Approved Marian Apparitions Explained

1. The Short Answer to "Which Ones Are Approved?"

Approved Marian apparitions are the small number of alleged appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary that a competent Church authority has examined and permitted the faithful to venerate publicly, among them Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima, La Salette, Pontmain, Laus, Knock, Beauraing, Banneux, Champion in Wisconsin and Kibeho in Rwanda. The Holy See has never published an official list of them, and the acts that stand behind each case are different: some rest on a named decree of a diocesan bishop, some on centuries of settled devotion and papal liturgical decisions with no apparition decree at all. Since the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued new norms on 17 May 2024, the Church ordinarily does not declare that any apparition is supernatural, and the usual favourable outcome is a permission called a nihil obstat.

Anyone who tries to assemble a clean table of Vatican-approved apparitions runs into the same problem within an hour: the sources contradict each other because the underlying acts are not the same kind of thing. A nineteenth-century French bishop's judgment that an apparition "bears all the marks of truth" is one kind of act. A pope granting a proper Mass and Office for a devotion already three centuries old is another. A 2024 note from a Vatican dicastery permitting pilgrimage while declining to rule on the visions is a third. Lists that flatten all three into one column marked "approved" are why so many Catholics are confused about Medjugorje.

What approval has always meant

Even in the strongest cases, Church approval of an apparition has always been a modest thing. It means the message contains nothing contrary to faith and morals, the phenomena show no signs of fraud or manifest error, the fruits appear good, and the faithful may prudently give the account their human assent. Approval has never made an apparition part of the deposit of faith, and it has never obliged anyone to believe it. That principle predates the 2024 norms by centuries and is stated plainly in the Catechism.

2. The 2024 Norms and Their Six Conclusions

On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, replacing the norms in force since 1978. The change is substantial. Under the new document the diocesan bishop investigates, and the conclusion he reaches, with the approval of the Dicastery, is one of six. Only one of those six is a positive permission, and none of them is a declaration that the phenomenon came from heaven.

The ordinary path now leaves the question of supernatural origin open and rules instead on the pastoral question the bishop actually has to answer, which is whether the faithful may be permitted to venerate publicly at this place. The Pope retains the ability, in an exceptional case, to authorise a declaration of supernatural origin. The norms present that as a rare exception.

The six possible conclusions

Nihil obstat. Nothing stands in the way. The bishop, without ever declaring the phenomenon supernatural, recognises many signs of the Holy Spirit's action, encourages the pastoral value of the devotion, and permits it to be promoted, including pilgrimage. This is the favourable outcome, and it is the one people mistake for a declaration of authenticity.

Prae oculis habeatur. Keep it before your eyes. Important positive signs are present alongside elements of confusion or risk that call for watchfulness and clarification, often because of how the devotion is being expressed or how a person connected to it is behaving. The bishop is asked to monitor and to correct.

Curatur. Proceed with care. Significant critical elements are present, and the devotion is already so widespread and so tied to authentic sacramental life that prohibiting it would harm the faithful. Public devotion stays permitted, and the bishop is asked to discourage it while offering catechesis that redirects people to what is sound.

Sub mandato. Under mandate. The phenomenon itself raises no particular problem. The difficulty lies in a person, a family or a group that is exploiting it, often financially, or exercising improper control over the place. The Holy See entrusts pastoral governance of the site to a delegate.

Prohibetur et obstruitur. Prohibited and impeded. Positive elements may exist, and the serious critical issues outweigh them. The Dicastery asks the bishop to declare publicly that adherence is not permitted, and to explain the reasons so that the faithful understand the judgment.

Declaratio de non supernaturalitate. A declaration that the phenomenon is not supernatural. This is reserved for cases where the evidence is objective and clear, for example a claimed seer's own admission of fabrication, or credible testimony that the events were manufactured.

Source: Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, approved by Pope Francis and published 17 May 2024. The document is available in full on vatican.va, and the six conclusions above are its own headings, translated. Descriptions here summarise the text and are not quotations.

3. Older Cases Were Judged Under an Older Framework

Lourdes, Fatima, La Salette and every other classic shrine was judged long before 2024, and under a different vocabulary. The framework in use through most of the twentieth century, formalised in the 1978 Normae Congregationis of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and made public in 2011, offered three verdicts: constat de supernaturalitate (the supernatural character is established), non constat de supernaturalitate (the supernatural character is not established) and constat de non supernaturalitate (it is established that the phenomenon is not supernatural).

The 2024 norms do not reopen or annul earlier judgments. A bishop's nineteenth-century decree recognising an apparition stands as the act it was. What the new norms change is the procedure for the future, and the older decrees were themselves more varied than the three-verdict scheme suggests.

Three different kinds of act, all called "approval"

• A named episcopal decree on the apparition. The bishop of the diocese, after a commission of inquiry, issues a judgment on the events themselves. Lourdes in 1862, La Salette in 1851, Pontmain in 1872, Beauraing and Banneux in 1949, Fatima in 1930, Kibeho in 2001 and Champion in 2010 all belong here. These are the cleanest cases, and each can be named with a date and a bishop.
• Approval in practice, with no apparition decree. The devotion is centuries old, popes have granted it a proper Mass and Office, basilicas have been built and images crowned, and no document ever adjudicated the visions as such. Guadalupe is the great example. Rue du Bac and Knock also sit closer to this category than to the first.
• Permission without judgment. Pilgrimage and public devotion are allowed while the question of supernatural origin is deliberately left open. Medjugorje since September 2024 is the clearest living example, and under the 2024 norms this becomes the standard shape of a favourable outcome.

The sections that follow sort the shrines into those three shapes, one site at a time, naming the act where an act can be named and saying so plainly where none can.

4. Guadalupe, Mexico City (1531)

Our Lady of Guadalupe is the case that breaks every tidy table. The account, preserved in the Nahuatl Nican Mopohua, describes the Virgin appearing to the Indigenous convert Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin on the hill of Tepeyac in December 1531, asking that a church be built there, and sending him to the bishop with Castilian roses gathered out of season. The tilma he carried them in bears the image venerated ever since. No episcopal decree adjudicating those apparitions exists.

What exists instead is four centuries of Church acts built on the devotion. Benedict XIV granted the feast a proper Mass and Office in 1754 and named Our Lady of Guadalupe patroness of New Spain. The image was solemnly crowned in 1895. Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II and every pope since have addressed her by that title. John Paul II canonised Juan Diego at the basilica on 31 July 2002, an act that presupposes the sanctity of the man at the centre of the account. The feast is kept on 12 December, and in the Americas it is celebrated with the rank of a feast or solemnity depending on the country.

No scientific finding about the tilma forms part of the Church's teaching, and no Catholic is required to hold any position about the fabric. Our full account of the apparitions, the image and the arguments around it lives at our guide to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the visionary himself at Saint Juan Diego. Guadalupe demonstrates the point of this whole page: if you demand a decree, Guadalupe has none, and the devotion is long and firmly established across the Catholic world. Approval is not always a document.

5. Lourdes, France (1858)

Lourdes is the cleanest of the classic cases. Between 11 February and 16 July 1858, a fourteen-year-old miller's daughter named Bernadette Soubirous reported eighteen appearances of a young woman at the grotto of Massabielle, on the edge of the town in the Hautes-Pyrenees. During the sixteenth of these, on 25 March, the figure identified herself in the local Occitan dialect with the phrase Bernadette could not understand and repeated all the way home to her parish priest: "I am the Immaculate Conception." Pius IX had defined that dogma four years earlier, in 1854.

The act of record is a decree of Bishop Bertrand-Severe Laurence of Tarbes, dated 18 January 1862, judging that the Immaculate Mary truly appeared to Bernadette and authorising the cult of Our Lady of Lourdes in the diocese. That is a named bishop, a named date, and a judgment on the apparitions themselves. Pope Pius X extended the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes to the universal calendar in 1907. Bernadette entered the Sisters of Charity at Nevers, died there in 1879, and was canonised by Pius XI in 1933 for the holiness of her life rather than for the visions.

The cures and how the Church actually handles them

Lourdes is associated with healing, and the sanctuary handles that association with a rigour worth understanding. Reported cures are examined first by the Medical Bureau at the sanctuary, then by an international medical committee, and the finding that a cure has no known medical explanation is a medical statement. The judgment that it constitutes a miracle belongs to the bishop of the person's own diocese, not to the doctors and not to the sanctuary. Very few reports survive both stages.

Source: the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes and its Bureau des Constatations Medicales, which publishes the list of cures recognised as miraculous by Church authority. As of the most recent recognition on that list, the cure of Sister Bernadette Moriau, declared miraculous in February 2018 by the Bishop of Beauvais, the sanctuary counted seventy such cures. Figures for pilgrim numbers are not given on this page because the sanctuary's estimates vary year to year and no independent audit exists.

Bernadette was told to wash and to drink at a spot where there was no spring, and she scraped the mud with her hands before the water ran clear. The gesture the sanctuary preserves is one of penance, and the message, so far as any message was given, was prayer for sinners and penance. That is exactly the content the Church looks for when it asks whether an alleged apparition says anything contrary to faith.

6. Fatima, Portugal (1917)

Fatima carries a long and heavily disputed documentary trail. Three shepherd children, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, reported appearances of a lady at the Cova da Iria on the thirteenth of each month from May to October 1917, preceded by appearances of an angel in 1916. The events drew growing crowds and culminated on 13 October 1917 in the phenomenon that the Portuguese press of the day reported and that has been described ever since as the miracle of the sun.

The act of record is the pastoral letter A Divina Providencia of Bishop Jose Alves Correia da Silva of Leiria, dated 13 October 1930, declaring the visions worthy of belief and permitting the cult of Our Lady of Fatima. Francisco and Jacinta Marto were canonised by Pope Francis at the shrine on 13 May 2017. Lucia lived as a Carmelite at Coimbra until 2005, and her cause has been opened.

Fatima is also the case most exploited by people selling prophecy. The three parts of the so-called secret, the consecration of Russia, and the identity of the bishop in white in the third part have generated a small industry of claims, several of which contradict the Holy See's own published account. The text of the third part was published by the Holy See in June 2000 together with a theological commentary. We treat the apparitions, the messages and the controversies in full at our guide to Our Lady of Fatima, and the disputed material specifically at the third secret of Fatima.

7. La Salette (1846) and Pontmain (1871)

Two French mountain apparitions, twenty-five years apart, both approved by named bishops, and both instructive about how approval can hold for the apparition while the Holy See restrains what gets published about it afterwards.

La Salette, 19 September 1846

Two cowherds, Melanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, reported meeting a weeping woman seated on a stone on the alpine slope above the hamlet of La Salette-Fallavaux in the Isere. She spoke to them at length about neglect of Sunday, blasphemy and the failure of the harvest, and gave each child a secret. Bishop Philibert de Bruillard of Grenoble issued his doctrinal judgment on 19 September 1851, exactly five years later, declaring that the apparition bore all the marks of truth and that the faithful were justified in believing it. The Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette were founded the following year, and the basilica stands at the apparition site high on the mountainside, reached by a mountain road.

From 1879 onward Melanie published expanded versions of her secret, containing apocalyptic and anti-clerical material far beyond anything in the 1851 judgment. The Holy Office intervened against the circulation of those later editions. The 1851 approval of the apparition itself was never withdrawn. This is the pattern to watch for: a sound approved core, and a later literature the Church has explicitly refused to endorse.

Pontmain, 17 January 1871

During the Franco-Prussian War, with Prussian forces advancing on Laval and the village men at the front, several children in the hamlet of Pontmain in the Mayenne reported seeing a woman in a starry blue robe in the night sky above a barn. As the villagers gathered and prayed the Rosary, the children read a message that appeared letter by letter beneath her: "But pray, my children, God will hear you in a short time. My Son allows himself to be moved." The Prussian advance halted the following day and the armistice came shortly after. Bishop Casimir Wicart of Laval issued his decree recognising the apparition on 2 February 1872.

Both messages are short, both are about prayer and conversion, and neither contains a date or a schedule. That is characteristic of the cases the Church has approved.

8. Laus (1664) and Rue du Bac (1830)

Notre-Dame du Laus

Saint-Etienne-le-Laus, a remote valley in the Hautes-Alpes, holds an unusually long apparition account. Benoite Rencurel, a shepherdess, reported appearances of the Virgin from 1664 until her death in 1718, fifty-four years. The message was penance and reconciliation, and the shrine became known as a place of confession, with priests hearing penitents there continuously for three centuries. A diocesan commission gave a favourable judgment as early as 1665, and formal recognition came very late: Bishop Jean-Michel di Falco Leandri of Gap issued the decree recognising the apparitions on 4 May 2008. Benoite Rencurel was declared Venerable in 2009.

Rue du Bac and the Miraculous Medal

In 1830, in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity at 140 rue du Bac in Paris, a novice named Catherine Laboure reported appearances of the Virgin, including one in November in which she saw an oval frame with rays streaming from Mary's hands and the invocation "O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee." She was asked to have a medal struck to that design.

The act here is not an apparition decree. Catherine told only her confessor, Father Jean-Marie Aladel, who obtained the permission of Archbishop Hyacinthe-Louis de Quelen of Paris, and the first medals were struck in 1832. A canonical inquiry held in the archdiocese in 1836 examined the medal and the reports connected with it and returned a favourable finding. Catherine's own identity as the visionary was kept secret for forty-six years, until shortly before her death in 1876. Pius XII canonised her in 1947. The devotion's approval, in other words, came through the medal and through the canonisation of the seer rather than through any judgment on the visions as such.

9. Knock, Ireland (1879)

On the wet evening of 21 August 1879, villagers gathered at the south gable of the parish church at Knock in County Mayo and reported seeing a silent tableau: the Blessed Virgin, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist holding a book, and an altar bearing a lamb and a cross, surrounded by light. The witnesses stood in the rain for around two hours. Nothing was said. There is no message from Knock, which distinguishes it sharply from every other case on this page.

The Archbishop of Tuam established a commission of inquiry within weeks, and it took depositions from the witnesses; a second commission examined the surviving witnesses in 1936. The commissions found the testimony trustworthy and satisfactory. What Knock does not have is a single decree in the style of Lourdes or Pontmain declaring the apparition supernatural. Approval at Knock came through practice and through Rome's own repeated recognition of the shrine.

Source: the accounts of the 1879 and 1936 commissions of inquiry as published by Knock Shrine and the Archdiocese of Tuam. The number of witnesses who gave testimony to the 1879 commission is conventionally given as fifteen, which is the figure the shrine itself uses; contemporary accounts vary on how many others were present for part of the time.

The papal acts are the substance of Knock's standing. John Paul II came in 1979 for the centenary and gave the shrine a Golden Rose. Pope Francis visited in August 2018. In 2021 Pope Francis designated Knock an International Marian and Eucharistic Shrine, a rare status that ties it directly to the Holy See. The apparition's imagery, an altar with a lamb and a cross, is why the Eucharistic element is in the title.

10. Beauraing and Banneux, Belgium (1932 to 1933)

Two Belgian villages in neighbouring provinces produced reported apparitions within weeks of each other, and both were approved by their respective bishops in 1949. They are usually treated together for that reason.

Beauraing

Between 29 November 1932 and 3 January 1933, five children of two families reported thirty-three appearances of the Virgin at a hawthorn tree in the garden of the convent school at Beauraing, in the province of Namur. The figure identified herself as the Immaculate Virgin, asked for prayer and for a chapel, and in the final appearances showed a golden heart. Bishop Andre-Marie Charue of Namur permitted the cult in 1943 and issued his declaration recognising the apparitions on 2 July 1949.

Banneux

Between 15 January and 2 March 1933, in the village of Banneux in the province of Liege, a girl named Mariette Beco reported eight appearances. The figure called herself the Virgin of the Poor, led the child to a small spring by the roadside and said the spring was reserved for all nations and for the relief of the sick. Bishop Louis-Joseph Kerkhofs of Liege recognised the apparitions in stages through the 1940s, with the definitive approval issued on 22 August 1949.

Both messages are brief and unremarkable in content, which is a point in their favour. The Church's reviewers have consistently been more comfortable with apparitions that ask for prayer and a chapel than with those delivering long doctrinal instruction, because the second kind is where error enters.

11. Champion, Wisconsin (1859)

Champion, a farming settlement in Brown County northeast of Green Bay, holds a Marian apparition site that carries a bishop's decree of approval, the one such decree issued in the United States. In October 1859, Adele Brise, a young Belgian immigrant, reported seeing a woman in white standing between two trees. On the third appearance the figure said, according to the account Adele gave afterwards, "I am the Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners, and I wish you to do the same," and told her to gather the children of the wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation. Adele spent the rest of her life doing that, walking farm to farm as a catechist and founding a school at the site.

Bishop David Ricken of Green Bay issued his decree on 8 December 2010, declaring the apparitions worthy of belief with moral certainty. The act came a hundred and fifty-one years after the events, following a two-year investigation with three Marian theologians reviewing the file. The shrine was designated a national shrine in 2016.

Source: the decree of Bishop David L. Ricken, Diocese of Green Bay, 8 December 2010, and the shrine's own published history. The Diocese of Green Bay describes the site as the first and only approved Marian apparition site in the United States; that characterisation is the diocese's own.

The Peshtigo Fire of October 1871 swept the region on the same night as the Great Chicago Fire. Adele and those who took refuge on the shrine grounds survived while the surrounding country burned, and the local memory of that night is a large part of why the devotion persisted. The shrine keeps the anniversary of the fire alongside the apparition anniversary.

12. Kibeho, Rwanda (1981) and Akita, Japan (1973)

Kibeho

Kibeho, in southern Rwanda, carries a Rwandan bishop's declaration recognising the apparitions reported there. From 28 November 1981, students at Kibeho College reported appearances of a figure who identified herself as Nyina wa Jambo, Mother of the Word. The visions were reported by a number of students over several years, and the Church's judgment covers three of them: Alphonsine Mumureke, Nathalie Mukamazimpaka and Marie Claire Mukangango.

Bishop Augustin Misago of Gikongoro issued the declaration on 29 June 2001, approving the public cult of Our Lady of Sorrows at Kibeho and recognising the authenticity of the apparitions to those three seers. The decree was explicit that it did not extend to the many other people who had claimed visions there.

Some of the reported visions included scenes of violence and of bodies, and it is common to see these presented as a prophecy of the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, in which Marie Claire Mukangango was among those killed. The bishop's declaration makes no such finding, and this page will not make one either. What is documented is the content of the reported visions, the date of the approval, and the fact that the association is a widespread popular interpretation rather than a Church judgment.

Akita

At the convent of the Handmaids of the Eucharist at Yuzawadai, near Akita in northern Japan, a wooden statue of Our Lady was reported from 1975 onward to weep, and Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa, a deaf nun, reported locutions and a wound in her hand. Bishop John Shojiro Ito of Niigata issued a pastoral letter on 22 April 1984 recognising the supernatural character of the events and authorising veneration in his diocese.

That pastoral letter is the act of record. Claims circulate widely that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith subsequently issued its own approval of Akita, sometimes attributed to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as prefect. No such decree has been published, and readers should treat the bishop's 1984 letter as the documented act and the rest as unverified.

Source: the pastoral letter of Bishop John Shojiro Ito of Niigata, 22 April 1984, and the records kept by the Handmaids of the Eucharist at Yuzawadai, who report that the statue was observed to weep on one hundred and one occasions between 1975 and 1981. That count comes from the community's own records. No independent audit of it exists.

13. Our Lady of All Nations, Amsterdam

Our Lady of All Nations is the case most often reported incorrectly, and it deserves its own section for that reason. Between 1945 and 1959, Ida Peerdeman of Amsterdam reported a long series of visions and messages, including a request for a dogma proclaiming Mary as Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate, an image, and a prayer.

The documented history runs as follows. Bishop Johannes Huibers of Haarlem examined the case and in the 1950s found no evidence of supernatural character. In 1974 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith upheld that negative judgment. In 1996 Bishop Henrik Bomers and his auxiliary, Jozef Punt, permitted public veneration of Mary under the title Lady of All Nations. In 2002 Bishop Punt, by then the ordinary, issued a declaration that the apparitions were of supernatural origin. In 2005 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith required the removal of the phrase "who once was Mary" from the prayer, which had been read by theologians as doctrinally problematic.

The most recent act is the decisive one. At the end of 2020, at the request of the Holy See, Bishop Johannes Hendriks of Haarlem-Amsterdam published a clarification stating that the supernatural character of the alleged apparitions is not established, that the 1974 judgment of the Congregation stands, and that his predecessor's 2002 declaration does not constitute a definitive Church judgment on the visions. Devotion to Mary under the title Lady of All Nations remains permitted, and the corrected prayer may be used.

The requested fifth Marian dogma is a separate question, and a live one in Catholic theology. Nothing in the Amsterdam case obliges the Church to consider it, and the Holy See has not indicated any intention to define it. Petitions circulated on the strength of the alleged messages are private initiatives.

Amsterdam also illustrates why the 2024 norms were written. Under the old three-verdict system, a bishop saying "not established as supernatural" while permitting devotion looked to many people like a contradiction, and campaigners on both sides filled the space between. The nihil obstat category now names that position openly: devotion permitted, supernatural origin not declared.

14. Medjugorje and the 2024 Nihil Obstat

Medjugorje, a parish in Herzegovina, has been publicly contested in the Catholic world since 24 June 1981, when six young people from the villages of Bijakovici and Medjugorje reported seeing a woman with a child on the hillside of Podbrdo. Several of them have continued to report daily or periodic apparitions in the decades since. Pilgrims have gone in large numbers. Bishops of the local diocese of Mostar-Duvno have been publicly sceptical throughout.

The documented sequence is worth having in order:

• 10 April 1991. The bishops of the then Yugoslavia, meeting at Zadar, declared that on the basis of the investigations to that point it could not be affirmed that supernatural apparitions or revelations were involved. That is the non constat de supernaturalitate formula of the old framework. The same declaration provided for the pastoral care of the pilgrims who were already coming.
• 2010 to 2014. An international commission chaired by Cardinal Camillo Ruini investigated at the request of Pope Benedict XVI and submitted its report to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The report has never been published in full.
• 2017 and 2018. Pope Francis sent Archbishop Henryk Hoser to Medjugorje, first as a special envoy to examine the pastoral situation and then as Apostolic Visitator with a special role for the parish, an arrangement that put the pastoral care of the place under a papal delegate.
• May 2019. The Holy See authorised officially organised diocesan and parish pilgrimages to Medjugorje, ending the earlier prohibition on official pilgrimages, while stating that this did not constitute a judgment on the apparitions.
• 19 September 2024. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published the note The Queen of Peace, signed by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez and approved by Pope Francis, granting a nihil obstat.

What the 2024 note actually says

The note grants a nihil obstat to the spiritual experience associated with Medjugorje. It recognises abundant spiritual fruits gathered at the place, including conversions, returns to confession and vocations, and it permits and encourages public devotion and pilgrimage. It offers a positive reading of the core of the messages, which centre on peace, prayer, fasting, conversion and the Eucharist.

The note also declines to declare the phenomena supernatural, in line with the norms published four months earlier. It states that the nihil obstat does not imply a declaration about the alleged visionaries themselves, and it cautions expressly against treating every message attributed to them as coming from Our Lady, noting that some messages appear to reflect the seers' own ideas and that certain of them have caused confusion. Pastoral responsibility for the shrine remains with a papal delegate.

Source: the note The Queen of Peace ("La Regina della Pace"), Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, 19 September 2024, published on vatican.va, read together with the Zadar declaration of the Yugoslav Bishops' Conference of 10 April 1991. Pilgrim numbers for Medjugorje circulate widely and derive from parish and tour-industry estimates rather than any audited count, so none is given here.

For a Catholic deciding whether to go, the practical effect is straightforward. Pilgrimage and devotion are permitted. The prudent posture toward the messages is the one the Dicastery itself recommends: receive the call to prayer, fasting and conversion, and hold loosely anything presented as a specific communication, a secret or a coming sign. The Church has not vouched for those.

15. Garabandal and the Negative Determinations

San Sebastian de Garabandal, a village in the mountains of Cantabria in northern Spain, is frequently listed online as an apparition site "still under study" or "not yet approved". Both descriptions overstate what is actually open. The Diocese of Santander investigated and reached negative conclusions, and those conclusions have been reaffirmed since.

From June 1961 four girls of the village, among them Conchita Gonzalez, reported appearances first of Saint Michael the Archangel and then of the Virgin under the title Our Lady of Mount Carmel, continuing until 1965. The reported phenomena included ecstatic states, walking backwards at speed on rough ground, and messages describing a coming warning, a miracle and a chastisement.

The diocese formed a commission in 1961 and issued a series of notes through the decade. Bishop Vicente Puchol Montis issued the clearest of them in 1970, stating that there had been no apparition of the Blessed Virgin or of Saint Michael or of any other heavenly personage at Garabandal, and that all the events admitted a natural explanation. Later bishops of Santander have reaffirmed that determination. Mass has at times been permitted at the village church as pastoral care for the people who come, and permission to celebrate Mass in a parish is not an endorsement of anything.

None of this is a judgment on the people involved, who were children at the time. It is a statement about what the competent authority determined. Anyone building a devotional life on Garabandal is building it against the judgment of the diocese that examined it.

16. What to Do With an Unapproved Private Revelation

Most alleged apparitions and locutions are never approved. Some are examined and found wanting, most are never adjudicated at all, and a great deal of material circulates online with no ecclesiastical status of any kind. The tradition supplies a working posture toward all of it.

Start from what is already binding

Public Revelation closed with the death of the last apostle. Nothing that comes afterwards adds to it. The Catechism puts the whole category of private revelation in its place: such revelations do not belong to the deposit of faith, and their role is to help the faithful live more fully by the Revelation already given (CCC 67). A private revelation that adds a doctrine, corrects the Church's teaching or announces a new dispensation has failed the first test before anyone examines its details.

Saint Paul gives both halves of the Catholic posture in three lines. Do not despise prophecy, and test everything. The same balance appears in 1 John 4:1, "do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God". Blanket credulity and blanket dismissal both fail it.

Practical rules that hold

• Obedience to the local bishop is the deciding factor. Judgment on an alleged apparition belongs to the ordinary of the place where it occurs, in agreement with the Holy See. A visionary or a promoter who resists that authority has already given you the answer.
• Nothing obliges you to believe any of it. Not Lourdes, not Fatima, not Medjugorje. A Catholic may hold an approved apparition to be entirely genuine, or may take no view, and is orthodox either way.
• Check what the devotion produces. Approved devotions send people to confession, to Mass, to the Rosary, to almsgiving and to their duties. Devotions that end in stockpiling, in fear, in contempt for the local parish, or in a group gathered around one charismatic figure are producing something else.
• Follow the money and the merchandise. The 2024 norms name financial exploitation of a site explicitly, and provide the sub mandato conclusion for cases where the phenomenon is sound and the people running it are not.
• Refuse anything with a date. Date-setting is where private revelation most reliably goes wrong. See our guide to false prophets and how to recognise them for the wider pattern, and to the Prophecy of the Popes for a case study in a text that never had any Church standing at all.

Approved private revelation, held rightly, is a gift. Saint Faustina Kowalska's Divine Mercy devotion, examined, restricted for a period and then approved and promoted by John Paul II, is the model case of a private revelation that has enriched the Church's prayer without displacing a line of its doctrine. Our page on Saint Faustina traces that history.

17. How to Weigh Any New Claim

New reported apparitions appear every year, and most readers meet one through a video or a forwarded message rather than a diocesan bulletin. Six questions will place almost any claim correctly within a few minutes.

• Which authority has spoken, and what exactly did it say? Name the bishop or the dicastery, the document, and the date. Vague attributions to "the Vatican" are the single most common error in this subject.
• Is a conclusion being reported as something stronger than it was? A nihil obstat permits devotion. A permission to celebrate Mass at a place permits Mass. Neither declares an apparition supernatural.
• Does the message add to the deposit of faith? Anything that supplies a new doctrine, corrects the Church or announces a new age of the Spirit fails immediately.
• Does it set a date or promise a sign on a schedule? Mark 13:32 settles that. So does the Church's consistent refusal to attach itself to timetables.
• Where does the seer stand toward the local Church? Submission to the bishop is the mark that appears in every approved case. Defiance of the bishop appears in almost every case that ended badly.
• What is the fruit, over years? Conversion, sacramental practice, charity and stability point one way. Fear, division, financial pressure and an inner circle point another.

Pilgrimage is a good thing to want. Going to Lourdes or Knock or Champion, praying the Rosary at the place where a poor child was told to pray for sinners, standing in the confession queue at Laus, is a real part of Catholic life, and none of it depends on holding a private opinion about the metaphysics of what happened there. The Church built the basilicas so that people would pray. Start there, and start now.

18. Related Guides