A vision need not guarantee its accuracy in every detail. One should thus beware of concluding without examination that revelations are to be rejected. . . . Much less should one suspect that the saints have been always or very often deceived in their vision. On the contrary, such deception is rare, and as a rule in unimportant matters only. . . .4
In his treatise on mystical theology, Father Poulain also lists the following possible causes of errors in private revelations: the human mind may mingle its own action with the divine action in a certain measure by injecting some of its own favorite or preconceived ideas; a true revelation may subsequently be altered when its recipient records it after an interval of time, or the secretary of the mystic may not write or edit it with perfect fidelity; and finally a printed text may be an incomplete version or an inaccurate translation of the original manuscript.5
We may therefore concede with the learned Father Herbert Thurston, S.J., that “it seems impossible to treat the visions of Anne Catherine [Emmerich]—or, indeed, any other similar visions—as sources which can contribute reliably to our knowledge of past history.”6
What then is the value of the best private revelations?
The famous Dom Prosper Guéranger, O.S.B., abbot of Solesmes and pioneer of the modern liturgical revival, summed up the age-old wisdom of Holy Mother Church’s reply to that question when he wrote: “Private revelations . . . are a powerful means of strengthening and increasing Christian sentiments.”7 For, according to his biographer, “in the thought of Dom Guéranger, private revelations, even though the human element may enter into their composition with the revealed element, are one of the channels by which edification and the supernatural penetrate among the Christian faithful.”8
The following statements on this subject by Dom Guéranger are significant and relevant:
In all periods the Church . . . has had in her bosom souls to whom it pleases God to communicate extraordinary lights of which He allows some rays to fall onto the community of the faithful. . . . What counts for the Christian who wishes to know the things of God in the measure which is permitted to us here below, is to know that beyond the teaching generally imparted to all the children of the Church, there are also certain lights which God communicates to souls whom He has chosen, and that those lights pierce through the clouds, when He so determines, in such a way that they spread far and wide for the consolation of simple hearts and also to be a certain trial for those who are wise in their own opinion. . . . Those to whom the seer communicates what he has thus learned from a divine source, being reduced to a human and fallible intermediary, need give it only that assent which we give to probable matters, an assent which we call “pious belief.” No doubt this is little if we consider the invincible certitude of Faith; yet it is much if we think of the shadows which surround us.
While granting the possibility of human imperfections in private revelations, Dom Guéranger insists on the spiritual value of the best examples in this masterful psychological analysis:
But there always remains that superhuman tone, both gentle and strong at the same time, an echo of the divine words which resounded in the soul, that unction which penetrates into the reader’s mind and soon obliges him to say: the source of this is not human. As we read, our heart slowly takes fire, our soul feels desires for virtue which it had not hitherto experienced, the mysteries of faith appear more luminous to us, bit by bit the world and its hopes vanish, and the longing for the good things of Heaven, which seemed to have been dozing within us, awakens with new fervor.9
That generations of devout Catholics, including many learned theologians and prelates and writers, have in fact derived great spiritual benefit and inspiration from a judicious reading of the private revelations which have been compiled here, will be definitively established in the following critical estimates of the works of the four mystics that constitute its sources, as found in the most authoritative Catholic encyclopedias and treatises on the subject.
St. Elizabeth of Schoenau
This daughter of a humble German family in the Rhineland entered the great Benedictine monastery at Schoenau near Bonn at the age of twelve. She became a remarkably fervent and mortified nun, and from the age of twenty-three until her death in 1164 experienced frequent extraordinary mystical graces. Her writings were edited by her brother Egbert, a Benedictine abbot. Though honored locally and in her Order, St. Elizabeth of Schoenau was never formally beatified. Her revelations, like those of SS. Hildegard, Gertrude, and Mechtilde, exercised a profound influence on medieval spirituality.10
St. Bridget of Sweden
Bridget (Birgitta)—not to be confused with the Irish St. Bridget of Kildare (453–521)—was born about 1303, the daughter of a wealthy provincial governor. At the age of fourteen she married Ulf Gudmarsson, and they became the parents of eight children. In 1343 her devout husband entered the Cistercian monastery of Alvastra, where he died the following year. After spending several years at the court of King Magnus Eriksson, Bridget went to Rome in 1349. Except for a number of pilgrimages to Italian shrines and one to the Holy Land in 1372, she resided in Rome until her death on July 23, 1373. So great was her fame for sanctity that she was canonized by Pope Boniface IX on October 3, 1391.
Before leaving Sweden she began to dictate her revelations, at the urging of Jesus Christ and His Mother, to one of the several learned priests who were at various times her spiritual directors. These “Heavenly Revelations” comprise nine books, amounting to over 1500 pages. They contain numerous lengthy discourses by our Lord and the Blessed Virgin on such subjects as the Church, moral advice for clergy and laity, marriage and education, Purgatory, as well as accounts of apparitions of St. Ann, St. John the Baptist, St. Matthew, St. Francis of Assisi, and other saints.
According to the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité Ascétique et Mystique,
Benedict XIV has pronounced the decisive word concerning the orthodoxy of the Revelations of Bridget in the De servorum Dei beatificatione. . . . Therefore there is no doubt: the Revelations of Bridget are included among those which have the approval of the Church; they are orthodox.
This formal approval, however, means only that they contain nothing contrary to faith and morals and that there is good evidence for their authenticity. For, in the words of Pope Benedict XIV,
even though . . . these revelations have been approved, we cannot and we ought not to give them the assent of divine faith, but only that of human faith, according to the dictates of prudence, wherever these dictates enable us to decide that they are probable and worthy of pious credence.11
The Revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden were among the most popular books in Europe during the late Middle Ages.12 Their “value . . . resides in the spirituality of the Saint.” They contain “an entire mariology which is extremely rich. It is the Blessed Virgin most often who describes the scenes of the childhood and of the Passion of Christ.”13
Venerable Mother Mary of Jesus of Agreda
Born in Agreda, Old Castille, Spain, on April 2, 1602, in a middle-class family, Maria Coronel entered in January, 1619, with her mother and youngest sister, a Conceptionist Poor Clare convent which her devout parents had founded in their home town, while her father and two brothers became Franciscans. From 1627 until her death on May 24, 1665, except for a period of three years, Mother Mary of Jesus was re-elected Abbess no less than eleven times.
Mary of Agreda, as she is usually called, is a figure of special interest to Americans because in the 1630s, in one of the most thoroughly documented cases of bilocation in history, without ever leaving her convent in Spain she appeared innumerable times to the Indians of western Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, instructed them in the Catholic religion, and sent them southward to be baptized by the approaching Franciscan missionaries.14
Her famous biography of the Blessed Virgin, The Mystical City of God, became the subject of considerable controversy among theologians when it was first published in 1670. On November 9, 1681, at the request o
f King Charles II of Spain, Pope Innocent XI suspended in Spain a condemnation of the work by the Holy Office of the Inquisition of June 26 of the same year.15 That this suspension was generally interpreted by theologians and ordinaries as being of universal application is indicated by the publication between 1700 and 1750 of about twenty French, Italian, Latin, German, and Polish translations in France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium.16 Although, as Dom Guéranger and the Abbé H. Brémond have shown, a Jansenist and Gallican majority of professors at the Sorbonne University in Paris issued a condemnation of the book in 1696,17 the Spanish Inquisition and “the universities of Granada, Burgos, Cadiz, Madrid, Canarias, Salamanca, Alcala, Toulouse, Louvain, and seventeen of the greatest colleges in Europe have favored The Mystical City of God with their official approbation.”18
According to the authoritative modern Catholic Lexikon fuer Kirche und Theologie,
[It] contains several errors in profane matters but nothing which contradicts the teaching of the Church. The point which was most displeasing to its opponents (particularly Gallicans, Jansenists, and followers of the Enlightenment) was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. . . . However, the definition of this doctrine as a dogma [in 1854] proved that the Venerable Servant of God was right and again drew the attention of the Catholic world to her writings. The Holy See has repeatedly permitted them to be read, but has not made a positive declaration concerning the character of the visions. . . . Many bishops and scholars have warmly recommended the work. Despite all controversies, it has been widely distributed in many editions and translations . . . and has filled countless souls, including priests also, with new love and reverence for the Mother of Our Lord.19
This remarkable book has indeed gained an ever increasing favor during the past hundred years, even though the controversies of the eighteenth century resulted in halting the author’s Process of Beatification.20
In 1850 the scholarly Jesuit editor of the journal La Civiltà Cattòlica wrote:
[We] must conclude that the book, The Mystical City of God, must with prudence be judged praiseworthy. . . . Between a blind belief and a no less blind scorn, the middle ground is a clear-seeing respect.21
Thirty years later the same journal announced
with great pleasure the new Italian version of the Life of the Blessed Virgin originally written in Spanish by Venerable Sister Mary of Jesus, to whom, as we may piously, though by merely human faith, believe that it was communicated by the Blessed Virgin herself. . . . Intrinsic reasons render it probable. . . . And extrinsic reasons likewise render it probable, i.e., the opinions of very learned theologians who have given the work their approval after a most detailed examination.”22
According to Ludwig Clarus (Wilhelm Gustav Volk), the editor of the German version published in 1853, “The Mystical City of God has aided many persons to find the True Faith and to acquire virtue.”23 This statement is especially noteworthy in view of the fact that Clarus himself joined the Catholic Church in 1855.24
In 1858–1859, Dom Guéranger devoted a series of twenty-four articles to a thorough analysis and defense of Mary of Agreda’s book. While granting that it was not lacking in human flaws, he summed up his considered opinion thus: “The least that one can say in praise of this work is that it remains one of the most impressive monuments of the human spirit.” Calling it “a marvelous Summa . . . amazing, if not superhuman,” Dom Guéranger declared that “after a lengthy study of The Mystical City and of the voluminous writings that have been published for and against it,” in his judgment
the revelations of Mary of Agreda on the life of the Blessed Virgin have a right to the respect and the esteem of all those who are capable of undertaking to read them, that they deserve to occupy a distinguished place among writings of that kind, and that the judicious use that can be made of them can serve as a powerful stimulus to a revival of devotion in souls. . . .25
Father Frederick William Faber (1814–1862), the intimate friend of Cardinal Newman and founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, whom Dom Guéranger considered a “saint,”26 and whom The Catholic Encyclopedia describes as “a master in mystical theology,”27 wrote that he found a “number of beautiful things”28 in The Mystical City of God, from which he frequently quoted passages in his inspiring devotional works.
Typical of the many official recommendations to be found in the editions of that time is the following statement of Archbishop Descamps of Malines and Primate of Belgium (when Vicar-General of the Diocese of Tournai): “We exhort the pious faithful and the clergy in particular who desire a deeper insight into the grandeur of the Most Holy Virgin to take advantage of this publication, which they cannot read without edification and profit.”29 A German edition published by the Redemptorist Fathers in 1885 was recommended by the Bishop of Ratisbon in these words: it “will surely edify all readers and be the occasion of great spiritual blessings.”30
The famous French writer J.K. Huysmans disclosed in his autobiographical novel, En Route, that the writings of Mary of Agreda and Anne Catherine Emmerich influenced him in his return to the sacraments. After complaining of the former’s verbosity and other faults, he added with profound perspicacity: “I know well that the Abbé [the hero’s spiritual director] would say that we need not concern ourselves with those singularities and those errors, but that the Cité Mystique is to be read in relation to the inner life of the Blessed Virgin.”31
On February 15, 1900, in Rome, a French-Canadian lady named Rose de Lima Dumas wrote a letter to His Holiness Pope Leo XIII in which she told him that for several years, after reading The Mystical City of God, she had adopted as a rule of life the moral instructions of the Blessed Virgin that are found at the end of each of its chapters, and that her feelings of gratitude and a desire “to spread the science of the saints had impelled her to publish” a one-volume compilation of those instructions in French “in order to offer it especially to devout persons living in the world.” While giving His Holiness a copy of the book, she begged for his blessing “for herself and for all those who will strive to put into practice the counsels of the Mother of God and who will do all they can to persuade others to do likewise.” On February 28, 1900, His Eminence M. Cardinal Rampolla wrote to her in reply that “the devout thoughts which you expressed to the Holy Father . . . were received with pleasure by His Holiness, who, wishing to confirm you in your virtuous projects, gladly gives you the Apostolic Blessing. . . .” Of special significance is the fact that the edition involved, entitled Sublime Doctrine de la Mère de Dieu sur les Vertus Chrétiennes; Extrait de la Cité Mystique de Dieu . . . was printed by the presses of the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda in Rome.32 Consequently, a few months later a Canadian diocesan journal stated:
The reserve which is ordinarily maintained on the subject of revelations really no longer has any reason to exist in relation to The Mystical City, since His Holiness Leo XIII has been so good as gladly to encourage the project of spreading among the faithful the science of the saints which is contained in that heavenly life of the Mother of God.33
And in 1915, the same lady published, also in Rome, a complete French edition of Mary of Agreda’s work bearing the statement of the Rev. Reginaldo Fei, O.P., Doctor in Sacred Theology, “that it contains nothing against faith and morals.”34
Meanwhile, in 1903, the Rev. Van den Gheyn, S.J., one of the learned and cautious Bollandist experts in hagiography, wrote in his article on Mary of Agreda in the authoritative Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique:
[The Mystical City of God], says Goerres, “. . . contains a truly grandiose mystical contemplation.” However, we must admit that there are in this work some very extraordinary assertions. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that the author’s only aim was to edify and that she had no intention of engaging in critical history. Mary of Agreda herself said: “Error on my part is possible, for I am only an ignorant woman. . . . Moreover I submit to my guides and to the correction of the Holy Catholic Church.”
In brief, if we wish to judge the work of Mary of Agreda without the partisan spirit which has unfortunately vitiated a good number of appreciations that have been made of her writings, it must be recognized that from the point of view of mystical theology and of edification, the Mystical City of God deserves the popularity which it has enjoyed.35
At the same time Father Poulain was writing in his Graces of Interior Prayer:
Whatever opinion we may form as to Mary of Agreda’s revelations, taken as a whole, we are obliged to admit that they contain some errors. Thus . . . she says that the earth’s radius is 1251 miles. . . . Let us not, however, conclude from this that Mary of Agreda deceived herself also as to her purely intellectual visions of the Divinity. . . . Amort, who criticized her a great deal . . . adds: “I unhesitatingly admit that she received wonderful lights from God. . . .36
The Life of Mary as Seen by the Mystics Page 2