Vatican approval of apparitions would now be ‘exceptional,’ doctrine chief says
(Justin McLellan. National Catholic Reporter).
Vatican rulings on allegedly supernatural phenomena, such as Marian apparitions, will continue to be released publicly, but official validation of an event’s supernatural status — as has happened at Lourdes, Fatima and Guadalupe — would be “exceptional,” the Vatican’s doctrine chief said. Speaking to Alfa y Omega, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Madrid, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that a Vatican ruling of whether an event was truly supernatural “does not seem necessary, because it has long been clear that not even a declaration of supernaturality obliges believers to accept such phenomena as of divine origin.”