Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (108 page)

In that case what was the ecclesiastical observer doing here? I had been watching him for hours. From whom or what was he supposed to be protecting the old lady, who he said was talking to Mary? She was closely guarded.... When I finally gave up, I heard again the monotonous praying which hung over the courtyard like an enervating curtain of noise. Without a break. 'Who arose from the dead - who ascended into heaven - who sent us the Holy Ghost ...'

For six whole hours it ground out as if unreeled by a prayer wheel. Suddenly I had rather an unkind thought. Was someone in the house playing a tape over and over again?

The Capuchin was quite right. People would wait. For years. For decades. For a century. Only then would 'Mama Rosa' from San Damiano do her bit in confirming the one true church by joining the army of the saints.

I should love to be able to thumb through the list of saints, if there still is such a thing, in one or two hundred years' time. I would probably find 'Mama Rosa's' name perpetuated in it.

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Ecclesiastical scholars such as the historian and hagiographer Walter Nigg [24] are cultivating the ground in which saints can grow and miracles flourish: Saints personify the Christian existence, they are the best teachers of intercourse with God, and they led us directly to the burning bush. There is nothing more vivid and alive than the saints; they are exemplary men who have God before their eyes as if they could see him.

I have made a summary of characteristic cases of visions with the spectrum of their potentialities.

Should we agree with Franz Werfel, author of the novel about Lourdes The Song of Bernadette? 'For the believer an explanation is unnecessary, for the non-believer an explanation is impossible.' Is it really?

So many visions have been confirmed in Christian countries alone and so many documented in our century that the reactions and judgments of many scholars merely bewilder me. That which is at first incomprehensible and indefinable, that which is not measurable or physically recordable, does not exist. Rationally it can only be a question of mumbo-jumbo and that is something no one talks about.

People should not make it so easy for themselves. After studying mountains of documents, it is absolutely clear to me that subjectively perceived visions have taken place. At the very moment I am writing on 17th April, 1974 someone is probably having a vision somewhere in the world.