I Would Love to Play Poker Against a Team of Theologians
May 5th, 2008According to the Telegraph, a shrine in France has been officially recognised by the Vatican.
Notre Dame du Laus, which already draws some 120,000 pilgrims each year, was formally acknowledged by the Vatican after three years of research into its credentials by a team of theologians, historians and psychologists.
Its ‘credentials’ are that a young shepherdess claims to have seen the virgin Mary appear there. So the options are:
- this really happened, or
- she is a nutter.
There’s surely no chance she’s a nutter, is there?
The shepherdess was described by one observer as the French champion of apparitions, because she saw the Virgin Mary around 2,500 times over 54 years – averaging once a week.
That’s okay, then.
Tags for this article: Catholicism , Vatican
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May 5th, 2008 at 15:59
This got quite a lot of coverage on the France 2 TV news yesterday, perhaps because news was a little slow. Which I find a bit worrying in a country which until recently made a big point of being secular, although Sarkozy is making worrying statements about the importance of religion in transmitting “values”.
May 5th, 2008 at 16:10
Looking at the Telegraph article, though, the public are at least suitably annoyed with him for the whole thing.
I don’t know what the system is in France, but I do worry about how easy it seems to be for one person (or a small group of people), having gained power, to start implementing policy changes more or less on their own, fairly regardless of their merit or popularity. Given how flimsy the system is for choosing these people in the first place, this could be a big problem.