| Societies
in Western Europe undergo periods of spiritual excitement in which
people are more open to signs from heaven or elsewhere, and lulls
during which those who claim direct messages from the divine are ignored,
ridiculed, or persecuted. Since the late 1960s, Catholic Europe has
been in the throes of a kind of re-enchantment, with its immediate
model the visions at Medjugorje and its background the intensive promotion
of the visions of La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima. Paolo Apolito had
the good fortune to be present virtually at the start of public visions
in 1985 not far from his home in Salerno. He observed how the visions
gained credence as apparitions and followed how the town and its church
sorted out the many apparition messages and dealt with the pilgrims
who arrived from throughout southern Italy.
First published in Italy in 1993, this book describes the cult
that developed at Oliveto Citra around the ongoing visions, the
seers and messages that became dominant, and the interpreters who
connected the visions to a cosmic struggle of good and evil and
the events at the end of time. It shows under what conditions people
who claimed to be seers gained access to the public and to the media,
what local elites intervened to filter this process, what pilgrims
contributed to the visions, and how the content of the visions converged
on the great themes of Marian apocalyptics. |
|
|
