How Private Revelations Have Influenced the Church- Part II

Part II. Once again, I point out that sharing an article does not indicate that I agree 100% with everything in it.

From Catholic Stand

By Edward Benet

Part I

The Assumption of Our Lady

It is generally agreed that the dogma of the Assumption has less foundation in Scripture than the Immaculate Conception (but see Rev 12:1-2). Despite that, in the first sixteen centuries of Christianity, theologians were more unanimous in accepting the Assumption than the Immaculate Conception.

This is an example of how the Catholic deposit of faith depends both on Scripture and Tradition A public revelation of the Assumption must have been made to at least one of the Apostles, because such revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle, and this article of faith was thus conserved and handed on by the Church.

When Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, many people began to petition the Apostolic See for the definition of the Assumption also. Between 1849 and 1940 more than 2,500 such petitions were received from bishops and superiors of religious orders. On May 1st, 1946, Pope Pius XII sent an Encyclical Letter (“Deiparae Virginis“) to every bishop in the world asking them about the devotion of their faithful regarding the Assumption. Nearly twelve hundred bishops answered that the dogma could safely be defined, and only sixteen questioned the advisability of the proclamation at that time.

In his letter, Pius XII had asked for a prompt response from the bishops, but he had also entreated “an abundance of divine favours and the favourable assistance of the heavenly Virgin”. Amazingly, that assistance came eleven months later in the form of a private revelation to a most unlikely character in Rome. On April 12, 1947, Bruno Cornacchiola, an avowed anti-Catholic and wife-beater who planned to kill the pope, had a vision of Our Lady at Tre Fontane outside Rome, the same spot where St Paul had been martyred.

During the apparition, Our Lady revealed to Bruno that she had been assumed into heaven. Bruno later recounted this in a private audience to Pius XII. Consider then the timeline: In May 1946, the pope writes to the bishops of the world regarding the Assumption and entreats Our Lady for divine favours to assist with the decision on this dogma. Less than eleven months later, Our Lady appears to a man who was vehemently opposed to all Marian devotion and tells him that she was assumed into heaven!

Pope Pius XII formally defined the Assumption as a dogma of the Catholic faith on November 1, 1950. The constitution cited testimonies from the Fathers, with theological reflection on many biblical passages which indicate that Mary was assumed into heaven. Exactly seventy years later, on November 1st, 2020, Cardinal Piacenza offered Mass at the Tre Fontane shrine in Rome. In his homily, he noted the link between the Marian dogma and the shrine, which he said: “Pius XII knew very well.”

Just as the visions at Lourdes confirmed the definition of the Immaculate Conception, so too Pius XII had private visions which he took as verification of the dogma of the Assumption. In handwritten notes, the pope testified that he saw the so-called “Dance of the Sun” of Fatima on four occasions (October 30, 31, November 1, 8, 1950), in the Vatican gardens.

The Sacred Heart Devotion

As Fr Michael Gaitley makes abundantly clear in his wonderful series Divine Mercy: The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, the devotion to the Sacred Heart is part of God’s providential plan to correct a wayward direction taken by many theologians and faithful from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards. Followers of the Jansenist school portrayed God as an exacting judge who demanded strict penances and sacrifices in exchange for the pardoning of our sins. This negative image of God, and the defective spirituality that accompanied it, would gain enormous influence in France and other parts of Europe right up to the Second Vatican Council, but it began to be countered in an effective way already with the rise of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, a devotion that “corrected” the wayward image of God and emphasized his love and mercy before all else.

In St John’s Gospel, Jesus’ heart is pierced by a Roman spear, and out flows blood and water. This image, which St John solemnly declares to have witnessed himself, has always been taken as a sign of the sacramental life of the Church which issues from the sacrifice of Christ onto death. In later centuries, it has also been taken as one of the scriptural foundations of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. An incredible pantheon of mystics and saints have promoted the devotion to the Sacred Heart since medieval times to the present. These include Bernard of Clairvaux,  Melchtilde of Helfta, Gertrude the Great, and Francis de Sales, among many others. The most significant visions occurred in the 1670s to Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial. But the Church still resisted introducing the feast on a universal level and the growth of the devotion was consequently impeded.

A German nun, Sister Mary of the Divine Heart, began to have interior locutions and visions regarding the Sacred Heart of Jesus during the final decades of the nineteenth century. On June 10th, 1898, her confessor wrote to Pope Leo XIII stating that Christ had requested Sister Mary to petition for the consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart. The pope took no action. Six months later, Sister Mary wrote again to ask that the first Fridays be observed in honour of the Sacred Heart. In response, Pope Leo commissioned a group of theologians to examine the matter on the basis of revelation and sacred tradition.

The outcome was positive and a papal encyclical, Annum Sacrum, was published in May 1899. The encyclical promoted the First Friday Devotions and established June as the month of the Sacred Heart. Sister Mary was to die at age thirty-six on the eve of the feast that same year, and the following day Pope Leo consecrated the entire world to the Sacred Heart. On May 8th, 1928, Pius XI’s encyclical, Miserentissimus Redemptor, affirmed the truth of the visions of Margaret Mary Alacoque. Subsequent popes have all reaffirmed the importance of the devotion.

Space does not permit a treatment of the many other instances of official Church teaching that have been influenced by private revelations. Perhaps the most spectacular is the devotion to Divine Mercy, a devotion condemned by the Church during the 1950s because of a poor understanding of the real content of Sister Faustina’s diaries. This devotion would go on to become the central element in the papacy of St John Paul II.  After canonising Sister Faustina in 2000, he declared that he had just completed the most important task of his pontificate.