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Also See Mary Who?
Mary's appeal is a growing phenomenon that has spread far beyond the traditional borders of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. With many more shrines dedicated to her than even Christ, she is rapidly becoming the "queen of ecumenism" someone whom diverse religions can honor, rally around and even worship without offending their respective theologies. The Los Angeles Times reported that "A growing number of Americans from all Christian denominations are reaching out to the Virgin Mary as a comforting conduit of spirituality and a symbol of peace in troubled times ...It's not just Catholics who are interested in Mary and following the apparitions.
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The Real Mary of The Bible
We know the Mary of the Bible was obedient to God's call to the point she was willing to risk her life as well as her future marriage and be the topic of slanderous gossip. She had faith to believe the impossible, pointed people away from herself to the teachings and directives of Jesus and mourned at the foot of the cross. She was also one of the over one hundred people who waited in the upper room for the Holy Spirit. In spite of all the above there is much more information in Scripture about other servants of God such as Moses, Abraham, the apostle Paul, etc. Additionally, She did not author any of the Bible nor was she martyred for her faith...
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Emphasis Mine In Bible Verses
On October 13, 1917 in Fatima when, despite heavy rain 50 to 70,000 people gathered to see if "Mary's" promise of a miracle on that date would occur.
Suddenly, the clouds broke, and the sun began to spin, change colors, and zigzag across the sky - something that defied all natural laws. Many thought it was the end of the world, while others fell to their knees in awe. Even secular newspapers documented the event, making it one of the most well-recorded miracles in history. [01].
It was the climax to a series of visitations by the Virgin Mary to the three Portuguese peasant children, and since then the 'Sun dance' phenomenon has proliferated: it has been observed in Poland, at Medjugorje in the former Yugoslavia, in Czechoslovakia and at Garabandal in Spain; every time associated with Marian visions. [02]
The Solar Phenomena
(The following section is an excerpt from The Marian Apparitions: Divine Intervention or Delusion? By Miriam Lambouras).
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaimeth the work of His hands (Ps. 18:1 - Septuagint numbering).
Allowing for auto-suggestion, over-active imagination, pretending to see things so as to be like other people, there remain enough solid witnesses to make it clear that there have been many instances of spectacular solar phenomena at the shrines. Are they natural phenomena, signs from heaven that accompany the presence of the Mother of God, or part of the "signs and lying wonders" campaign in preparation for the Anti-Christ?
In the Old Testament, the sun stands still for Joshua (Jesus, son of Navi), and moves backwards for Hezekias, while in the Gospels we have the Star of Bethlehem and the darkening of the sun at the Crucifixion. In the Church, we know the Cross of Constantine the Great, the Cross seen over Jerusalem in 357, and the Cross over Athens in 1925.
IPS Note: Whether Constantine's 312 AD vision of a cross in the sky before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge was genuine is a matter of historical debate, as it relies on accounts from Eusebius (the bishop of Caesarea Maritima from about AD 314) and Lactantius (an early Christian author who became an advisor to Constantine) rather than physical, contemporary proof.Traditional sources accept the spiritual shift some historians believe that Constantine was using Christianity for political purposes.
Besides which,
... the symbol Constantine used was not a cross but a Chi-Ro, a symbol made by superimposing the Greek letters Chi and Ro. The Chi-Ro was (and still is) uses as a symbol of Christianity since these are the first letters of the Greek words for ‘Christ the king.’ But it was also used as a good luck symbol by Greco-Roman pagans, so while it sent a message to the Christian soldiers it would not have offended the pagan soldiers who still made up the bulk of Constantine’s army.
As for the vision itself, it was probably an invention of Lactantius who was one of the two main Christian sources for the battle. Eusebius, the other source, makes no mention of any vision. It would have been out of character for Constantine to be so openly Christian this early in his career. One of the reasons Constantine succeeded in Christianizing the empire where other emperors, like Elagabulus, who tried to change the religion of the empire failed is that he knew to take it slow.
He started off by legalizing Christianity, then giving Christians preferences for imperial jobs, and only when he was secure in his power did he use imperial resources to build churches and promote Christianity. He was much too subtle to announce he had a religious vision before he even gained control of the whole empire. [03]
Throughout history, strange things in the sky have been seen and recorded. At the beginning of the tenth century, Bishop Radbod of Utrecht recorded a sky filled with stars which seemed to "crash one upon another," a sign which was followed by many natural and historical disasters. Halley's Comet, visible in England in 1066, is embroidered on the Bayeux Tapestry.
During the Wars of the Roses, a contemporary chronicler recorded "three suns in one" appearing before a battle, which the leader of the Yorkists, the future Edward IV, declared was a good omen as it signified the Trinity, thus calming his frightened troops. Shakespeare used this account when he mentioned this sign in his play, "Henry VI."
In 1646, a book was published called, Strange Signes from Heaven, recording sightings of many phenomena, and in 1882 Walter Maunder, a Greenwich astronomer, published an account of the most remarkable thing he had ever seen in the course of many years sky gazing. Together with hundreds of people all over Britain, he witnessed a great circular disc of greenish light which lengthened out into a cigar shape, more than a hundred miles above the earth, at least fifty miles long, and moving very rapidly at about ten miles a second. Scientists today can explain it as part of an auroral display.
There had been a violent magnetic storm at the time, and charged particles from the sun plunged into the earth's atmosphere and lit up like a neon light. A beam of particles would create the appearance of a solid object moving at speed. When the beam had spent its force, it would simply break up like a cloud, which it did, over Europe.
No doubt many "strange signs from heaven" are in fact natural phenomena.
A well-known natural phenomenon is the "halo," when the sun's image, refracted through ice crystals, forms a cross with the sun at its centre. There are "mock" suns and moons known to astronomers, and the planet Venus, when viewed through the polluted air near the surface of the earth, appears to change colour and make erratic movements. A programme appeared on television, Christmas 1993, about the Star of Bethlehem. One scientist / astronomer said that natural phenomena occur every year, and if the Church could give him a definite date for the Nativity, he would be able to say what it was the Wise Men saw, as all the dates for the movements of the planets are known.
[Note the editor's note in the original article said:
"Although, as our authoress doubtless intended, this demonstrates the number of extraordinary natural phenomena there are, the scientist was mistaken because the Bethlehem Star was not a natural phenomenon but a spiritual one (see Homily VI of St John Chrysostom on the Gospel of St Matthew). Furthermore, despite the frantic preparations by Mammonites to celebrate the second millennium of an event they do not seem to believe in (!), the exact date of the Saviour’s birth is not known to us.]"
Some of the solar phenomena seen at the very many shrines all over the world are undoubtedly purely natural in origin. But hundreds of people who claim to have seen the sun "dance" have been able to look at the sun with ease for long periods with no damage to their optic nerves. But not everyone present saw exactly the same thing, and some saw nothing at all, so obviously the dancing sun does not have a natural cause, and perhaps has to do with a mass hallucination of some kind. Certainly the sun could not physically have spun and zigzagged, or that would have been the end of the solar system.
All the well-documented accounts of the "miracle of the sun" at Fatima stress the terror of the crowd, many of whom - but not all - saw the sun spinning in a mad whirl, then detaching itself from the sky, spin towards the earth in a huge fiery mass, and return to its place. The movements were repeated twice.
While some people at the shrine saw nothing, others fifty kilometres away saw the spectacle and believed that the end of the world had come. The sun changed colour, giving off red, then yellow, then purple light, In The Dancing Sun, Desmond Seward quotes a passage from an unpublished account of events at Turzovka.
In 1958, the Mother of God is said to have appeared to a forty-two year old forester, a "vague believer," who saw a beautiful woman in white holding a rosary and floating in the air. Altogether there were seven appearances, in the same place and at the same time weekly. The forester was told to pray for reconciliation and atonement by the world for its sins; there were the usual apocalyptic warnings and the stressing of the rosary. Crowds from all over the Slovakian countryside came to the mountain, a spring burst forth on the spot of the apparition and healings took place.
The Communist authorities put the forester in an asylum, but later released him. Strange lights were reported, and in 1963 the miracle of the sun took place. "The fiery orb ... seemed to be ablaze, burning, with flames bursting out of it.... among over 500 people who were watching in consternation there was only shocked astonishment. After a few moments an enormous cone-shaped light spread above and around us, like an over-sized tent made of long, vividly hued strips. It consisted of every colour in the spectrum, from red to violet ... All around, coloured strips covered the sky, the trees and their branches, the ground and the people.
The strips fanned out from a single focal point in which was the sun. I saw deep blue and bright yellow people next to me, whose colour changed when they moved." Three local brass bands with the pilgrims formed up and played fortissimo the hymn, "We salute you a thousand times, Mary," as everyone believed this to be a sign of the presence of the Mother of God. Reading about it at second hand, one rather gets the impression of a sort of supernatural religious disco, but to the writer it was "strange and deeply moving, overwhelming ... God-related."
It had never occurred to me that there could be some connection between UFOs and the shrines, until quite by chance a book about UFOs in a pile of second hand books in a local antique shop caught my eye. Glancing through it, I was astonished to find, among many sightings reported in England in 1967, two that immediately sounded familiar.
The first concerned two women neighbours living on an estate in Stoke-on-Trent, who, together with some children playing in the street, saw a "flying saucer" land in a field not far from the estate about 9 p.m. on September 2nd, 1967. The field "looked as though it was on fire - like a bonfire," "it was just as if someone had got a great big bonfire." Within minutes the police, summoned by the women arrived, but all was in darkness, and a daylight search revealed nothing. At Medjugorje in August 1981, along with a spinning sun sending out multi-coloured rays, rainbows without any rain, and other phenomena, a fire appeared to break out on the Hill of the Apparitions, but when the fire brigade arrived there was no sign of it.
The second concerned the Flying Cross. Between 1959 and 1967, 808 investigations into UFO sightings were carried out by the Ministry of Defence, with help from the Royal Observatory, the Meteorological Office, the Royal Air Force, the United States Air Force stationed in Britain, radar establishments, Air Traffic Control and the police, although there seems to have been no inquiry at the highest scientific level. The vast majority of the sightings proved to be purely natural in origin - satellites and debris, meteorological balloons, celestial objects (Venus, etc), aircraft, natural phenomena such as mock suns and moons, cloud reflections and the inevitable few hoaxes. Of the 84 unexplained sightings, some involved those where information was insufficient to make a decision, but the Flying Cross was one of the remainder, well-documented, but for which no explanation could be found.
During October 1967 lights that flew slowly, hovered, formed a cross, and moved off at tremendous speed were seen by over a dozen reliable witnesses, including policemen and BBC engineers. The light was "not piercing but it was very bright. It was star-spangled - just like looking through wet glass. "The Thing" was always seen at night or in the early hours. A retired RAF Wing Commander was driving with his wife in Hampshire one October night when they saw seven flying lights that made no noise, seven bright lights in formation in the sky. At first the lights formed a perfect V but later rearranged themselves into a cross. "They certainly seemed to be under some sort of control - the formation was perfect," said the Wing Commander.
This sounded strangely similar, indeed at times identical, to descriptions by witnesses of the apparitions over the Coptic Church of St Mary at Zeitoun, Cairo, six months later. A Coptic Bishop, Gregorios, in charge of Higher Studies, Coptic Culture and Scientific Research, who saw the apparition on many occasions said,
"Before the apparitions take place, some birds that look like pigeons - I don't know what they are - appear in different formations.... They do not flap their wings, they glide.... Whatever formation they take, they keep. Sometimes as many as seven of them fly in the formation of a cross. They fly very swiftly. They are ... completely lighted. One does not see feathers at all - just something bright. They are radiant creatures, larger in size than a dove or pigeon."
A special committee of Coptic clergy appointed by the Coptic Pope said in their official report, "... Another night we saw doves with the bright colour of silver and with light radiating from them. The doves flew from the dome to the sky direct. We then glorified God Who has allowed the terrestrials to see the glory of the celestials ..." The Coptic Pope Kyrillos VI said in his statement confirming the authenticity of the apparitions, that the glittering apparition was "preceded by some spiritual forms such as doves which moved at great speed."
I read and re-read the UFO accounts and the Zeitoun accounts. Was it possible that "The Thing" seen briefly in England in October 1967 had turned up again in Egypt six months later for a lengthy stay of three years to become the Coptic clergymen's "celestial beings" and the Coptic Pope's "spiritual forms"?
By a strange coincidence, while I was writing this article, my husband called to me one evening early in June to come and look at a most unusual sunset effect. Lit by the most glorious rose-gold glow were clouds in an amazing deep pink and purple hill and valley formation. "It's the Judaean Desert!" exclaimed my husband. Next to it was a "map" of the Mediterranean, with the boot-shape of Italy clearly showing, together with the whole Mediterranean coastline. From behind surrounding deep rose-coloured clouds came powerful rays of golden light. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it, and we stood watching until it had faded. It was incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring, and in a way a spiritual experience, because the overriding thought was "glory to God," and yet it was entirely natural.
I thought afterwards of the English Math teacher at Garabandal in 1974, who saw the dancing sun, a disfigured Christ in the sky, "maps" of various countries together with rays of great light which she felt meant the presence of "an All-Powerful Being," which she took to be "the Eternal Father", who was sending out "rays of terrible anger" onto London on the map. I wondered what she would have made of "my" sunset if she had seen it at Garabandal or some other shrine.
Discounting the natural phenomena, unless we believe that the "doves" and dancing suns are genuine signs from Heaven sent to confirm faith, to indicate the gracious presence of the Virgin, and to warn of disasters which can only be averted by repentance, then it seems we are left with the possibility of some kind of mass hallucination, or with part of a "signs and lying wonders" campaign in preparation for the Anti-Christ.
According to St Luke's Gospel, in the last times there will be "terrors and great signs from heaven." St Ignaty Brianchaninov, writing over a hundred years ago, warned that a time was approaching when there would be numerous and striking false miracles.
"... the miracles of Anti-Christ will be chiefly manifested in the aerial realm, where satan chiefly has his dominion. These signs will act most of all on the sense of sight, charming and deceiving it.
St John the Theologian, beholding in revelation the events that are to precede the end of the world, says that Anti-Christ will perform great signs, and will even 'make fire to come down out of heaven upon the earth in the sight of men' (Revelations 13:13).
This is the sign indicated by Scripture as the highest of the signs of Anti-Christ and the place of this sign is the air." Several of the apparitions have prophesied a Great Sign to come.
End Notes
[01] The Miracle of the Sun https://tinyurl.com/mhkha5n5
[02] Frank McLynn. Book Review / Maybe the sun dances, maybe saucers fly: The dancing sun - Desmond Seward: https://tinyurl.com/3kcue69z
[03] Did Emperor Constantine really have a vision of a flaming cross with the inscription ''In His Sign Conquer'' before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312? https://tinyurl.com/mr8azx8f
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