CATHOLICISM’S LYING WONDERS
 
INTRODUCTION

The Christian Church says that God wishes to communicate something with us when he sends an apparition or a miracle for us. 
 
This article is about miracles and apparitions in the Catholic Church and why they cannot be accepted as having the right to tell us what to do and how we should live. We will see how it is best to pay no attention to them and despise their message. People find miracles fascinating but the truth about them is just as interesting.
 
It is enough to say that the Catholic Church boasts of having a faith that has not been added to since the apostles and that these things do not add to divine revelation for they simply remind us of it. But they do add on for a miracle is a miracle and a revelation is a revelation. Suppose you have a cathedral building that legally you cannot add to. You cannot build a miniature cathedral on to it and use the excuse that the miniature is not an addition but something that points to the cathedral. The newer miracles are more convincing than the ones from the apostles’ day which tells us how bad the evidence of the apostles for Christianity was. So should the apostles' revelation come first? Not a single apparition or miracle ever taught that binding and divine revelation has stopped with the apostles. Is the Church manipulating a threat to its authority to get power? It looks like it!

SUPERSTITION AND SAINTS
 
The Roman Catholic Church believes that we should pray to the saints in Heaven. They say that this is just asking a saint to pray to God for you so you are really praying to God. The idea is that the saint has a better chance of influencing God than you have. God will only do something if it is for the best but here we are told he can do it not because it is best but because a saint asked him. This is blasphemy. And if it is partly because it is best and partly because he is asked then there is still a problem. The saints are really demons and stronger than God if they can talk him into doing wrong. If you think you are not good enough to approach God and have to go to a saint then your prayer must be good enough when the saint listens to it so God should listen to it. The Virgin Mary is reputedly the greatest of the saints and the most powerful. When morality is what is best how can it be moral to pray to a lesser saint?

Many of the canonised saints were rabid anti-Semites and had visions that the Church never accepted as real and even rejected. Many engaged in savage self-abuse like St Mary Maddalena De Pazzi and St Margaret Mary Alacoque who had visions about the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Church says that their sanctity is provable regardless of their error. But surely the more sensible a saint is the more likely they really are sainted. Their sanctity cannot be proved when their crimes are interpreted as errors. Saints are an argument for the holiness of the Catholic Church. But if deluded people who mean to be sincere Catholics but who are really heretics can be saints this is impossible so there should be Protestant saints.

The Bible calls all Christians saints.
 
The Catholic practice of canonisation seems ridiculous and sectarian.
 
The saint has to do miracles before the Church will canonise. But the recipients pray principally to Christ and invoke canonised saints and so one wonders how they can be so sure the miracle commands the person be canonised. Perhaps it was Jesus who answered the prayer. The saints liked to hide their virtue and would have despised the idea of doing miracles to get canonised. When they hid it how can one be sure they had virtue? If a miracle verified a false saint the miracle would be regarded as satanic so the process of saint-making is riddled with inconsistency.
 
If by praying to the saints you are really praying to God then it follows that if you wrongly think there is a St Expedite and pray to her you will still get help because it is God you are praying to. Clearly favours and miracles cannot show that there really was such a saint or that the person if he or she existed was a saint.
  
MAKING MIRACLES
 
One thing the Catholic Church does is hijack miracles. I mean it takes the miracles as belonging to it and therefore verifying its claims to be the Church that embodies the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is easy to prove that that is nothing more than theft.
 
For one thing, the Church will not accept a miracle as true if the miracle implies the Church is wrong in faith or morals. For example, if a statue came to life and said Jesus was a fraud the Church will not accept the miracle as true. It hijacks miracles for it only picks the ones that suit its religious and political agenda.
 
A person might be totally honest but a liar in relation to a miracle claim. It's the one lie one can never get caught out for telling. If somebody stares at a spot on the wall and says they are seeing the Virgin Mary there is no proof that they are not seeing her.

The famed miracle-worker Mirabelli the Great (1889-1951) would have been hailed as a new Jesus had he not kept up his pretences too long. He was caught out in 1934. How do you know that the other Jesuses and miracle workers just did not work long enough or hard enough so that they missed the chance of being caught out by sheer good fortune?

Many saints and fakirs were and are allegedly immune to burning by fire. Some decades ago fire-walking was hailed as a proven miracle. Nobody could explain how people seemingly just by using their minds were able to walk barefoot across hot coals. They can now and it is all perfectly explicable. But it follows that in the days when it had to be considered to be a miracle that the whole Christian world should have stopped arguing that miracles were divine acts and that only God could have raised Jesus from the dead and not psychic power. The Christian world should have stopped seeing any miracle as the work of God. If Jesus demands faith and faith has to be reasonable to be faith, then it follows that we have to follow the evidence as we see it even if it leads us astray for what else are we to do?

BOOKS CONSULTED
  
Ballinspittle, Moving Statues and Faith, Tim Ryan and Jurek Kirakowski, Mercier Press, Dublin, 1985
Beauraing and Other Apparitions, Fr Herbert Thurston, Burns, Oates & Washbourne, London, 1934
Believing in God, PJ McGrath, Millington Books in Association with Wolfhound, Dublin, 1995
Bernadette of Lourdes, Rev CC Martindale, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1970
Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1985
Catholic Prophecy, The Coming Chastisement Yves Dupont, TAN, Illinois, 1973
Comparative Miracles, Fr Robert D Smith, B. Herder Book Co, St Louis, Mo, 1965
Counterfeit Miracles, BB Warfield, The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1995
Cults and Fanatics, Colin & Damon Wilson, Siena, London, 1996
Divine Mercy in My Soul, Sr M Faustina Kowalska, Marian Press, Massachusetts, 1987
Eleven Lourdes Miracles, Dr D J West, Duckworth, London, 1957
Evidence of Satan in the Modern World, Leon Cristiani, TAN, Illinois, 1974
From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls, Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, Athlone Press, London, 1996
Fatima in Lucia’s own Words, Sr Lucia, Postulation Centre, Fatima, 1976
Fatima Revealed…And Discarded, Brother Michael of the Holy Trinity, Augustine, Devon, 1988
From the Visions of the Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich, Topic Newspapers, Mullingar, undated
Garabandal, a Message for the World, Ave Maria Publications, Middleton, Co Armagh
Introduction to the Devout Life, St Francis de Sales, Burns Oates and Washbourne Limited, London, 1952
Looking for a Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books, New York, 1993
Miracles in Dispute, Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, SCM, London, 1969
Miracles, Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1937
Mother of Nations, Joan Ashton, Veritas, Dublin, 1988
New Catholic Encyclopedia, The Catholic University of America and the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., Washington, District of Columbia, 1967
Objections to Roman Catholicism, Edited by Michael de la Bedoyere, Constable, London, 1964
Our Lady of Beauraing, Rev J.A. Shields, M.A., D.C.L., M.H. Gill and Son, Ltd., Dublin, 1958
Padre Pio, Patrick O Donovan, Catholic Truth Society, London
Please Come Back to Me and My Son R Vincnet, Ireland’s Eye, Mullingar, 1992
Powers of Darkness, Powers of Light, John Cornwell, London, 1992
Rosa Mystica, Franz Speckbacher, Divine Mercy Publications, Dublin, 1986
San Damiano, S di Maria, The Marian Centre, Hungerford, 1983
Spiritual Healing, Martin Daulby and Caroline Mathison, Geddes & Grosset, New Lanark, Scotland, 1998
St Catherine Laboure of the Miraculous Medal, Fr Joseph I Dirvin C.M., Tan, Illinois, 1984
The Apparition at Knock, A Survey of Facts and Evidence, Fr Michael Walsh, St Jarlath’s College, Tuam, Co Galway, 1959
The Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary Today, Rene Laurentin, Veritas, Dublin 1990
The Appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Grotto of Lourdes, JB Estrade, Art & Book Company Ltd, Westminster, 1912
The Autobiography of St Margaret Mary, TAN, Illinois, 1986
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline, London, 1996
The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Michael P Carroll, Princeton University Press, 1986
The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary, Kevin McClure Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, 1985
The Exaltation of the Virgin Mary, by Rev S.G. Poyntz, M.A., B.D., Association for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Dublin, 1955
The Holy Shroud and Four Visions, Rev Patrick O Connell and Rev Charles Carty, TAN, Illinois, 1974
The Holy Shroud and the Visions of Maria Valtorta, Msgr Vincenzo Celli, Kolbe Publications Inc., Sheerbrooke, California, 1994
The Incorruptibles, Joan Carroll Cruz, Tan, Illinois, 1977
The Jesus Relics, From the Holy Grail to the Turin Shroud, Joe Nickell, The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2008
The Medjugorje Deception, E Michael Jones, Fidelity Press, Indiana, 1998
The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, Fr Herbert Thurston, Burns, Oates & Washbourne, London, 1952
The Sceptical Occultist, Terry White, Century, London, 1994
The Supernatural A-Z, James Randi, Headline Books, London, 1995
The Thunder of Justice, Ted and Maureen Flynn, MAXCOL, Vancouver, 1993
The Turin Shroud is Genuine, Rodney Hoare, Souvenir Press, London, 1998 Twenty Questions about Medjugorje Kevin Orlin Johnson Ph.D, Pangaeus, Dallas, 1999
The Two Divine Promises, Fr Roman Hoppe, TAN, Illinois, 1987
The Virgin of the Poor, Damian Walne and Joan Flory, CTS, London, 1983
The Way of Divine Love, Sr Josefa Mendenez, TAN, Illinois, 1980
The Wonder of Guadalupe, Francis Johnson, Augustine, Devon, 1981
To the Priests, Our Lady’s Beloved Sons, Fr Gobbi, The Marian Movement of Priests, St Paul’s Press, Athlone, 1991
  
THE WEB

The Most Dangerous False Apparition in the World
www.unitypublishing.com/Apparitions/Garabandal2.html

False Visions Which Followed Knock
www.theotokos.org.uk

Critique: “Poem of the Man-God” Medugorje’s Gospel by Brother James,
http://members.lycos.co.uk/jloughnan/critique.htm

BIBLE QUOTATIONS FROM:
The Amplified Bible