Marian apparitions and Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Introduction
In nineteenth-century Europe, the philosophy of the Enlightenment had introduced new concepts that challenged traditional thinking. The regicide and Terror of the French Revolution profoundly threatened the position of elites throughout Europe, and the republican ideology and secularization institutionalized by the Revolution undermined the authority of both the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Yet instead of becoming a death-bed concern or fanatical pursuit, popular Catholicism remained a powerful social and cultural force that bound people together in communities of consensibility and spiritual meaning. The Catholic Church remained an active political agent, involved in state-formation, and representatives of the Church interacted with newly empowered government bodies, shaping policy along with the religious worldview of ordinary Catholics. The cultural significance of popular Catholicism became manifest in a surge of devotion to the Virgin Mary and wave of Marian apparitions reported in Catholic communities across Europe during this time of popular upheaval.
This paper will address the historical treatment of Marian apparitions by David Blackbourn[1], Jonathon Sperber[2], and Michael Carroll[3]. The works of Blackbourn and Sperber discuss German Catholicism explicitly. In many ways, the experiences of the German people exemplified the social trends listed above, with the pressures of industrialization, the expansionist Prussian state, and the mid-century religious revival. Blackbourn writes about the apparitions that were reported in a small German village, analyzing both micro and macro influences and consequences of the apparitions at Marpingen. Sperber addresses the form and function of German Catholicism during the nineteenth century. Lastly, Carroll attempts to expose the origins of Marian devotion, not specifically in the German lands, but instead within the human psyche. This variety of treatments of Marian devotion demonstrates three distinctly different historiographical approaches toward creating a more complete understanding of the powerful resonance of popular Catholicism.

Marpingen
In his book, Marpingen, Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village[4], David Blackbourn examines the Marian apparitions reported by three young German girls in 1876. Blackbourn argues that the larger social, economic, and political pressures of the Kulturkampf, the depression of the 1870s, and the aggressive centralization and expansion of the state interacted with the discreet details of the personal lives of the visionaries, culminating in a phenomenon that was at once specific to the Marpingen community and indicative of broad European trends. Blackbourn approaches his subject with empathy and respect, drawing his evidence from a variety of sources in order to uncover the historical forces at play as well as the experiences of the people involved in the dramatic incident.
Marian apparitions are a fascinating reminder of the power of popular religion and the subject of several historical investigations beyond what is addressed in this paper. Blackbourn refers to historical and psychological analysis of Marian apparitions contributed by Michael Carroll in his book, The Cult of the Virgin Mary [5]and the solid background of social history provided by Jonathon Sperber in his book, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany,[6] and both works are discussed in detail below. Other treatments of Marian apparitions are often religious and reverential in approach, such as the recent work by Cheryl Porte, Pontmain, Prophecy and Protest [7]or, at the other end of the short spectrum, anti-clerical in tone, like Nicholas Perry and Loreto Echeverria’s book, Under the Heel of Mary[8]. In Marpingen, Blackbourn has successfully avoided either moralistic stance, neither embracing nor dismissing the spiritual significance of such incidents in the lives of nineteenth-century Catholics. Combining a variety of details about the visions themselves with a solid historical interpretation of nineteenth-century Germany, he explores many angles of the apparitions with curiosity and integrity.
Blackbourn’s methodology reflects his meticulous research as well as his ability to weave his theory and evidence together into a compelling story of both historical and personal importance. He divides his book into three parts, addressing first the social, political and economic background to popular material insecurity and Marian devotion. In the second part of Marpingen, Blackbourn investigates the apparitions themselves and finally, in the last section he addresses the legacy of the events. This style of organization allows him to address a variety of perspectives with evidence culled from both official and anecdotal sources.
In the first section of his book, Blackbourn begins by examining the trends and patterns of nineteenth-century Marian devotion. He positions the events at Marpingen within a context of epidemics, famine and political upheaval to illustrate the popular desire for an accessible intercessor in the face of hardship and uncertainty. For many Catholic Germans, Mary symbolized piety and comfort, and “her message that plenty could be restored by faith and repentance was a source of hope.”[9] The secular legacy of the French Revolution and the state-building reaction to the Napoleonic Wars had disrupted the hierarchies and institutions of many Catholic communities and resulted in “the first great wave a visions in modern Europe.” [10] In the 1860s and 1870s, the Marian apparitions reported in German and Italian communities occurred against the backdrop of war and insecurity that accompanied the creation of the Italian and German states. Blackbourn convincingly ties Marian devotions and vision to popular fears, not just of war and scarcity, but of a tangible loss of traditional systems of social organization, particularly the authority of the church. Blackbourn supports his position by calling on examples of Marin apparitions in Lourdes, Pontmain, La Salette and Tuscany and other locations that experienced similar threats to tradition.
Blackbourn shifts his analysis to the transformation taking place in German villages, blending the larger trends across region with details specific to Marpingen. He describes the changes in village demographics and the significance of industrialization, modernization, emigration, capitalism and the centralization of state power to prove that Marpingen was a “community fundamentally transformed in the nineteenth century.” [11] Social hierarchies were disrupted, collective land use was restricted and popular religion was standardized, marginalized or politicized. The Kulturkampf institutionalized the struggle between the Catholic Church and the state, while a religious revival among Catholic increasingly emphasized Marian devotion. Blackbourn argues that Marpingen was especially vulnerable to these social, political and economic forces as it was located on the boarder, had been “caught up in a dizzy reel of territorial exchanges and treaties”[12], had rapidly become a mining community in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, and had recently welcomed a new priest, Jakob Neurenther, himself a devotee to Mary and indicative of a “large-scale religious revival.” [13]
Blackbourn then steps back from Marpingen to examine the larger forces at play in greater detail. He explains the scope and impact of the depression of 1873, the implications of the German unification and the tensions between agriculture and industry, between the Catholic Church and the state, between liberals and the state and between liberals and the Catholic Church. He provides tables showing migration statistics and the convictions of priests who were caught performing mass illegally. Seeming almost perfunctory, this section of the book is less impressive then his more personal analysis of the visionaries and their community, and Sperber gives a much deeper analysis of this subject that will be discussed later in this paper.
In the second part of his book, Blackbourn investigates the backgrounds and experiences of the visionaries themselves, Margaretha Kunz, Katherina Hubertus and Susanna Leist. The Marpingen apparitions received wide public recognition, became the object of state intervention and interrogation and a formal investigation by the Catholic Church. Blackbourn uses interrogation transcripts, media reports, court records, personal letters and clerical accounts to flesh out his interpretation of the events. He reveals the personal details of the girls’ lives to show how their claims fit with their earlier experiences of loss, illness and deprivation. He points out the similarities between Margaretha Kunz, who he identifies as the ringleader, and Bernadette Soubrous, the visionary at Lourdes, who experienced many of the same personal losses and deprivations that colored Margaretha’s childhood. He then demonstrates the powerful role played by pilgrimages and miracle cures in the popular imagination, concluding, “the apparitions obviously tapped a source of intense spiritual hunger among Germans.” [14] He also points out the disconnect between the official Church disapproval of the apparitions and the enthusiastic involvement of the local priest, demonstrating the disarray of the Catholic hierarchy.
The apparitions at Marpingen, and the ensuing legal debacle exposed, not only the division within the Catholic Church over popular piety, but also the repressive nature of the Prussian state and, ultimately, the limits of its hegemonic project. After two weeks of military occupation, the harsh interrogation of children, and a blatantly disingenuous investigation, there was no evidence of fraud or instigation of public disorder. Indeed Blackbourn argues that the ultimate consequence of the official investigation of the apparitions at Marpingen was a well-deserved contempt of the Prussian authorities and their destructive and repressive tactics. The limits of their power were exposed, as were the limits of the reach of the Church, and “the tacit support of local officials for the apparitions was most telling, and frustrating to higher authority.” [15]
Blackbourn then turns from the religious and political reactions to the apparitions to the tensions between popular Catholicism and liberal ideology, demonstrating the diverse worldviews held by the German public. Speaking in the language of the natural sciences of a “brave new world of progress… (working toward) a society of citizens” [16] underpinned by Darwinian theory, many German liberals were uncomfortable with the mystical superstition they saw at the core of Marian devotion.
The “red thread”[17] of modernity and the problematic interactions between the forces of change and the proponents of tradition acquire new depth and complexity in Blackbourn’s analysis of the apparitions at Marpingen. The failure of the Catholic Church to subdue or absorb popular religious movements and the inability of the Prussian state to repress and punish such movements demonstrate the diverse and contradictory currents of modernity and popular sentiment in Marpingen during the 1870s, but also speak to the underpinnings of Marian devotion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Visions of the Virgin Mary have continued in Germany, between the two World Wars, during the 1930s and the Cold War, supporting Blackbourn’s argument that apparitions occur during “times of political and social stress” [18], yet his caution that these material trends do not suffice when analyzing Marian apparitions is significant because the personal lives and experiences of the visionaries themselves, and the communities in which they live, are crucial pieces of the story.

Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany
In his book Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-century Germany,[19] Jonathon Sperber examines the forces that shaped popular Catholicism in the German land of North Rhine-Westphalia between the years 1830 and 1880, and the role the Catholic Church played in this time of profound change. Sperber argues that the Prussian state was unsuccessful in subsuming popular Catholicism because of the dynamic and flexible nature of the Catholic Church in Germany, and because of its ability to incorporate popular movements and sentiments into a fundamentally counterrevolutionary agenda. Sperber also agues that the church-state struggle Kulturkampf was not the origin of Catholic conservatism in Germany, but instead merely an exacerbating factor. Sperber supports his thesis by exposing the ways the Catholic Church encouraged new religious associations and Marian devotion, restructured pilgrimages, and accommodated the Prussian state while rejecting the ideologies of socialism and liberalism.
Sperber approaches his project as a social historian primarily concerned with economic policies and social trends instigated by politicians and church officials and reflected by archival records kept by the church and state, such as census records, religious association membership and election results. While not delving into the popular experience directly, Sperber provides insight into the relationship between popular movements and political and religious rhetoric. While the reader may be left wondering how German Catholics of this era perceived their social identity or personal agency, Sperber compensates for his top-down treatment of his subject with his deftly nuanced analysis of the Catholic Church’s interaction with both internal and external forces.
Against the backdrop of the secularization and economic change of the Vormarz period of the early nineteenth century, Sperber describes a Church losing control of its congregants. With the replacement of a guild-based economy with a capitalist system came new opportunities for sinfulness. Restrictions on marriage were loosened, and the clergy feared the sexual promiscuity that could potentially result. Formerly collective forest land was privatized, and this transformed previously innocent acts like hunting and wood-cutting into crimes. Sperber provides tables showing the demographic changes[20] that imply the social upheaval experienced by German people increasingly uprooted, and suffering from the “disruption and disunity, decay of traditional practices”[21] The Catholic Church was itself experiencing the winds of change with a growing division between the traditional ultramontane clergy and the clerical “hermesians”[22], influenced by enlightenment ideology.
Once he has established the defensive posture of the Catholic Church in Germany in the early part of the eighteenth century, Sperber explains the conservative nature of the clerical reaction to secular trends in the decades leading up to the Kulturkampf. He describes how the Catholic Church changed the nature of festivals and missions from popular, and occasionally bawdy, celebrations into “a powerful political force, diverting popular attention away from secular, social and political action, encouraging a passive acceptance of existing conditions”[23] (58) Another part of the Catholic Church’s conservative project involved the encouragement of Marian devotion. Sperber illustrates this focus on Marian devotion with a table showing the increasing number of pilgrimages devoted to the veneration of Mary[24], and the complimentary embrace of chastity. New religious associations, Marian Sodalities in particular, reflected the conservative tendencies Sperber observes, as they were run by an increasingly centralized clergy, a change from their previous leadership of laymen. Sperber provides another table, this time demonstrating the decline in illegitimate births[25] to prove the conservative movement of the clergy was manifested in popular behavior. He notes that this growing conservatism both predated and anticipated the Christian Social movement, and was welcomed by different groups, explaining, “For the Catholic upper class, as well as the Prussian authorities, the counterrevolutionary and socially pacifying efforts of the religious revival were visible and most welcome” [26]
Sperber then traces the role the religious revival of the 1850s played in the politicization of German Catholics. According to Sperber’s analysis, “if the political impetus for the Christian Social movement came from the need to counter social agitation, the movement’s organizational form was an outgrowth of the sodalities, congregations, and related Catholic organizations which had developed in the industrial areas after mid-century.”[27]
Having established the conservative nature of the German Catholic Church well before the Kulturkampf, Sperber investigates the struggle between the Prussian state and the Catholic Church. The May Laws, the expulsion of the Jesuits and the prosecution of priests performing illegal Mass were indeed, in Sperber’s opinion, exacerbating factors that led to the hardening of the Catholic Church’s conservative ideology, yet it was the rejection of liberalism, not the expansion of the Prussian state that served as the primary motivation. To further illustrate his point, Sperber uses the rhetoric of politically active Catholic Chaplains, such as Chaplain Laaf, who told an appreciative audience that, “The enemy of religion is liberalism, whose faith is disbelief and whose mother is the revolution”[28] and Chaplain Schunks who proclaimed “he who shakes the alter topples the throne.”[29] Sperber also emphasized the contentious relationship between the clergy and members of liberal, hermesian Freemason Lodges, viewed by many church officials as epitomizing “satanic subversion”[30] and threatening the traditional order with conspiracy and revolution.
Although dry intone and replete with impersonal tables and social analysis, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany successfully conveys the conservative nature of the Catholic Church, and the integral role that Marian devotion played in the popular acceptance of that conservatism. While affected by Prussian state-building, Sperber shows that the politicization of German Catholicism originated in a visceral reaction against liberal ideals, decades before the punitive measures of the Kulturkampf.

The Cult of the Virgin Mary

In his book, The Cult of the Virgin Mary,[31] Michael Carroll investigates the historical, sociological, and psychological origins of Marian devotion. He argues that Marian devotion is a unique phenomenon because it is based on the adulation of an asexual mother, that it has explicit historical origins in fifth-century Rome, and it is more common in certain geographical regions than others due to specific ecological and psychological factors. Carroll defines Marian devotion as an immensely popular cult that is often neglected by scholars, even those seeking to explain the division between Catholics and Protestants or explore the sociology of cults like Scientology. In order to uncover the origins of such a powerful popular movement, Carroll investigates the aspects of Marian devotion that make it exceptional in history, and claims that this process will lead to a more complete understanding of early Christianity and the greater human experience.
Carroll contextualizes his approach within both historical and psychological treatments of Marian devotion. The work of historian Guy Swanson[32] connected Marian devotion to agricultural societies with certain political systems, while the structuralist approach of Edmund Leach[33] revealed links between an emphasis on the intercessory role of Mary and patronage, a social organization that concentrates the power in the hands of a few inaccessible rulers. Carroll also uses Carl Jung’s[34] theories of a mother archetype that exists within the human unconscious and manifests itself as goddess worship and Marian devotion. For the purposes of this paper, Carroll’s analysis provides a useful foil for Blackbourn’s cultural approach to the apparitions at Marpingen and Sperber’s social approach to nineteenth-century German Catholicism because it focuses on origins of Marian devotion that are completely independent of nineteenth-century German experiences.
Carroll builds his book around three fundamental questions: why is Mary both a virgin and a mother when other goddess cults celebrate the obvious connection between sexuality and maternity; why does Marian devotion develop in the fifth century, at the same time as the crucifixion symbolism; and why does Marian devotion originally take hold most strongly in Spain and Southern Italy? Carroll answers each question in turn, using a combination of historical interpretation and Freudian psychoanalysis.
Freudian analysis is the primary tool in Carroll’s kit as he constructs answers to his first and third questions. The devotion to a manifestation of a sexless mother derives from an unconscious need to disguise children’s infantile desires for incestuous relationships with their parents. According to Carroll’s analysis, a child’s sexual desire for the parent of the opposite gender is more common in families that have female authority figures due to the father’s need to be away, seeking sustenance. This “father ineffective family”[35] was a common feature of life in Spain and Southern Italy, due to a combination of harsh ecological and social factors.
Carroll then seeks the fifth-century origins of Marian devotion within the context of the “great transformation” of Christianity “from a middle-class movement to one that incorporated people from all levels of Roman Society.” [36] Carroll argues that Marian devotion was the result of a calculated and successful attempt to integrate peasants into the Christian religion by allowing popular goddess devotion to be transformed into Marian devotion. Carroll also argues that the masochism associated with repressed sexual desires can be seen in the disassociation of Mary with all elements of sexuality, and is also reflected by the fifth-century focus on the crucifixion and the torture of Christ, as well as the celebration of celibacy, or “symbolic castration.” [37] These devotional developments within early Christendom are set against the growing material inequity in fifth-century Rome.
Carroll then tests his theories by applying them to several Marian apparitions. Having established the theories that Marian devotion originates most often in marginalized agricultural communities in need of an sympathetic intercessor, and in ‘father-ineffective-families’ that display both Freudian desires and material needs, Carroll seeks to prove them with evidence from Lourdes, Pontmain, Fatima, and other apparition sites. While his theoretical analysis had been fascinating, if generalized, the weakness of Carroll’s argument is exposed in this empirical section of his book. He spends many pages distinguishing between illusions and hallucinations and defining visionaries as either primary or secondary, while neither distinction proves particularly insightful. Once he finishes categorizing the visionaries and their visions, Carroll seeks the origins of their experiences. Many deceased people have been academically resurrected and psychoanalyzed, and Carroll attempts to do just that to several of the visionaries. The basic premise of applying Freudian techniques to historical questions is problematic. How can a historian simultaneously provide a voice to long-dead individuals and then apply psychoanalysis to the individual the historian himself has constructed?
Ultimately contributing the observation that the French visionaries of the nineteenth century were most likely “prompted by unconscious infantile memories”[38] that were activated by recent events, Carroll’s analysis does not actually augment the reader’s understanding of either the personal or historical origins of the visionaries’ dramatic experiences. However, Carroll does establish the importance of apparitions in Marian devotion, the role of imitation in apparition stories and the interaction between popular religion and social upheaval through his comparison of a variety of Marian apparitions. Unfortunately he relies almost exclusively on Freudian theory for his analysis, and the reader is reminded that once a historical argument becomes defined by the belief in a theory that all humans are shaped by the repression of their sexual desires for their parent, then that theory loses all usefulness as an analytical tool.
Conclusion
Today Marian devotion continues to play a powerful role in the human experience. The image of the Virgin Mary inspires pilgrimages, news stories and bidding wars on E-Bay. Perhaps the origins of such devotion are to be found in a combination of historical, economic, social, and psychological factors, or maybe they are as elusive as a satisfying academic definition of the human soul. This paper does not attempted to locate or interpret the meaning of this devotion, but does, hopefully, provide an analysis of some of the scholarly treatment of this phenomenon.
[1] Blackbourn, David. Marpingen. New York: Vintage Books. 1993.
[2] Sperber, Jonathon. Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1984.
[3] Carroll, Michael. The Cult of the Virgin Mary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1986.
[4] Blackbourn, David. Marpingen. New York: Vintage Books. 1993.
[5] Carroll, Michael. The Cult of the Virgin Mary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1986.
[6] Sperber, Jonathon. Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1984.
[7] Porte, Cheryl. Pontain, Prophecy, and Protest. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc..2005
[8] Perry, Nicholas & Echeverria, Loreto. Under the Heel of Mary. London and New York: Routledge. 1988
[9] Blackbourn, David. Marpingen. New York: Vintage Books. 1993. Pg. 19
[10] Ibid. Pg. 20
[11] Ibid. Pg 44
[12] Ibid. Pg. 58
[13] Ibid. Pg. 70
[14] Ibid. Pg. 141
[15] Ibid. Pg. 233
[16] Ibid. Pg. 256
[17] Ibid. Pg. 374
[18] Ibid. Pg. 327
[19] Sperber, Jonathon. Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1984
[20] Sperber, Jonathon. Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1984. Pg 41
[21] Ibid. Pg 277
[22] Ibid. Pg. 22
[23] Ibid. Pg. 58
[24] Ibid. Pg. 66 & 67
[25] Ibid. Pg. 93
[26] Ibid. Pg. 92
[27] Ibid. Pg. 179 & 180
[28] Ibid. Pg. 216
[29] Ibid. Pg. 217
[30] Ibid. Pg. 218
[31] Carroll, Michael. The Cult of the Virgin Mary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1986.
[32] Swanson, Guy. Religion and Regime. Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1967
[33] Leach, Edmund. “Virgin Birth.” In Genesis and Myth and other Essays. London : Jonathan Cape. 1969
[34]Jung, Carl. Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1970
[35] Carroll, Michael. The Cult of the Virgin Mary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1986. Pg. 50

[36]Ibid. Pg. 80
[37]Ibid. Pg. 86
[38] Ibid. Pg. 80


© Feather Crawford Freed
All Rights Reserved