It is with embarrassment that I admit that I was a history major as an undergrad, which I did because I liked it and because it was easier than physics. Still, it required all-nighters for finals because of the huge amounts of memorization. Interpretation, though, was another thing, something that came naturally along with the data. Here are the facts, ma’am, and after that, it ain’t hard to see the truth.
Well, no, actually; it has taken me decades to fully appreciate that both facts and interpretations can be manipulated, either subconsciously as I did as a student dependent upon the professors, or consciously, as do provocateurs of some kind of political agenda. In the encyclopedic book Marian Apparitions, the Bible, and the Modern World, author Donal Anthony Foley gives us a broad overview of (largely) European history, primarily of the 19th and 20th century (along with a brief look at the time before, and the colonial period in Mexico) with the eyes of an orthodox Catholic and biblical scholar, conveying some surprising facts and interpretations of the facts that we would never find in the secular classroom. For instance, did you know that the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles Joseph, who took over from his dad Francis Joseph (who started WWI by attacking Serb nationalists for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand) tried desperately to stop the war without calls for recriminations of any kind? (He was roundly rejected by both the British and the Germans, who wanted an all-out win regardless.) And more: Charles Joseph was forced to resign at the end of the war, where he went into exile in Madeira, Portugal, where he died in poverty. In 1972 his body was exhumed as the first step taken to declare him a saint for his efforts at peace. His body was found in almost perfect condition – meaning it is likely that the man who was the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the calamitous First World War will be made a saint. That was never in any of my history books.
And oh, how involved it gets, as European history from any perspective always does. Continuing with this war period, in May of 1917 Pope Benedict XV, appalled at this suicide of Euro-Christian culture, directed the invocation “Queen of Peace, pray for us!” so that Mary would intercede in human affairs to help stop the war. Just over a week later, Mary appeared to the three shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal, at the Cova da Iria, or “Hollow of Peace.” Here she told the children that Russia would become something of the anti-Christ (but would return again to Christianity), and that Europe would be plunged into a greater war if they did not heed the Christian call for prayer and worship (and so on). Later that year, Lenin and his gang took over Russia, forbidding worship and nearly everything else that is personal, and of course, WWII followed 20 years later with even greater ferocity than WWI.
And so the book moves, following a history of Marian apparitions, from Guadalupe to post WWII Europe, with a constant look at the surrounding normal facts to show (if not prove) that Marian apparitions reflect current history, and are attempts to get humanity to move in a more godly direction and away from greed, war, and other sins.
But wait, as the advertisement says, there’s more! In addition, he shows with varying degrees of probability how the narrative of the Bible coincides with both the movement of current history and the apparitions of Mary. In other words, he sees the whole movement of history as a recapitulation of the Bible, with the clear distinction that, now that the Savior has come, we are given the possibility that his mother – the ultimate mediatrix between God and Man – might intercede for us. Unlike traditional history, the outcome of this history is set: we will eventually end up at the final judgement. History in his view, then, is all about how we get there.
I cannot do justice to this book in a matter of a few pages. It is vast, covering the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, Darwinism and Marxism and Freud, Free Masonry, the Catholic Church in general, and a large part of Biblical history. The latter is mostly too arcane to feature here – for instance, it compares the Virgin to the Ark of the Covenant, drawing extensive parallels between its biblical history and Marian apparitions. The logic is that Mary was the carrier of God just as the Ark was, so their histories, and our lives as well, have all been and forever will be intertwined.
This is heady and heavy stuff, however, so I will swerve in another direction that has something to do with me personally, and that contradicts a part of Foley’s thesis - although it shouldn’t, as it keeps within his frame of reference.
I go back to Fatima, the greatest Marian apparition of our times. The appearance is intimately connected with Russia and Europe and peace and war, as we have seen, but there are ever more wrinkles to it. Bishop Fulton Sheen, who is about to become a saint himself, pointed out in the 1950’s that Fatima is the name of the prophet’s favorite daughter and the most beloved of women in the Koran, aside from Mary. Mary’s appearance at Fatima, then, is to Sheen an indication that God is advocating a kind of detente, or coming together of Islam and Christianity.
Some 80 years later, Pope (now saint) John Paul II called another Marian site, Medjugorje, which I recently visited, the culmination of the vision of Fatima. It is significant that Medjugorje was in the former communist nation of Yugoslavia, in the area now called Serbia-Herzegovina. The visions of Mary to the (visionary) children there began in 1982, eight or so years before the fall of the state. Thus we have featured here the conflict with communism, mentioned at Fatima, but now at its conclusion, with religion victorious over dialectical materialism and totalitarianism. But the fall of the Soviet Union was followed by a period of ethnic cleansing, especially in Serbia – the nation where WWI began - based primarily on Christian vs Muslim tensions. Recall Fulton Sheen’s reflection on the name of Fatima. Today at Medjogorje, Mary continually calls for peace, including peace between religions, so much so that she once told one of the visionary children that the conflicts between the religions were based on humanity’s misunderstandings, not on God’s truth.
This has brought our author to vehemently oppose the authenticity of Medjugorje – why, he rightly claims, John the apostle wrote that Jesus said that there is no way to the Father except through him, the son. This is true, but it is clear that God, and His voice in Mary, have ideas that might supersede both Christianity and the Bible. God is not limited in any way and can do things that are against our understanding of Him– just as Jesus surpassed the understanding of the Jews who were awaiting another Davidic king of this world. I don’t claim to know the answer to this apparent biblical discrepancy, but St John Paul understood it, and it is clear that Mary appeared in Medjugorje just before the end of communism and at the beginning of modern Muslim violence to bring God back to a people forced away from religion, and to resolve the mounting Muslim hostilities in the world, thereby facilitating peace once again. It all fits, from Fatima to Mejugorje, but for that biblical discrepancy.
I wager that a scholar and believer like Foley could solve this discrepancy if he were open to the idea that God might take his children back to Him even if they practiced different, even imperfect religions. They may then have to be converted to the Way once in the spirit world, but it might be His way to take them any-way.
All that aside, the view of world history, especially that of Europe, from the biblical and Catholic perspective is far more attractive than one might think. In fact, it is far more attractive than many of the histories interpreted through Marx or the current neo-Marxist theories that see history as a product of trans-sectional group conflict and oppression. For me, it is even more attractive than the more “objective” view that I was taught, which saw historical movement in terms of greed and power. So yes, I would say that we are directed – that history is not, as social Darwinism and materialism would have it, a matter of intersecting vectors of survival strategies and randomness. To one who is studying the complexities of the Bible, the idea that the Bible might recapitulate itself again and again as the word of God that lives in history is also attractive. After all, if history is directed, the Bible would certainly be a good source to help in understanding that action.
Our own interpretations, however, can never be said to be the end-all for all things that are and will be. Historians such as Foley who put God in history might be better off if they realized that there are some things that must remain hidden, at least from certain epics, so that history can continue as it should to fulfill the Divine Plan. It simply makes sense that we cannot know the future if we wish to fulfill it, and it is why we should not go to fortune tellers – as Oedipus found out. We certainly cannot discern all that will come, and we probably will never discern the meaning of all that has been until the end of history. Still, Foley gives us a sharp, sometimes even shocking, look at our own world through lenses of the divine and the miraculous, coming close to proving that we are part of the Divine Plan.
As for me, I believe it more and more the more I read history. That is my own perspective, of course, but time has shown me that this is the more enlightened path. Foley’s interpretation will not show up in public school history classes anytime soon, but that is as it should be. In a directed world, we are brought to ideas as we are ready to receive them. Amen I say to that, and I tremble at the thought of what more is to come.
It is with embarrassment that I admit that I was a history major as an undergrad, which I did because I liked it and because it was easier than physics. Still, it required all-nighters for finals because of the huge amounts of memorization. Interpretation, though, was another thing, something that came naturally along with the data. Here are the facts, ma’am, and after that, it ain’t hard to see the truth.
Well, no, actually; it has taken me decades to fully appreciate that both facts and interpretations can be manipulated, either subconsciously as I did as a student dependent upon the professors, or consciously, as do provocateurs of some kind of political agenda. In the encyclopedic book Marian Apparitions, the Bible, and the Modern World, author Donal Anthony Foley gives us a broad overview of (largely) European history, primarily of the 19th and 20th century (along with a brief look at the time before, and the colonial period in Mexico) with the eyes of an orthodox Catholic and biblical scholar, conveying some surprising facts and interpretations of the facts that we would never find in the secular classroom. For instance, did you know that the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles Joseph, who took over from his dad Francis Joseph (who started WWI by attacking Serb nationalists for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand) tried desperately to stop the war without calls for recriminations of any kind? (He was roundly rejected by both the British and the Germans, who wanted an all-out win regardless.) And more: Charles Joseph was forced to resign at the end of the war, where he went into exile in Madeira, Portugal, where he died in poverty. In 1972 his body was exhumed as the first step taken to declare him a saint for his efforts at peace. His body was found in almost perfect condition – meaning it is likely that the man who was the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the calamitous First World War will be made a saint. That was never in any of my history books.
And oh, how involved it gets, as European history from any perspective always does. Continuing with this war period, in May of 1917 Pope Benedict XV, appalled at this suicide of Euro-Christian culture, directed the invocation “Queen of Peace, pray for us!” so that Mary would intercede in human affairs to help stop the war. Just over a week later, Mary appeared to the three shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal, at the Cova da Iria, or “Hollow of Peace.” Here she told the children that Russia would become something of the anti-Christ (but would return again to Christianity), and that Europe would be plunged into a greater war if they did not heed the Christian call for prayer and worship (and so on). Later that year, Lenin and his gang took over Russia, forbidding worship and nearly everything else that is personal, and of course, WWII followed 20 years later with even greater ferocity than WWI.
And so the book moves, following a history of Marian apparitions, from Guadalupe to post WWII Europe, with a constant look at the surrounding normal facts to show (if not prove) that Marian apparitions reflect current history, and are attempts to get humanity to move in a more godly direction and away from greed, war, and other sins.
But wait, as the advertisement says, there’s more! In addition, he shows with varying degrees of probability how the narrative of the Bible coincides with both the movement of current history and the apparitions of Mary. In other words, he sees the whole movement of history as a recapitulation of the Bible, with the clear distinction that, now that the Savior has come, we are given the possibility that his mother – the ultimate mediatrix between God and Man – might intercede for us. Unlike traditional history, the outcome of this history is set: we will eventually end up at the final judgement. History in his view, then, is all about how we get there.
I cannot do justice to this book in a matter of a few pages. It is vast, covering the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, Darwinism and Marxism and Freud, Free Masonry, the Catholic Church in general, and a large part of Biblical history. The latter is mostly too arcane to feature here – for instance, it compares the Virgin to the Ark of the Covenant, drawing extensive parallels between its biblical history and Marian apparitions. The logic is that Mary was the carrier of God just as the Ark was, so their histories, and our lives as well, have all been and forever will be intertwined.
This is heady and heavy stuff, however, so I will swerve in another direction that has something to do with me personally, and that contradicts a part of Foley’s thesis - although it shouldn’t, as it keeps within his frame of reference.
I go back to Fatima, the greatest Marian apparition of our times. The appearance is intimately connected with Russia and Europe and peace and war, as we have seen, but there are ever more wrinkles to it. Bishop Fulton Sheen, who is about to become a saint himself, pointed out in the 1950’s that Fatima is the name of the prophet’s favorite daughter and the most beloved of women in the Koran, aside from Mary. Mary’s appearance at Fatima, then, is to Sheen an indication that God is advocating a kind of detente, or coming together of Islam and Christianity.
Some 80 years later, Pope (now saint) John Paul II called another Marian site, Medjugorje, which I recently visited, the culmination of the vision of Fatima. It is significant that Medjugorje was in the former communist nation of Yugoslavia, in the area now called Serbia-Herzegovina. The visions of Mary to the (visionary) children there began in 1982, eight or so years before the fall of the state. Thus we have featured here the conflict with communism, mentioned at Fatima, but now at its conclusion, with religion victorious over dialectical materialism and totalitarianism. But the fall of the Soviet Union was followed by a period of ethnic cleansing, especially in Serbia – the nation where WWI began - based primarily on Christian vs Muslim tensions. Recall Fulton Sheen’s reflection on the name of Fatima. Today at Medjogorje, Mary continually calls for peace, including peace between religions, so much so that she once told one of the visionary children that the conflicts between the religions were based on humanity’s misunderstandings, not on God’s truth.
This has brought our author to vehemently oppose the authenticity of Medjugorje – why, he rightly claims, John the apostle wrote that Jesus said that there is no way to the Father except through him, the son. This is true, but it is clear that God, and His voice in Mary, have ideas that might supersede both Christianity and the Bible. God is not limited in any way and can do things that are against our understanding of Him– just as Jesus surpassed the understanding of the Jews who were awaiting another Davidic king of this world. I don’t claim to know the answer to this apparent biblical discrepancy, but St John Paul understood it, and it is clear that Mary appeared in Medjugorje just before the end of communism and at the beginning of modern Muslim violence to bring God back to a people forced away from religion, and to resolve the mounting Muslim hostilities in the world, thereby facilitating peace once again. It all fits, from Fatima to Mejugorje, but for that biblical discrepancy.
I wager that a scholar and believer like Foley could solve this discrepancy if he were open to the idea that God might take his children back to Him even if they practiced different, even imperfect religions. They may then have to be converted to the Way once in the spirit world, but it might be His way to take them any-way.
All that aside, the view of world history, especially that of Europe, from the biblical and Catholic perspective is far more attractive than one might think. In fact, it is far more attractive than many of the histories interpreted through Marx or the current neo-Marxist theories that see history as a product of trans-sectional group conflict and oppression. For me, it is even more attractive than the more “objective” view that I was taught, which saw historical movement in terms of greed and power. So yes, I would say that we are directed – that history is not, as social Darwinism and materialism would have it, a matter of intersecting vectors of survival strategies and randomness. To one who is studying the complexities of the Bible, the idea that the Bible might recapitulate itself again and again as the word of God that lives in history is also attractive. After all, if history is directed, the Bible would certainly be a good source to help in understanding that action.
Our own interpretations, however, can never be said to be the end-all for all things that are and will be. Historians such as Foley who put God in history might be better off if they realized that there are some things that must remain hidden, at least from certain epics, so that history can continue as it should to fulfill the Divine Plan. It simply makes sense that we cannot know the future if we wish to fulfill it, and it is why we should not go to fortune tellers – as Oedipus found out. We certainly cannot discern all that will come, and we probably will never discern the meaning of all that has been until the end of history. Still, Foley gives us a sharp, sometimes even shocking, look at our own world through lenses of the divine and the miraculous, coming close to proving that we are part of the Divine Plan.
As for me, I believe it more and more the more I read history. That is my own perspective, of course, but time has shown me that this is the more enlightened path. Foley’s interpretation will not show up in public school history classes anytime soon, but that is as it should be. In a directed world, we are brought to ideas as we are ready to receive them. Amen I say to that, and I tremble at the thought of what more is to come.
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