This Protestant Researched Marian Miracles, & What He Learned Blew His Mind

Satan cannot drive out Satan. A house, or a kingdom, cannot be divided against itself.

The synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record this profound event in the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. After healing a demon-possessed man, Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees, the pious religious leaders of the time, who question what authority Jesus has to cast out demons. They suggest, since Jesus certainly can’t possibly be working through the power of God, that it must be Satan, the devil, that’s given Him the power to drive out the demonic.

I think it’s safe to say that Jesus’s profound theological observation—that Satan can’t work against himself—can be applied to the context of modern day miracles as well.

Miracles, like those connected to the appearance or the intercession of the Virgin Mary, cannot possibly be explained as work of Satan. Miracles which, for all intents and purposes, draw millions to Jesus Christ Himself. When I dug deep into the historical miracles of the Catholic Church, especially those connected with the intercession and appearance of the Virgin Mary, I knew I had something enormous to contend with. What I found, dear reader, blew my mind.

As a Protestant, especially a Pentecostal, miracles weren’t something wholly unfamiliar to my faith life or to my understanding of Christianity. Far from it. In the middle years of my University life I attended a charismatic Pentecostal church in town where faith healings, speaking in tongues, and being slain in the Spirit were par for the course in a Sunday evening meeting. I’ve witnesses miracles, to be sure.

When I began to explore the Catholic Church, however, I was perplexed, as a Protestant, as to how miracles could be attributed to the intercession of Mary. To begin, I didn’t understand that notion of the intercession of the saints, so that didn’t help. But I worried, as well, that perhaps all those superstitious Catholics had the wool pulled over their eyes, so to speak, by the Father of Lies, Satan himself.

I think this is a fairly common concern of evangelical Protestants—at least this was my experience. What if the miracles of Mary were nothing more than a garden variety strategy by Satan to lead the Catholic Church, and well-meaning Catholic Christians, away from the truth of Christ? What if, instead of raising up Christ, these miracles were a diabolical means to elevate Mary to the status of an idol? My fear, as a good Pentecostal Protestant, was that Satan had put Mary in the way of Christ.

But how can a kingdom be divided against itself? It can’t. Jesus is clear.

Because, as I’ve learned, the Marian miracles, and there are scores and scores of them, do not lead well-meaning people away from Christ, towards Mary. The Marian miracles lead millions to Christ. And that can’t be the work of Satan.

Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal

In 1830 an apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared to Sister Catherine Laboure, a novice in the community of the Daughters of Charity in Paris, France. Over the course of several appearances, the Virgin Mary allegedly told Sister Catherine to have a medal fashioned in her image for faithful Catholics to wear around their necks.

Now called the Miraculous Medal, the medal itself features highly symbolic imagery of Mary and asserts, among other things, her Immaculate Conception, a dogma which wasn’t proclaimed by the Church until 24 years later, although it had been piously believed since the early foundation of the Christian Church.

Several things are critically important to understand about this story.

The first is this. The Virgin Mary appeared to Sister Catherine—these days canonized as St. Catherine—at a critical junction in the life of the Church. Although widely held to be true, the Church hadn’t promulgated an official teaching on the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary—that is, she was conceived from the very first moment, protected by God, from sin. St. Catherine’s apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared at just the right time, making even more popular the widely held belief by establishing a mission to create and distribute the Miraculous Medal and its message.

The second important thing to understand is this. The body of St. Catherine is what the Church calls incorruptible. What does that mean? That means that coming up on 200 years after her death her body, which lies interred in the chapel where she first received this vision of the Virgin Mary, has not decayed.

I’ll say that again: Her body has not decayed. For how long now? 200 years.

What blows my mind, dear reader, is that not only have miracles been genuinely associated with the medal that the Blessed Mother gave to St. Catherine—that’s why it’s called the Miraculous Medal—but that, as if to underscore the reality of these miracles, Catherine’s body itself has not decayed, unpreserved, after nearly 200 years!

Our Lady of Guadalupe

In a nutshell, the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe is something after the heart of Jesus. Of course, because Mary’s miracles don’t work through some incredible power of Mary herself—they point to Christ—so we should expect, as she often does, Mary to appear to the poor and destitute, the young and the sick, as Jesus did, and would.

In 1531, the Virgin Mary appeared to a native American peasant named Juan Diego in a place just outside of Mexico City. Mary asked for Juan to petition the local bishop to have chapel build in her name. Juan, obviously awestruck, went to the bishop but his story wasn’t well received. In the course of several more appearances, and the continued reluctance of the bishop to believe Juan’s story, the Virgin Mary instructed him to gather some flowers into his cloak, flowers growing on a particular hill which, interestingly enough, weren’t native to the area (and shouldn’t have been growing at that time).

Finding the flowers, Juan gathered them up and went to see the bishop. When he opened his cloak to show the bishop the flowers, as proof of the Virgin Mary’s appearance and the truth of his story, he revealed quite a bit more.

Instead, the inside of Juan’s cloak was miraculously transformed into a deeply symbolic image of the Blessed Mother. Like the Miraculous Medal, 300 years later, the symbolism was incredibly rich, and the appearance of the image itself, entirely miraculous.

In fact, and incredibly, like the incorruptible body of St. Catherine the very same cloak worn by Juan Diego, displaying the image of Our Lady, can still be seen today, nearly 500 years later. The cloak and its preservation from decay, subjected to rigorous scientific tests, is truly beyond the explanation of science.

And pointing to Christ? The miracle of the cloak and word of its occurrence spread throughout Mexico and it’s believed that some eight million Aztec natives were converted to Christianity. The pilgrimage to see Juan’s cloak and the chapel which was, obviously, built in her name following the miracle, remains the largest pilgrimage in North America and sees millions of people every year come to celebrate Mass, and worship Jesus Christ, from all around the world.

That blows my mind.

Our Lady of Lourdes

Finally, the miracles of Our Lady of Lourdes.

In 1858, the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year old peasant girl in Lourdes, France. In the course of several appearances, the Virgin Mary spoke to Bernadette who, like Juan, wasn’t at first believed by her parents and peers. But Bernadette insisted, and persisted, and Mary’s appearances culminated in the instruction to Bernadette to dig in a certain area of the ground, near the grotto, where Mary had been appearing.

From the area Bernadette dug a spring appeared. This spring would later go on to be connected with scores of miraculous physical and spiritual healings and gain official status in the Church as a place of great importance.

In fact, the incredible aspect of Lourdes, in my opinion, is the enormous body of evidence which exists to support the profound miracles perpetuated at this holy site. The Lourdes Medical Bureau, an organization which exists to examine and rule on possible miraculous healings, has declared 68 scientifically inexplicable miracles to have occurred at Lourdes. The Bureau itself is incredible in its sophistication and expertise made up on an enormous panel of expert doctors, including skeptics, from around the world and with a tightly-controlled and highly-regulated system for declaring what is, and isn’t, an unexplained miracle.

Out of some 7,000 cases the Bureau has examined 68 may seem like a small amount of genuine healings. But, think about this, that’s still 68 healings that science cannot, in any sense, explain.

That blows my mind.

Lourdes, to this day, is one of the most popular Catholic pilgrimage sites in the world.

Mary’s Miracles Always Point to Christ

A good, devout Catholic doesn’t need to believe in any of Mary’s miracles to be a Catholic. The Church teaches that private revelation, like these sorts of miracles, can be believed, or not. Even in cases, like Lourdes, where the Church definitively declares a miracle to have taken place it’s up to the individual believer to necessarily subscribe to it, or not.

Personally, and, obviously, there’s a lot of compelling stuff in here. For me, as a Protestant, I find no other way to explain these miracles than to say, flatly, that there’s something about Mary. Something incredible. Something blessed.

If God doesn’t work through the intercession of the saints, if Mary was no one more special than a fourteen year old Jewish virgin, then why is her intercession the cause of these profound miracles? Why, if she is not, as Catholics assert, first amongst the saints, would God use her in this way? It would, in the end, truly be pulling the wool over the eyes of Catholics if God used Mary in this way and let us go on, happily, believing in her special place in the kingdom.

If Mary isn’t who Catholics say she is, and if the saints aren’t to be venerated (asked to pray for us in the same way I ask my living, Christian friends to pray for me) then why would God allow her to appear, in this way, to mislead Catholics. Because, ultimately, it would be misleading if she appeared like this and she wasn’t someone special.

Would God allow that? Would God use that?

As a Protestant, I struggled for answers here.

It would be, utterly impossible, however, for Satan to be working in this way. I think that’s clear enough. Satan could never, and would never, use anything that would lead so many millions of people to a relationship with Christ—and that is precisely what these Marian miracles do.

There are only so many ways to explain our way out of this, and they all exhaust in a simple conclusion. And that conclusion, the truth about Mary, the saints, and their intercessory power, has blown my mind.

I ask my living, Christian friends to pray for me) then why would God allow her to appear, in this way, to mislead Catholics. Because, ultimately, it would be misleading if she appeared like this and she wasn’t someone special. Would God allow that? Would God use that?

Why does God allow that and more, even any alternative to what is of Him? The answer to that query by that poor ignorant soul, is the same reason why God Eve to be tempted, and allowed magicians to duplicate the first 3 miracles of Moses, and for Simon to do things that fooled the simple into believing that "This man is the great power of God," (Acts 8:10) and for occult doctors to do many miracles, and for Islam to continue for centuries;

and will allow in the latter days "the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." (2 Thessalonians 2:9-10)

And will allow the devil when he is loosed at the end to "deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea." (Revelation 20:8)

The answer is that from the beginning to the end God allows competition, to prove the hearts of men, to see what they really wanted. This ignorant soul rejected Scripture which nowhere examples or teaches addressing anyone else but God in prayer to Heaven, besides the other aspects of Catholic Mariolatry , and relied on signs above what Scripture teaches and God gave him over to his delusion.

Allowing such deception is a judgment upon the people:

"I also will not henceforth drive out any from before them of the nations which Joshua left when he died:" "That through them I may prove Israel, whether they will keep the way of the Lord to walk therein, as their fathers did keep it, or not." (Judges 2:21-22)

"And he said, Hear thou therefore the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left." "And the Lord said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth–gilead? And one said on this manner, and another said on that manner." "And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the Lord, and said, I will persuade him." "And the Lord said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also: go forth, and do so." (1 Kings 22:19-22)

There was even "Sister Magdalena of the Cross -The devil's saint for 40 years" with her demonic heavenly visions: http://www.mysticsofthechurch.com/2011/12/sister-magdalena-of-cross-nun-who-made.html

But the Mary of Catholicism is NOT the humble holy Mary of Scripture, the former of whom is exalted (officially or with implicit sanction) as

• an almost almighty demigoddess to whom "Jesus owes His Precious Blood" to,

• whose [Mary] merits we are saved by,

• who "had to suffer, as He did, all the consequences of sin,"

• and was bodily assumed into Heaven, which is a fact (unsubstantiated in Scripture or even early Tradition) because the Roman church says it is, and "was elevated to a certain affinity with the Heavenly Father,"

• and whose power now "is all but unlimited,"

• for indeed she "seems to have the same power as God,"

• "surpassing in power all the angels and saints in Heaven,"

• so that "the Holy Spirit acts only by the Most Blessed Virgin, his Spouse."

• and that “sometimes salvation is quicker if we remember Mary's name then if we invoked the name of the Lord Jesus,"

• for indeed saints have "but one advocate," and that is Mary, who "alone art truly loving and solicitous for our salvation,"

• Moreover, "there is no grace which Mary cannot dispose of as her own, which is not given to her for this purpose,"

• and who has "authority over the angels and the blessed in heaven,"

• including "assigning to saints the thrones made vacant by the apostate angels,"

• whom the good angels "unceasingly call out to," greeting her "countless times each day with 'Hail, Mary,' while prostrating themselves before her, begging her as a favour to honour them with one of her requests,"

• and who (obviously) cannot "be honored to excess,"

•

Martin Luther on the Virgin Mary.

There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know. And since the Holy Spirit has told us nothing about it, we can make of it no article of faith . . . It is enough to know that she lives in Christ. (Sermon of August 15, 1522, the last time Martin Luther preached on the Feast of the Assumption)

The veneration of Mary is inscribed in the very depths of the human heart. (Sermon, September 1, 1522)

[She is the] highest woman and the noblest gem in Christianity after Christ . . . She is nobility, wisdom, and holiness personified. We can never honor her enough. Still honor and praise must be given to her in such a way as to injure neither Christ nor the Scriptures. (Sermon, Christmas, 1531)

No woman is like you. You are more than Eve or Sarah, blessed above all nobility, wisdom, and sanctity. (Sermon, Feast of the Visitation, 1537)

One should honor Mary as she herself wished and as she expressed it in the Magnificat. She praised God for his deeds. How then can we praise her? The true honor of Mary is the honor of God, the praise of God's grace . . . Mary is nothing for the sake of herself, but for the sake of Christ . . . Mary does not wish that we come to her, but through her to God. (Explanation of the Magnificat, 1521)

Luther gives the Blessed Virgin the exalted position of "Spiritual Mother" for Christians:

It is the consolation and the superabundant goodness of God, that man is able to exult in such a treasure. Mary is his true Mother .. (Sermon, Christmas, 1522)

Mary is the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of all of us even though it was Christ alone who reposed on her knees . . . If he is ours, we ought to be in his situation; there where he is, we ought also to be and all that he has ought to be ours, and his mother is also our mother. (Sermon, Christmas, 1529)

It is a sweet and pious belief that the infusion of Mary's soul was effected without original sin; so that in the very infusion of her soul she was also purified from original sin and adorned with God's gifts, receiving a pure soul infused by God; thus from the first moment she began to live she was free from all sin" (Sermon: "On the Day of the Conception of the Mother of God," 1527)

She is full of grace, proclaimed to be entirely without sin- something exceedingly great. For God's grace fills her with everything good and makes her devoid of all evil. (Personal {"Little"} Prayer Book, 1522)

Martin Luther on Mary's Perpetual Virginity

Christ, our Savior, was the real and natural fruit of Mary's virginal womb . . . This was without the cooperation of a man, and she remained a virgin after that. {Luther's Works, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan (vols. 1-30) & Helmut T. Lehmann (vols. 31-55), St. Louis: Concordia Pub. House (vols. 1-30); Philadelphia: Fortress Press (vols. 31-55), 1955, v.22:23 / Sermons on John, chaps. 1-4 (1539)} Christ . . . was the only Son of Mary, and the Virgin Mary bore no children besides Him . . . I am inclined to agree with those who declare that 'brothers' really mean 'cousins' here, for Holy Writ and the Jews always call cousins brothers. {Pelikan, ibid., v.22:214-15 / Sermons on John, chaps. 1-4 (1539)}

A new lie about me is being circulated. I am supposed to have preached and written that Mary, the mother of God, was not a virgin either before or after the birth of Christ . . . {Pelikan, ibid.,v.45:199 / That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew (1523)}

Scripture does not say or indicate that she later lost her virginity . . . When Matthew [1:25] says that Joseph did not know Mary carnally until she had brought forth her son, it does not follow that he knew her subsequently; on the contrary, it means that he never did know her . . . This babble . . . is without justification . . . he has neither noticed nor paid any attention to either Scripture or the common idiom.

{Pelikan, ibid., v.45:206,212-3 / That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew (1523) } ". . . she is full of grace, proclaimed to be entirely without sin. . . . God's grace fills her with everything good and makes her devoid of all evil. . . . God is with her, meaning that all she did or left undone is divine and the action of God in her. Moreover, God guarded and protected her from all that might be hurtful to her."

(Luther's Works, American edition, vol. 43, p. 40, ed. H. Lehmann, Fortress, 1968)

". . . she is rightly called not only the mother of the man, but also the Mother of God. . . . it is certain that Mary is the Mother of the real and true God." {Sermon on John 14. 16: Luther's Works (St. Louis, ed. Jaroslav, Pelican, Concordia. vol. 24. p. 107)}

"Christ our Savior was the real and natural fruit of Mary's virginal womb. . . . This was without the cooperation of a man, and she remained a virgin after that."

(On the Gospel of St. John: Luther's Works, vol. 22. p. 23, ed. Jaroslav Pelican, Concordia, 1957)

"Men have crowded all her glory into a single phrase: The Mother of God. No one can say anything greater of her, though he had as many tongues as there are leaves on the trees." (From the Commentary on the Magnificat)

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