Vatican City, Italy: The Vatican has introduced new guidelines on supernatural phenomena, addressing when reports of a weeping statue become fake news, how credible claims of a holy relic leading to miraculous healing are, and how divine apparitions should be confirmed. These guidelines, presented at a media briefing on Friday, were compiled by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and aim to establish stricter rules for assessing the truthfulness of such claims.
In recent years, reports of such phenomena have surged, often amplified by social media and sometimes propagated through disinformation and rumor. To counter this trend, the Vatican has tightened criteria for the screening, analysis, and potential rejection of cases, marking the first update to such guidelines since 1978.
Throughout history, apparitions have been reported, with some recognized by the Church prompting pilgrimages by believers and even visits by popes to sites where they purportedly occurred. Examples include Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal, where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to children, offering promises of miracles. These events, such as the one officially recognized by the Church in 1930, have drawn millions of faithful seeking spiritual solace.
However, not all reported apparitions hold up under scrutiny. In 2016, an Italian woman began claiming regular apparitions of Jesus and Mary in a small town north of Rome after bringing back a statue from Medjugorje in Bosnia, another site where the Virgin Mary is alleged to have appeared. Despite crowds gathering to pray before the statue and receiving messages purportedly from the divine, including warnings against same-sex marriage and abortion, it took eight years for the local bishop to debunk the story.
Therefore, the Vatican, an institution steeped in mysticism and known for its centuries-old traditions such as communicating via smoke signals, aims to regulate claims of the supernatural more effectively with these new rules.
