In 1994, a devout Catholic woman from Vermont began having religious visions and hearing the voice of the Virgin Mary. To spread word about her mystical experiences, she turned to the Internet. As Paolo Apolito records here, she is only one of many people who use the Web as a tool of religious devotion. Every day, thousands of Catholics—from Italy and Latin America to the United States and Bosnia—use the Internet to describe and celebrate apparitions of Mary, to exchange relics and advice in chat rooms, to make pilgrimages to religious Web sites, and to practice the rites of their faith online. But how has this potent new mix of technology and religiosity changed the way Catholics view their faith? And what challenges do the autonomous qualities of the Internet pose to the broader authority of Catholicism? Does the democratic nature of access to digital technologies constitute a return to a more archaic and mystical form of Catholicism that predates the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council? In working through these questions, Apolito considers visions of Mary on the Web over the past two decades, revealing a great deal about religion as it is now experienced through new information technologies. The Internet, he explains, has made possible a decentralized community of the devoted, even as it has absorbed God into the shifts and complexities of electronic circuitry. And this profound development in religious life will only accelerate as use of the Internet spreads around the world. An indispensable guide to the future of Catholicism, The Internet and the Madonna offers a compelling glimpse into the spiritual life of the connected soul.

The Internet and the Madonna: Religious Visionary Experience on the Web

Religion & Spirituality

Apolito, Paolo

Christian Books & Bibles

University of Chicago Press

Societies in Western Europe undergo periods of spiritual excitement in which people are more open to signs from heaven or elsewhere, and lulls during which those who claim direct messages from the divine are ignored, ridiculed, or persecuted. Since the late 1960s, Catholic Europe has been in the throes of a kind of re-enchantment, with its immediate model the visions at Medjugorje and its background the intensive promotion of the visions of La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima. Paolo Apolito had the good fortune to be present virtually at the start of public visions in 1985 not far from his home in Salerno. He observed how the visions gained credence as apparitions and followed how the town and its church sorted out the many apparition messages and dealt with the pilgrims who arrived from throughout southern Italy. First published in Italy in 1993, this book describes the cult that developed at Oliveto Citra around the ongoing visions, the seers and messages that became dominant, and the in

Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra: Local Visions and Cosmic Drama

History

Europe

Penn State University Press

Ritmo

Guarino, Raimondo

Pascarelli, Giuseppe

Edizioni Grenelle

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