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Post by falconer on Jul 1, 2008 12:15:21 GMT
I seem to remember the guy who attacked the statue down the country also attacked the statue opposite the Gresham in O'Connell st. but I haven't found any reference to it anywhere. Maybe it was a seperate division of the Statue Attackers Association. www.answers.com/topic/ballinspittle?cat=travelAnd in Lourdes one day 70,000 people saw the Sun move out of its normal orbit after staring at it for a prolonged period. The Sun managed to do this without coming to the attention of the thousands of high powered telescopes nor the 5 billion people on the rest of the planet.....
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 2, 2008 11:10:06 GMT
That was Fatima, Falconer, and many of the observers who saw it were journalists from Portugal's secular press who came out to discredit it. That it was only observed in Fatima and not seen by observatories indicate it wasn't an actual physical occurance, but a phenonemon like the others described here.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 1, 2008 23:25:21 GMT
I think the church's "filter" system in terms of restricting promotion of unapproved apparitions became disabled after Vatican II and this has paved the way for this sort of subculture. You actually get some people now who think it is wrong to question any self-proclaimed Marian visionary because they don't realise how tightly the church screened these things in the past and how many fake and dodgy apparitions have been rejected.
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Post by Harris on Nov 3, 2008 16:46:16 GMT
I remember that time well. The hysteria of the whole event.
I think a lot of the world media really had a bit of a laugh at us during that time.
The old stereotype of the drunken Irishman seeing things whilst walking home from the pub made its way into the press in other countries more than once during that period.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 24, 2008 15:00:39 GMT
The phenonomen was far from unique to Ireland - there are books written about the growth industry in Marian apparitions in the United States.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 25, 2008 17:32:34 GMT
There have always been non-canonical and dubious apparitions, many of which are demonic in orign while others reflect the alleged seers' psychological peculiarities. I would recommend the writings of the early twentieth-century Jesuit hagiologist Fr. Herbert Thurston on this usbject - a fine Catholic scholar. His eviscerations of anti-Catholic slurs by such figures as the mediaevalist GG Coulton are a joy to read. Fr. Benedict Groeschel has an useful book on the subject - A STILL, SMALL VOICE: A PRACTICAL GUIDE ON REPORTED REVELATIONS (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1992)
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Apr 22, 2009 11:58:10 GMT
Yes, there is a lot of material on this type of thing. It captured the imagination of a lot of religious people in the 1980s. It seems to me there was a sort of phoney war period between the Papal Visit of 1979 and the Divorce referendum of 1986 when everything looked better than it actually was, inspite of the prophecies of doom emanating from these phenomena.
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Post by eircomnet on Apr 23, 2009 1:23:24 GMT
Hi all, it's my belief that that people experienced definite visions or hallucinations whatever you like to call them. I would consider them diabolical, but I don't believe they were imaginings. I know several very hard boiled people of a very sceptical nature who had experiences.I must number my own mother-in-law who, though religious, was convinced of what she saw. I, myself, saw nothing.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 23, 2009 7:58:39 GMT
Hello Eircomnet,
I think this is a good point, one not made often in these pages. I think the physically moving statue in Ballinspittle was a case of optical illusion. A friend of mine who is a science graduate explained to me how it worked. But some of the other phenomena went beyond that.
I read the 'Message' given at Mount Mellaray grotto, which apart from being disproven by its prophecies not coming true, was a thoroughly weird concoction. I might not say it was the work of the devil, but I would be slow to rule it out.
Were any of these venues exorcised afterwards? I don't think so, but maybe in some cases they should have been.
Alaisdir.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 24, 2009 12:12:48 GMT
I remember talking to someone who had visited the Mount Mellary grotto and was convinced it was hysterical mass suggestion - she described how she saw someone claiming to have seen a light and how later that day she talked to people who were telling embellished accounts of it. This person was not someone who disbelieves in apparitions in principle. I also heard a couple of accounts of original seers being elbowed aside by people who arrived at grottos where apparitions were alleged to have taken place and then started to claim to be seeing apparitions there themselves on a regular basis. There are certain types of hysterics and fantasists who flock to such things; such people may even be good and virtuous in many ways, but they're unhealthy.
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Post by hibernicus on May 21, 2009 11:16:20 GMT
Here's one case where I agree with Fr. Brendan Hoban - the so-called face of Jesus which is supposed to be appearing on a wall in Ballina (cf last Sunday's SUNDAY TRIBUNE, with photo)is no more than a pattern of damp spots.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 21, 2009 14:52:49 GMT
Here's one case where I agree with Fr. Brendan Hoban - the so-called face of Jesus which is supposed to be appearing on a wall in Ballina (cf last Sunday's SUNDAY TRIBUNE, with photo)is no more than a pattern of damp spots. I also agree with Brendan Hoban, for once.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on May 27, 2009 9:58:35 GMT
This habit of seeing faces of Jesus and Mary in the most absurd places - is this a recent occurance fuelled by the mass media, or is there an older history? Also, would the moving statues era have lasted along as it did without the media?
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Post by hibernicus on May 27, 2009 10:56:56 GMT
I think it has always existed, but without mass communications it would not have spread very far outside particular localities. The Italians have always been susceptible to it. The availability of photography - the fact that images can be easily made and disseminated, allowing people to "see for themselves" is probably relevant also. I suspect, as I noted above, that the loosening of formal chuirch controls over reported apparitions after Vatican II probably contributed to it - both because the church would ahve discouraged the dissemination of such reports at the source, so to speak, and because it would have used its influence with the media to suppress them. Apparitions often seem to come in waves. Numerous apparitions were reported around Lourdes in Bernadette's time, though only here visions were recognised by the Church (some locals believed that at least one other visionary was genuine for decades afterwards). Some of the other visionaries engaged in strange and often grotesque behaviour, and it has been widely believed that their visions were inspired by the Devil in order to distract attention from the genuine one. Similarly, there was a wave of reported apparitions around Ireland in 1879-80; I am not sure if Knock was the first, but there were certainly quite a few which resembled the "moving statues". James Donnelly Junior, an American scholar who is writng a book on Irish Marianism from a liberal Catholic/sceptical position, published an article on this some years ago in an academic journal called EIRE-IRELAND. In addition, quite a few people claimed to see later visions at Knock, but this seems to have been due to mass hysteria; nowadays only the first vision (which is the only one assessed by a canonical tribunal) is treated as genuine. Modern media certainly fuelled the moving statues, but again this is not unique; the major Marian apparitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become known through media attention. Without journalists like Louis Veuillot, without the availability of railroads to carry pilgrims, Lourdes would have been a local shrine almost unknown outside the Pyrenees.
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Post by Harris on Jul 30, 2009 14:49:34 GMT
This habit of seeing faces of Jesus and Mary in the most absurd places - is this a recent occurance fuelled by the mass media, or is there an older history? Also, would the moving statues era have lasted along as it did without the media? Well seeing as we dont have any pictures of what Jesus or Mary looked like all people are "seeing" are the Nordic blue eyed representations of the aforementioned that were popularised by painters down through the centries. In all likiness both Jesus and Mary were dark skinned and browned eyed with dark hair. If these visionary people claimed to be seeing a dark curly haired woman with brown eyes wearing coarse loose fitting garments in the bottom of their tea cup or in the stain in their damp bathroom wall who would they claim it was? In all honesty they probably wouldnt jump to the conclusion that it was the Blessed Virgin. But ironically that physical description, in all likelhood, is argueably a more accurate guess at her appearance than the pale skinned, blue eyed woman dressed in immaculate white and blue garments that has been dipicted in popular culture.
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