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.
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.
The part played by imagination due to religious 'enthusiasm', the effect on what is subjectively experienced of environment, upbringing and outside influences, these are things that call for investigation. The negative point of view of those who deny everything that is not measurable is no longer consonant with present-day research.
It may be attractive to be witty about phenomena which one does not understand or even try to understand in order to provide small talk at parties. The task of proposing new themes, phenomena and problems for research is left to bolder spirits than mine.
Inquiry and rationalization can suggest hypothetical explanations of the phenomena of visions, but one thing we can definitely prove is which causes of visions can be excluded. Let us begin with the 'Holy Scriptures'.
Chapter Two - Who Really Speaks Through The Bible? - Are The Original Texts 'God's Word'?
More than a hundred thousand million people in this world call themselves Christians. What is it that ties them to their creed? A common basis is necessary for the purpose. That basis was and is the Bible.
The word Bible comes from the Greek: ta hiblia. books. Under the entry 'bible' in the dictionary it says: 'Book of books, Holy Scriptures, the collection of writings which are regarded by the Christian Church as documents of the divine revelation, God's word, and as binding in faith and life ...'
Against their better judgment, the churches proclaim that the Bible is 'God's word'.
To the ears and simple heart of the humble Christian this proclamation from the anointed tongues of theologians sounds as if God in person had inspired the Book of Books and/or dictated it, and as far as the New Testament is concerned he is left to believe that the companions of Jesus of Nazareth took down his speeches, rules of life and 'prophecies' in shorthand, observed his miracles at first hand and soon afterwards noted the miraculous events down in a chronicle. The Christian then is supposed to accept the Book of Books as a collection of authentic reports. Professor Hans Conzelmann, Professor of New Testament Studies, Gottingen, admitted that the Christian community really continues to exist because the conclusions of critical examinations of the Bible are largely unknown to them That is not the proper Christian way, but it is true.
The Bible is not what it is represented to be and even the Holy Ghost is no longer what it was originally supposed to be. I know that my theological critics will raise their eye-brows and say: 'But we know that perfectly well, you can read it in our theological literature.'
They are right. But: the churches, large and small, live among and by the public. They accompany the simple man from the cradle to the grave, at important stages of life they make themselves
'indispensable' by their ceremonies, they exercise their power and fill the church coffers in public. So it is quite unfair to say that all the errors (publicly diffused as the ultimate truth) of religious biblical dogma are available (and admitted) in the books of remote theological libraries. How many of the more than one hundred thousand million Christians ever cross the threshold of one of those libraries?
Joachim Kahl [l], graduate in theology of Phillips University, Marburg, states: 'The ignorance of most Christians is largely due to the scanty information provided by theologians and ecclesiastical historians, who know two ways of concealing the scandalous facts of their books. They either twist reality into its exact opposite or conceal it.' I call both methods cheating the faithful.
The layman has a right to be liberated from erroneous Christian dogmas that have long since been superseded; he can, since it happens in the name of the Lord, demand that he be told the truth in an intelligible way in language without complicated and impossible theological gymnastics.
In the Constitution of the Council on the Church on 21st November, 1964, in the statement of 28th November, 1965 on the relationship with non-Christian religions, as well as in the solemn credo of Pope Paul VI of 30th June, 1968, it was once more expressly laid down: that the Catholic Church alone proclaims the infallible truth, that the Catholic Church is necessary for salvation, that the Catholic Church alone is the true heir of the divine promise, that the Catholic Church alone is in possession of the spirit of Christ, that the Catholic Church alone is entrusted with the infallible teaching office, that the Catholic Church alone is in possession of the absolute truth.
On 18th November, 1965 the Catholic Church proclaimed solemnly and most officially in the dogmatic constitution: that God was the originator of the Bible, that all parts of the Bible are sacred that all parts of the Bible were composed under the influence of the Holy Ghost, that everything that the inspired composers of the Bible say must be considered to be written by the Holy Ghost and that what is taught in the Bible is accurate, true and without error.
So that they can defend this exclusive property to the vast community of believers, Theologists, unaffected by the results of their biblical research, base themselves on the evangelists, the epistles of the apostles and the miraculous 'original text' of 'the Holy Scriptures.
But none of the evangelists was a contemporary of Jesus and no contemporary wrote an eyewitness account. Nothing was written down about Tesus and his followers, until after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Titus (A.D. 39-81) in the year 70. And if the year 30 is accepted for the death of the Son of God, then Mark, the first author of the Bible, wrote his gospel at least forty years after the crucifixion of Jesus. Dr. Johannes Lehmann [2], co-translator of a modern edition of the Bible, says on this point: 'The evangelists are interpreters, not biographers; they have not illuminated what had grown dark with the passage of generations, but obscured what was still light. They have not written history, but made history. They did not want to report, but to justify.'