/lit/ - Literature

Any good books on Marian apparitions?

>>22686090
Anon you do realize that a lot of that is still in practice in large parts of the Catholic world, right? And the Orthos do it too, to some extent. There's still very much a "folk quality" to a lot of Catholic and Orthodox religion, and it's fine as long as there's nothing explicitly heretical going on.

Hell, every now and then God throws us a for-real miracle or apparition, so He seems to approve of the practice.

Is it so impossible for you to believe that God is real?

Is it so impossible for you to believe that the miraculous, the supernatural, and the otherworldly are real?

>>20751559
>Catholic icons and idols of Mary are almost universally shaped like vaginas.
Protestants pull this factoid out like it's damning evidence or something... The shape is the ,"Vesica piscis" which when presented horizontally symbolises an overlapping of the physical and spiritual world, also makes up the traditional "fish" symbol for Christ. When vertical, it is symbolic of the vagina/fertility. So symbolically it is speaking to the fact that the feminine bore/contained the divine i.e. Mary literally carried the Divine within her and gave birth to Him.

Whether artists were consciously expressing this in their depictions, or whether it was a subconscious expression of scared truth, or even if it's just a cool coincidence, I think it's pretty neat

The Shroud isn't even necessary, the Church has more powerful miraculous relics. To this day, for example, no one has been able to debunk the Tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Even its continued existence is miraculous; being made of natural material, it should have rotted away to nothing centuries ago.

Christianity's great wildcard has always been how it can convert populations. This is the thing the Muslims and the Jews and the Hindus don't really have. The Buddhists perhaps come close, but even they don't convert people at the scale Christianity does. That's the great thing, in any future assessment of civilizations, of paganism, Islam, Christianity, and the like. It almost doesn't matter what the ethnic makeup of a people is, they can all be converted en masse to Christianity within a generation, if the circumstances are right. It's happened before. Almost all of South and Central America were converted to Christianity within a century, not long after the Spanish took the continent.

All thanks to Our Lady of Guadalupe, of course.

Lads I think I might be able to manage it so that I can be in Mexico City for the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

I'm pumped. I think I'm going to take the plunge and go. Imagine being at the basilica, seeing the tilma, on the feast day.

>>18598542
There's also the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, which was seen by thousands, including atheists.

Also, there's the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The image is miraculous and seems to contain no brush strokes. The tilma itself was made of cactus leaves and should have rotted into nothing centuries ago, yet it still exists. You can go see it in Mexico City to this day.

>>18455366
Well the trick is, do you believe the Marian apparitions are real or not?

And that's related to the larger question of, what exactly do you expect Christianity to be? Just this ethical system? Or a private matter of the heart? Or do you think it is the action of God Himself, the Alpha and the Omega, He who set the stars in their courses, coming directly into the world, and altering the course of history? And, in doing so, fulfilling the messages He had laid out since the time of Abraham, and which were repeatedly emphasized and reemphasized in all the Law and all the Prophets?

If Christianity is not just a system of ethics, or a way of perceiving the world, but is, instead, about the actual God of the universe interacting with mankind, then there would be a certain amount of evidence of this interaction, right? Logical assumption would say so.

And this is part of what the Marian apparitions are. They are a subset of the miraculous deeds that God has worked for His People since time immemorial, and which He continues to work today for the benefit of His people, who are the Church founded by Christ.

Not every half-baked Marian apparition claim should be taken seriously, of course. But the Church has designated some of them as "worthy of belief," and these should be taken very seriously indeed, because they are signs that God still does incredible things in the world. That God is not dead, and has not withdrawn Himself from human beings, but instead continues, from time to time, to do marvels and wonders, such as we read of in Exodus, or in Joshua. If the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has survived for centuries, or if the sun danced in the sky because of Our Lady of Fatima, should we really be surprised, if it comes from the same God who parted the Red Sea? Shouldn't we EXPECT that God, if He is real, can continue to work miracles even today?

It doesn't fit the Ancient World definition of idolatry. Go look up what the ancient Jews and the Church Fathers wrote about the subject. The practice of respecting and venerating statues is not the same thing.

Also, frankly, Protestants just make everything too hard. All the accoutrements of Catholicism and Orthodoxy are helpful because they're vivid representations of the things you are supposed to believe. Protestants want to make everything mental, but most people can't handle that. People need their senses engaged to help center their thoughts and their beliefs.

There's a lot of subtle wisdom in the things the older Churches do.

It is definitely true that if Christianity is real in all its miraculous, supernatural glory, then Nietzsche's criticisms of it have absolutely no weight. How can you say "God is dead" in the face of miracles, healings, apparitions, and prophecies?

At the very least, it makes pure materialism difficult.

>>18177975
Based and Guadalupe-pilled.

Will you argue with Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima, OP?