Search

This article deals with the transnational Dutch-Canadian apparitional cultus of our Lady of All Nations/Peoples. It analyses how contemporary visionary Catholicism is influenced by religious eclecticism, esotericism, and New Age spiritualities, and how this devotion has shifted into an autonomous millennialist movement. Finding fertile soil in modern societies in socio-economic, political, and religious crisis, and due to the dwindling of existential certainties at the individual level, its ideology of 'progressive millennialism' has shown itself to be a successful religious format that mobilizes devotees, even when its deviation brings the movement into conflict with the formal Church. The movement's prophetic and millennialist views fit into a salvific system of conditionality according to which the visionary, unveiled as the reincarnation of Mary herself, will realize the new millennium if her party will fulfill certain conditions. With its new theology the Quebec movement tries to appropriate the whole Lady cultus as a vehicle for universal salvation. In this way the means for revelation and salvation are taken from the hierarchical ecclesiastical powers-that-be and situated in the 'banality' of the everyday life of the reincarnated Mary. In the providential Marie-Paule Giguère, the devotees involved find an appealing prophet who is both Mary and a co-redeeming messiah, and who in the near future is supposed to realize the second millennium, framed in a new, modern cosmology, for all peoples and faiths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1945, the Western world has recorded a sharp increase in Marian apparitions and messages, which in terms of frequency, content, structure and representation differ from those of previous centuries. The often oppositional content is actively disseminated by traditionalist and fundamentalist Catholics and devotees, and generates cults and shrines which turn away from or disassociate themselves from the Catholic Church. On the basis of two related and much discussed cases, Amsterdam's cultus of The Lady of All Nations and the devotion to the Queen of Peace at Medjugorje, this paper investigates the manner in which these two Marian interventions are articulated and interpreted by the visionaries, and how these interventions relate to the ideological wars which have dominated ecclesiastical politics, and the politics of the Christian world, since the Second World War. When the Roman Catholic Church fails to get such processes of religious divergence under control, it appears that because of the success of some of these cults the ecclesiastical hierarchy ultimately finds itself forced, willingly or not, to join in or converge with the heterodox and previously rejected opinions. In this way the Church increases the significance of conservative and traditionalist thought and practice within its faith community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]