Cappoquin apparitions?

newmug

Hi all. I've always been fascinated by the cappoquin apparitions. It seems the message Mary had has come true, I think it would be fair to say that the devil has done some serious harm to the Church in recent times.


What do you's think?


http://www.thefreelibrary.com/VIRGIN+MARY+SPOKE+TO+ME%3B+Teenager's+vision+starts+rush+of+pilgrims+to...-a061095338

SonOfAdam

In fairness, it's the 'Church' itself that has done the harm, no need to be passing the blame to the poor divil

newmug

SonOfAdam wrote: »

In fairness, it's the 'Church' itself that has done the harm, no need to be passing the blame to the poor divil

Eh, yea. All 1.5 billion of us are to blame, not just a handful of evil baxtard pedophiles who used the job of priest to cover their tracks. :rolleyes:

Manach

I would not denigrate the normative effects of our belief in the entity that is a font of evil this world. But as well, there were flaws within the Church in Ireland, both due to the institutional nature and within the Irish psyche of failing to act to counter-balance authority (i.e. latest Guards revelations).
So the damage has been caused by numerous vectors, and while attempting to repair the damage to the community from that which of purely human origin of the small number that acted and failed to act, it would good to pray to avert such harm.

newmug

Manach wrote: »

I would not denigrate the normative effects of our belief in the entity that is a font of evil this world. But as well, there were flaws within the Church in Ireland, both due to the institutional nature and within the Irish psyche of failing to act to counter-balance authority (i.e. latest Guards revelations).
So the damage has been caused by numerous vectors, and while attempting to repair the damage to the community from that which of purely human origin of the small number that acted and failed to act, it would good to pray to avert such harm.

Thanks for your reply Manach. While I may not fully agree with you, at least you respectfully gave an informative answer.

Although the shortcomings in the Church have indeed been implemented by humans, the Christian belief is that the devil acts on our conciousness, tempting people in their mind, decieving with offers of pleasure or power, as opposed to physically materialising and causing trouble himself. Just think of the popular image of devil and the angel sitting on your shoulders. In other words, he uses humans by proxy, and indeed while the human has a choice whether or not to act on the devils invitation, it is ultimately the devil who instigates all evil in the world.

In this particular case, my contention is that the Cappoquin apparations predicted the fall in popularity of the Church, saying that the devil will infiltrate it, and guess what? The Church has taken a significant fall, primarily caused by the child abuse scandals, and I think we can all agree that sexually abusing children is evil. Ergo, the predictions were correct. Now, was this coincidence, or is it concrete evidence of the supernatural?

Peregrinus

Concrete evidence of the supernatural? No.

I'm old enough to remember that in the mid-1980s there was a rash of "moving statues" cases across the South of Ireland - Ballinspittle, Dunmanway, Cappoquin and more besides - and a variety of more or less cryptic messages were offered by a selection of visionaries. If you make sufficient diverse and sufficiently vague predictions, there's a good chance that some of them can later be mapped onto events, more or less, and people forget about the others. There's nothing supernatural about that.

Besides, the Cappoquin case was in 1985. We know now that by then the child abuse phenomenon was in full swing in the church; in fact it had been going on for years. If child abuse is the devil's work, then the devil had well and truly infiltrated the church long before 1985. What happened ten years later was that they got found out, with consequent loss of respect and status. But we can't imagine - can we? - that the Virgin saw Getting Found Out as the problem to be avoided.

The implication of the prophecy, if we take it at face value, is that "the devil infiltrating the church" does not refer to clerics abusing hildren; it refers to those clerics getting caught. So treating this as a genuine supernatural prophecy is very, very problematic. It implies that, in the Virgin's understanding, the evil thing was not to abuse children; it was to get caught.

So, not supernatural. Sincere, quite probably, but not supernatural.