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The Catholic imagination has long been captivated by apparitions. In large part, this is because they magnify the reality of a heaven that loves so much that it reaches down to earth. It sprinkles paradise over our everyday world and stirs our appetite for the Eternal One.
Apparitions are one of heaven’s most dramatic ways of piercing human history. They call us to a new view of life. In Willa Cather’s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, one of the main characters—a missionary priest—puts it like this:
“Where there is great love there are always miracles. One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love… . The miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
We seem to have a special affection for Marian apparitions, because Our Lady so often comes to the…
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