Garabandal vs Medjugorje vs Kibeho Rwanda

Physiological Proof of Religious Visionary Experiences

Garabandal vs Medjugorje vs Kibeho Rwanda


The Catholic Church goes through its own processes for affirming or denying Religious Visionaries, and some of these procedures are troubling and stupid. First among the stupid things is that they have this extreme emphasis on protecting Catholic Orthodoxy. They are pretending that in any disagreement between Heaven and the Vatican, that the Vatican must always be right. What this leads to is a situation where even if there were any slight imperfections in the Catholic Church, then they would be absolutely uncorrectable, as even the very Voice of God, if He were to speak in order to point out such error, would be immediately discredited because, of course, every single Bishop who knows the letter of the Catechism would know better than God Himself. Yes, suddenly Tradition and the Absolute Truth of how Catholicism has always understood things can be tossed aside easily enough if the Bishops decide to have a kind of Political Convention and vote one way or another on things that they treat merely as policy issues. Such political haggling and horse trade, they call that the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is okay as long as it works politically and in the basest materialistic channels, where the Bishops do all their work. But certainly it can never be said that the Bishops of the Catholic Church have ever been influenced by anything Religious or Spiritual. That is simply not the Holy Spirit as they have grown from time immemorial to understand it.

But why should there ever be a Visionary? If the Church had everything absolutely correct, then God would have no need for sending any Visionaries, isn’t that so? So Visionaries are inherently a Corrective. Yes, the Church has no trouble approving Visionaries when the Visionaries speak in regards to correcting the people, the Laity or the Religious Orders, but the Church bristles when their own Fat Cat Bishops receive Heaven’s Scrutinizing Gaze. The only thing the Bishops need help with is their legal strategies for protecting their sexual lifestyle choices with children and such.

Another problem with Church review of the Visionaries is that there does not seem to have been an effort to arrive at some expected physiological baseline for genuine Religious Experiences, and this some 40 years after the publication of Charles Tart’s “Altered States of Consciousness”.

What brings this to mind is that I have been reading “Our Lady of Kibeho” by Immaculée Ilibagiza of Rwanda in Africa. Her description of the trance states of the Kibeho Visionaries reminded me of what I had read concerning the Garabandal Visionaries in Spain. Unfortunately, the physiological descriptions from Spain and Africa have only the most marginal similarities with those of the more famous Visionaries from Medjugorje in Croatia.

In Garabandal Spain it was obvious to everybody that at least something supernatural was going on, and the only choice was between whether the God or the Devil were responsible. The Visionaries would become impervious to their surroundings, their dissociation was so complete that they wouldn’t flinch in the least even under the most extreme tortures – driving nails into their arms, needles up the fingernails and applying flames to hands and feet while the Visionaries were in trance. And the Visionaries seemed capable of the impossible (which is what they mean by ‘supernatural’, isn’t it?), for instance, dashing about on the mountain side amidst the roughest terrain almost as if by levitation. In Kibeho Rwanda the seers would collapse and then assume the characteristic of being un-moveable – six strong men could not pick up a small teenaged waif. Also, in the African case there had been some rather extreme trances in which the seers had appeared death-like for longer than a day at a time. Finally, trained medical personnel detected something like an hourly breath and heartbeat. Ordinarily we shouldn’t expect teenagers to be able to fake such things.

But in Medjugorje the famous Seers only had to stop paying attention to the crowd, they only needed to all look up in approximately the same direction, and then they only had to agree upon telling about the same story afterwards. They brought in Medical Examiners who treated the Medjugorje Visionaries as authentic only because they blinked only half so often during their trances as at other times. Now, if they had not blinked at all…

In both Rwanda and Spain there was a certain vicious sadism applied to testing the Subjects for complete dissociation during the Trance States. We could certainly deplore such cruelty, had the seers felt anything, but what was generally conceded was that the children felt nothing at the time and had no experience of discomfort later – no open bleeding sores or third degree burns to treat. Why were the Medjugorje Seers let off so easy? Well, probably because they flinched at the first slightest tickle. They were given the Test, only they didn’t pass it. After that they were only measured on their ability to play pretend. Then Wishful Thinkers gave them the go ahead. Also, there may have been something of a material agenda behind Medjugorje. What all the books seem to say is that the Franciscan Religious Order in Croatia put together the entire Visionary ploy in order to draw tourist dollars to the area, so they could buy up weapons cashes in preparation for all the Ethnic Cleansing they would soon be engaged in. And it all seems to be born out by the subsequent facts. When one checks the Ethnic Demographic Map before the Civil War and then after, one finds that the Medjugorje District was perhaps the most successful at almost entirely becoming Ethnically Homogenous, that is the nice People of Medjugorje were successfully able to either chase away or kill nearly every single Serb and Muslim in the district. Mostly from the profits they made from Rosary Bead sales.

Anyway, the Catholic Church needs stop insisting on Doctrinal Purity. After all, nobody applied any such Tests to Paul who made up most of these Doctrines that they now must so stubbornly protect against so many attacks from Spiritual and Theological Common Sense and the dictates of Ordinary Morals. The Bishops conveniently forget that at the Height of Catholic Civilization most of Paulist Doctrine was ignored, and that the recognition and implementation of Paulist Doctrine, far from helping anything, in fact went hand in hand with the Decline and Fall of Catholic Civilization. So why protect something that is at best dubious in the first place?

It would be better to define exactly what one should expect physiologically from a true Visionary, and then just learn to live with whatever these True Visionaries bring with them from Heaven. The Jews had called them Prophets, and look at how well it worked out for them.