Devotion to Her has long been a Controversial Affair

Veneration of Mary takes many forms, among them special prayers—including the Hail Mary—shrines, relics, and statues. Many individual clerics pushed devotion to Mary by founding Marian societies, especially during the so-called counterreformation, when the Roman church reacted to the Protestant movement. Mariology got another boost in the 19th century as part of an effort by the Vatican to standardize Catholic practices. In 1854, Mary's Immaculate Conception became church dogma. In large part, Carroll says, the 19th-century church was again reacting to external pressures. Its authority was under assault by popular movements, modernist thought, and various governments.

Marian devotion has certainly helped wrap the Catholic Church in a cloak of mysticism. Marian apparitions have been commonplace and widespread since at least the fourth century. Shrines tend to be built at the sites where reported miracles involving Mary occurred. Charlene Spretnak, in her book Missing Mary, says 66 percent of Europe's Catholic shrines are dedicated to Mary; a mere 7 percent focus on Jesus. Claims of weeping Madonna statues were once very common, too. The number has dwindled since the 18th century, Carroll says, because the church typically failed to acknowledge them. The Vatican has also been reluctant to legitimize claims of visions of Mary. "The church cannot have hallucinating individuals defining church doctrine," Carroll explains. "It also tends not to endorse them because it does not want the whole thing trivialized."

Nevertheless, a few well-documented apparitions have gained church acceptance, including Lourdes in France, where, in 1858, teenager Bernadette Soubirous said Mary appeared to her 18 separate times and said: "I am the Immaculate Conception." Since that message came on the heels of the church's 1854 declaration, "Lourdes was a safe one" for it to accept, Carroll says. According to Spretnak, Lourdes has documented 2,000 miracle cures since the visitation, and the church has accepted 66 of those.

Visions. Perhaps the most famous visitation of the last century was in 1917 at Fátima, Portugal, when several children said they saw and heard Mary. The enduring claim that the Virgin at Fátima warned of Russia rising as a godless world power would later fit into the church's anticommunist mentality, Carroll explains. For more than four years, starting in 1961, children in the Spanish village of San Sebastian de Garabandal said they had visions of Mary. The church has not accepted the Garabandal apparitions, Boss says, "but it has not condemned them, either." More recent unendorsed visitations have been reported in the 1980s in Medjugorje, Bosnia, and Kibeho, Rwanda.