Vatican sharpens rules on investigating supernatural events

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican sharpened its rules for investigating supernatural events such as visions of Christ or the Virgin Mary, acknowledging on Friday that overactive imaginations and outright “lying” risked harming the faithful.

The new norms allow for a more “prudent” interpretation of events that generally avoids declaring them outright a supernatural event.

They were published by the Holy See’s powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and approved by Pope Francis.

“In certain circumstances
not everything is black or white,” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, who leads the dicastery, told journalists.

“Sometimes a possible divine reaction mixes with... human thoughts and fantasies,” Fernandez added.

The history of the Catholic Church is filled with episodes of strange or unexplained phenomena involving religious statues or other objects.

The new guidelines come two months after the Church said that a series of widely reported miracles attributed to a statuette of the Virgin Mary – including making a pizza grow in size – were false.

The new rules provide more guidance to bishops, who until now have been left relatively free to determine the authenticity of such visions on a case-by-case basis. It is the first time they have been updated since 1978.

Underscoring the complexity of the issue, the Vatican has completed only six cases of such alleged supernatural events since 1950, with one taking around “seventy excruciating years,” the document said.

The new rules call for more collaboration between the bishops of the individual dioceses concerned and the Vatican over such investigations.

The final decisions of the bishops should be submitted to the dicastery for approval, it said.

Some incidents “at times appear connected to confused human experiences, theologically inaccurate expressions, or interests that are not entirely legitimate,” the document noted.

Bishops might have to deal with “manipulation, damage to the unity of the Church, undue financial gain, and serious doctrinal errors that could cause scandals and undermine the credibility of the Church,” it added.

But in the absence of problems, dioceses will now be able to declare a “Nihil