long-term religious conversions follow from the incident.

Even when an occurrence has been recognized, Father Laurentin noted, individual Catholics were not obligated to believe. Belief as a whole, he said, was entirely out of his purview — though he seemed more sympathetic than many Catholic priests and scholars in his opinion of Medjugorje, a town in the former Yugoslavia where Mary has allegedly appeared each day since June 1981.

“If someone asks me if I believe in Medjugorje, I say, ‘I am not obliged to answer to this question.’ I am an expert; I examine reasons in favor and reasons against,” he told a priest in 2003. “Let each one judge for himself and let [the] Church judge for all of us.”

 

Comments

[Ellen Mullin]

Amen !!!!!!!!