'A modern mental epidemic.' Marian apparitions in Belgium in the 1930s.

This project will focus on the (sliding) importance of two components of Marian appartions, the location and the visionaries. Although the persona of the visionary appears to be indispensable for the signalisation of the apparition(s) and defining the authenticity, apparitions are denoted with the location of the event (e.g. Fatima, Lourdes) and the location names function as point of reference. Moreover, apparitions incited the creation of places of pilgrimage, but did only rarely lead to the canonisation of the visionaries. Once the supernatural character of a place had been indicated, this location could provide a place to new witnesses of the divine presence: 'miracules' whose sick or injured body healid there in a miraculous way. The Belgian wave of Marian apparitions in the 1930s is an ideal means to study the importance and correlation of these two components. The Belgian wave not only offers the opportunity to compare highly divergent cases (ca. 20), but, as the (initial) apparitions of Beauraing and Banneux are part of the very select group of twentieth-century apparitions approved by Rome, the wave also enables us to point out the differences in the development of approved and non-approved apparitions. Moreover, sources are available for the various stages of the event(s) (attestation, resonance, materialisation).

Keywords:Devotion, Belgium, Catholicism, Marian apparitions, Gender, Pilgrimage, Body

Disciplines:History