Antony Shugaar

Paolo Apolito

In 1994, a devout Catholic woman from Vermont began having religious visions and hearing the voice of the Virgin Mary. To spread word about her mystical experiences, she turned to the Internet. As Paolo Apolito records here, she is only one of many people who use the Web as a tool of religious devotion. Every day, thousands of Catholics - from Italy and Latin America to the United States and Bosnia - use the Internet to describe and celebrate apparitions of Mary, to exchange relics and advice in chat rooms, to make pilgrimages to religious Web sites, and to practice the rites of their faith online. But how has this potent new mix of technology and religiosity changed the way Catholics view their faith? And what challenges do the autonomous qualities of the Internet pose to the broader authority of Catholicism? Does the democratic nature of access to digital technologies constitute a return to a more archaic and mystical form of Catholicism that predates the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council? In working through these questions, Apolito considers visions of Mary on the Web over the past two decades, revealing a great deal about religion as it is now experienced through new information technologies. The Internet, he explains, has made possible a decentralized community of the devoted, even as it has absorbed God into the shifts and complexities of electronic circuitry. And this profound development in religious life will only accelerate as use of the Internet spreads around the world. An indispensable guide to the future of Catholicism, The Internet and the Madonna offers a compelling glimpse into the spiritual life of the connected soul.

Religious Visionary Experience on the Web

The Internet and the Madonn

"At Oliveto Citra, in the province of Salerno, on May 24, 1985, a group of children said they saw the Madonna. In subsequent weeks, hundreds of persons made similar declarations, beginning an extraordinary phenomenon of collective visions that is not yet over." "In Cielo in Terra: Costruzioni Simboliche di un' Apparizione Mariana (1993), translated for the first time here by William A. Christian Jr., Paolo Apolito completes the inquiry begun in a previous work about "how" the world of apparitions is constructed and considers the problem of "what" constitutes this world. The author shows how the visionary reality is constructed through the interaction of local symbolic creativity, Catholic tradition, ecclesiastical authority, and the charisma of the seers. Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra describes the conditions under which people who claimed to be seers gained access to the public and to the media, what local elites intervened to filter this process, what pilgrims brought to the visions, and how the content of the visions converged on the great themes of Marian apocalyptics." --Book Jacket.

Paolo Apolito

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