Book Review

I recently read "Understanding Medjugorje Heavenly Vision or Religious Illusions" by Donal Foley. After my last post on this subject the Author sent me a copy of this book to review.

It was quite an interesting read and whatever you feelings are on this subject it is quite informative. The book is definitely in the critical camp on these alleged apparitions and I am in the same camp. There have been a lot of pro-Medjugorje books and very few that take a more skeptical view. During my conversion I had read a few books that supported these visions and even attended a talk by one of the "seers" Ivan Dragicevic. The information in Foley’s book presents both things I have read in the past and a lot of information that was totally skipped in book sympathetic to the "seers."

His book is broader though than just an examination of the seers. He places the events at Medjugorje firmly on historical background and gives an overall view of both the political and social climate surrounding the area. The dispute between the diocesan bishop and the Franciscans goes back hundreds of years. There has been a climate of disobedience by these Franciscans for quite a while and has been addressed multiple times by the Vatican with little result. The apparitions have done nothing to change this pattern. The author also gives the background of the individual seers and their family life.

One of the pieces of evidences he uses is a series of tapes that were recorded between the parish priest and the seers during the first week of these apparitions. That such tapes existed were something that I had never read in a pro-Medjugorje book. There is a very good reason for this. The information recorded and transcribed on these tapes contains a bit of odd information that supporters never allude to. For example the original visions happened after the group of seers had swiped some cigarettes and went off to listen to rock music. It was while smoking that the Gospa first appeared to them. One of the seers reports that Mary’s hand was shaking during this first vision. The interviews show the fact that during the first week of these so-called visions that the Gospa never spoke to them and in fact just did a lot of laughing. There were no messages at all.

The author throughout the book uses references from solid theologians on mystical experiences to contrast what was said by the seers. He compares authorized Marian apparitions, especially Fatima, with Medjugorje. He also gives a history of some apparitions that have been condemned by their local bishop. The contrasts really shine a negative light on Medjugorje. The only modern apparition that has similar points is Garabandal which has also been condemned by the local ordinary. Many people speak of the fruits of Medjugorje, especially of conversions. He describes the case of one visionary in the U.S. that also had many conversion with people going to confession and returning to the sacraments. This visionary had also been condemned by the local bishop, because not only did the messages go against Church teaching, but the Visionary didn’t even go to Mass and was rather anti-Catholic. I would think that people who become interested in supernatural apparitions are already favorable to conversion and when the sacrament are available there will always be good fruits.

The history of more than 25 years with 33,000 plus visions that have never been supported by both bishops of Mostar-Duvno or the Yugoslavian Bishop’s conference is filled with odd stories and outright disobedience. The book is worth reading just for the details of all these stories and how in the world did Medjugorje ever become a major pilgrimage site. Donal Foley details some of the reasons of how this happened and the context of which they happened. My jaw dropped repeatedly throughout the book of stories that some of the seers told. One that floored me though was that the Gospa had told one of the seers to read "The Poem of the Man-God." A book that use to be on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list that still carries "moral weight" as then-Cardinal Ratzinger said.

I could go on and on about these stories and you just have to read the find the details of when the bishop was attacked and kidnapped by the local Franciscans there. The biggest fruit of Medjugorje is disobedience by just about everybody involved. The messages have also been messaged at times. For example in one instance the Gospa called somebody a Judas for not believing in the apparitions. This message was later edited to say Doubting Thomas instead. But just the idea of Mary calling someone a Judas for not believing in a alleged private revelation is just not credible.

Fairly recently Bishop Ratko Peric of Medjugorje of said:

Therefore I responsibly call upon those who claim themselves to be “seers”, as well as those persons behind the “messages”, to demonstrate ecclesiastical obedience and to cease with these public manifestations and messages in this parish. In this fashion they shall show their necessary adherence to the Church, by neither placing private “apparitions” nor private sayings before the official position of the Church.

This has not stopped the public release of new messages since then. Rank disobedience is plainly not a sign of authentic seers. It is bad enough that promoters have time and again been disobedient and have spun and just plain lied about the apparitions and what the Church has spoken on the subject. The idea of disobedient visionaries who drive BMW’s, own large houses, and who go on speaking circuits and live off the apparitions is quite ridiculous.

Dwight Longenecker a graduate of Bob Jones University and a former Anglican priest is going to be ordained as part of the Pastoral Provision. He spent much of his life in England, but is back in South Carolina now. I reviewed his book Adventures in Orthodoxy before and so has Julie at Happy Catholic. I also recently read his St. Benedict and St. Therese: The Little Rule & the Little Way. He has a great Chestertonian way of looking at things and writing in such as way to make you look more closely to.

On another note of former Anglican’s now a priest. Fr. George Rutler celebrated his 25th anniversary as a priest yesterday. I loved his book The Cure D’Ars Today which not only was a great biography of St. John Vianney, but included many great turns of phrases. On a side note whenever I hear Fr. Rutler’s name I am reminded of The Rutles, a parody band from some members of Monty Python. Strange association, but they both have the ability to make me laugh.

I recently finished the book Salvation Is From the Jews by Roy H. Schoeman put out by Ignatius Press. The book is wide ranging in its topics. When I bought it I expected it to mainly be on the Old and New testaments with background information from a Jewish view. This was indeed part of the first half of the book and is worth the price of the book alone.

What I found interesting was how Jewish apologists will try to answer specific claims made by Christians. I have heard and read many hours of Protestant objections and I found this part of the book to be fascinating. Of course like Protestantism there is no one specific Jewish view on passages in the Old Testament or about predictions of the Messiah. Or that among a large swath of modern Jews even a belief in an afterlife. Roy Schoeman goes in depth through the messianic prophesies and how they relate to Jesus. He also details objections and their counters. I found lots of new information that I had not encountered before that I found fascinating.

He also goes into some of the Talmudic writing and how they also related to Jesus. While these of course are not inspired they definitely show the view of Rabbis at the time they were written and how they viewed the coming Messiah. One of these passages written after Jesus had died about a temple practice whose miraculous sign had stopped around the death of Jesus was very interesting.

I had often wondered how Jewish believers would deny that Jesus was the Messiah prophesied. All of salvation history was headed towards a crescendo of the birth of the Messiah, yet the Jewish view is that Prophets just stopped coming and there were no more inspired books to add to the canon. That the Temple just happened to be destroyed within a generation of Jesus’ death. This book goes a good distance and answering these questions.

Another good sized chapter discussed "Judaism and the Holocaust." The chapter covers not only the Holocaust but some of the Jewish religious reaction to the aftermath. He also goes into the debate of calling it this sad time in history the Shoah or the Holocaust. He favors Holocaust and explains his reason why. There are theological reasons why both sides of the debate favor their choices.

Another excellent chapter is "Ideological Foundations of Nazism." He debunks the idea that it was specifically Christian anti-semitism that lead to the Nazi regime. While it is certainly true that it existed and in some ways cooperated with the Nazi’s he shows it is in no way the cornerstone they built on. He traces Nazi spiritualism back to Theosophy for an occult racist theory which later added a mixture of German paganism. The development and basis of Nazi ideas is shown as it progress through many organizations and proponents of a master race and occult tendencies. This chapter covers a lot of information and as the rest of the book contains many footnotes to sources. You truly get a sense of the demonic in this chapter. He also details while Nazism was the most virulent form of anti-Semitism the anti-Semitism of the rest of the world aided Hitler. The chapter reminds us of how ships filled with Jewish people were turned back to Germany and the people later interned in the concentration camps because President Roosevelt would not budge from the quota system for immigrants. The U.S. was not alone in this and it was only two small countries in Europe that were accepting Jewish immigrants. The chapter also goes into the influence of Margaret Sanger and the people on the board of the Birth Control Review and how they were instrumental in the intellectual underpinnings of eugenics that became policy in Nazi germany.

The next chapter "anti-Semitism after the Holocaust" concentrates mainly on Arabs. He shows the history of Arab involvement with Hitler and for the most part their wholesale agreement with his agenda. This whole section really puts a lie to so much of what we hear today about anti-Semitism in the Middle East really being anti-Zionism. This rabid hatred was already in full swing long before Israel became a country. Mein Kamph has long been a best seller in Arabic. This chapter is well documented with quotations. The quotation from so-called moderate Anwar Sadat were just as hateful towards Jewish people as you hear from the most extreme sources. The only weakness in this chapter is that by concentrating mainly on Arabs it omits all the other forms of anti-Semitism that are present in the modern day.

The book continues with conversion stories to Catholicism that include some rather famous cases and some less well known. Even in the more famous cases he revealed details that I had not read in other treatments. To often these stories are treated as instantaneous conversions or that a specific event brought them out. He goes farther in these stories to show how their movement towards the Church was gradual for the most part. The book ends with his own conversion story and is another good read.

So as you can tel by this book I quite enjoyed it and his writing style moves you along quite quickly through the chapters.

The December issue of This Rock magazine was specifically devoted to book reviews and articles about Catholic publishing. Just what I needed, recommendations for even more books to buy and read. My drivers license photo shows me reading a book so that other would be able to properly identify the half face peering over the book. Regardless one article by Todd M. Aglialoro who is the editor of Sophia Institute Press intrigued me. He was referring to all of the books that get sent in to them and the process for selecting what they hope to be good sellers. Also talked about are the cases where they thought they had a real good book, but the sales never really took off. He referred specifically to a book by Dwight Longenecker called Adventures in Orthodoxy that they felt would do very well and were disappointed at it’s sales. The cover of the book has an Indiana Jones like figure and the title is done similar to the title of Raiders of the Lost Ark. They mentioned that next time around they might give it a different title and or cover since they have had success with this tactic before. Now I had seen this book in the Catholic bookshops before and the cover and title appealed to me though I didn’t pick it up then. So because of what they said about this book in the article I bought it and have just finished reading it.

Adventures in Orthodoxy is both a fun and informative read as it is a Chestertonian romp through the Creed. This book is written as excitedly as orthodoxy should be truly be seen. It is no dry tome of the history of the Creed or a specifically theologically analysis of it. He acknowledges much to G.K. Chesterton and takes some of Chesterton’s paradoxes as a guide to to the Apostles creed. The world view that the Creed is looked at is by Chesterton’s statement “any scene, such as a landscape, can sometimes be more clearly and freshly seen if it is seen upside down.” Mr. Longenecker certainly takes a fresh approach and upside down look at much of the creed and it is an exciting and thought provoking ride as you see elements of the Creed in a new light. This look at the Creed also reminds me of Chesterton’s example in Orthodoxy of a man who gets on a ship and leaves his country. The man returns unaware that he has returned to his native land and thinking it a foreign land sees it as if it was for the very first time. Seeing the Creed though Dwight Longenecker’s eyes is also to see it as new for the first time.

Each chapter of the book starts of with a small segment of the Creed and a Chapter title that makes you wonder what you are in store for in the following pages. One passage towards the beginning I especially enjoyed.

The more tasteful religious executives have efficiently excised the awkward bits, such as a judgmental God, fantastic miracles and eternal damnation, and kept the nice bits such as angels, being good, and making the world a better place.

In doing so, they have watered down the wind and tamed the lion. They have taken a religion worth dying for and made it not worth getting out of bed for.

In the section on the Creed “… born of the Virgin Mary” he says.

You might imagine that such total innocence and goodness would make Mary a sort of Galilean wonderwoman. It’s true that her innocence wa extraordinary, but it was also very ordinary. That is to say that while it was momentous, it didn’t seem remarkable at the time. There is a curious twist to real goodness. It’s summed up by the observation that what is natural isn’t unusual. If a person is really good, he is humble; and if he is humble; he is simply who he should be. There is nothing about him that calls attention to him. Truly good people blend in. They are at home with themselves, and no one is out of place when they are at home. In the same way Mary wasn’t noticed in Nazareth. Because she was natural, she was perfectly ordinary. Therefore, she was both as marvelous and unremarkable as a morning in May.

I truly enjoyed this book and will give it the highest praise that I seldom give books. That is that I am sure to read it again since one reading is not enough to extract all that it has to say. I have another book of Mr. Longenecker’s called St. Benedict and St. Therese: The Little Rule & the Little Way which is now going to be move upward in my book queque on my bookshelf.

As a side note I am happy to see that Catholic writer and blogger Kathryn Lively has been doing book reviews for This Rock magazine. It seems more and more I am seeing names from Catholic blogdom in Catholic magazines. They even let Catholic Ragemonkey Fr. Shane Tharp out long enough for a good guest column in the latest Crisis Magazine.