THERE are other miracles beside sporting ones. Or rather, "miracle" can mean many things. Crowds are gathering these days, in the atmosphere of miracle, at a chapel in Achill Sound. The place doesn't surprise me. The sadness of the past is very close perhaps because the railway ended right beside the bridge, the rails lying in wait for the people who came streaming off the island when they gave up the struggle with the land.
The wind scours down between the island and the mainland, at the sound. This isn't a place for prettiness. Not the place, but how little we think about what the claim of a miracle means, is the surprising thing. That we don't think what does personal revelation mean, in relation to authority?
A woman called Christina Gallagher who helps to run the chapel as I understand it in a retreat house for priests which was established some time ago in Achill Sound, has become a visionary. Mary, the Mother of God, speaks to her, in her opinion. And in the opinion of the great many people who go to Achill to join in the activities at Mrs Gallagher's "House of Prayer". The largest intangible benefit claimed for this and for most other Marian interventions is the benefit of prophecy. The Mother of God comes to warn us and tell us to repent. If we heed her, we will avert catastrophe.
About 95 per cent of the population of the Republic of Ireland call themselves Christian, at least for descriptive purposes. They are therefore familiar with the words I am using here. If I say that the Archbishop of Tuam has now appointed a number of people to look into Mrs Gallagher's claims, everyone knows what those words mean. But "mean" doesn't have its usual meaning in this area. What consensus can there be about the meaning of saying that the creator of the universe has a mother and that she is talking to a housewife from Mayo? What methods can possibly be brought to an investigation of such a claim? I take it for granted that the persons who are visionaries and elocutionists are perfectly sincere. But after satisfying themselves of that (or not) what else can ecclesiastical bureaucrats do?
THE subject opens up another corner of the vast subject of authority. I had realised that this dimension of popular belief is foundly opposed to the authority of the institutional church. But I hadn't realised how successful the institution has been in marginalising it. And how journalists play their part in the marginalisation.
Personal revelations are not part of respectable social discourse even though they have as good a claim to be as most other things. The Catholic Church holds itself as aloof as possible in a book about visions of Mary, for which I had had some hope because it is introduced by the Jesuit who holds the Chair of Mystical Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, I learn that when the Vatican in 1984 endorsed events involving a weeping statue in a convent in Akita, in Japan, it was the first such endorsement for 50 years. They've held back from endorsing Medjugorjc, which may have to do with the Catholic fascist element in Croatia, and the power struggle between the Franciscan fathers who run the shrine and the local bishop. Yet the messages received at Medjugorje are much the same as the ones at Akita which are, apparently, much the same as the third secret of Fatima, i.e., unless humankind repents "fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing not even priests.
What the apparitions say is often strikingly banal, though no more banal than the average sermon. But what is not banal is that messages of a similar nature are heard all over the world. The names, presumably, trip off the tongues of a certain kind of pilgrim Garabandal, Rwanda, Naju in South Korea, Phoenix, Arizona, in Sound, suppose. I, cannot know each other's cultures hear the same things and see, nearly always, a mother, rather than a father or a lover or a child.
All this is too like magic for those believers who accept mysteries, like transubstantiation, but not magic, yet always and everywhere have loved magic. And the magic surrounds messages that human beings can come at themselves, which is something. Messages between deity and person don't need an institution, such as the Roman Catholic Church, because they don't need mediation. What an apparition says is accessible, unconscious to unconscious.
IT carries no burden of consequences. People see a statue move or the sun dance but there's nothing they have to in consequence do. Or they may have to fast, but they don't have to transform themselves. It would be foolish to sneer at all this. Scepticism is just as arbitrary as belief in the supernatural. It would also be offensive. Many of the great European Marian apparitions have been to poor and lonely people, often very young people. It is mostly the powerless who flock to apparition sites, I imagine, to try to touch the one power that no establishment has expropriated from them already. And the oddest things do happen. It is only a quirk of our culture that the establishments try to ignore that.
The near supernatural is of central importance in the lives of very many people. Yet I can't think of any Irish writer, except Colm Toibin, who has cared to explore the visions of the people. Perhaps this is because as his book The Sign of the Cross shows this can't be done without coming to terms with one's own sliding scale of belief. Journalists shun the personal side of religion (thus propping up the institutional side of it). An alleged apparition isn't "news". And columnists and general commentators will use almost anything else as an instrument of analysis accounts of crimes, popular music, films made by 25 year olds, voting patterns but they won't use the efflorescences of the thing called faith. All this is a victory for the organised churches. The last thing a priestly caste wants is demystification.
When I was at Medjugorje for this newspaper, I went to the yard of the small house where, under a perspex porch, one of the visionaries was answering questions put to her through an interpreter. I heard an Irishman's voice raised to put an urgent question to the young woman. "Do unbaptised children go to heaven?" I turned. It was a senior churchman a figure in the Irish church who would no doubt be listened to by legislators and so on whose beliefs, in other words, would affect my life. And he was asking her!
Then I thought why ever not? Why is what he knows any better than what she knows, if it weren't for the church trappings? If what visionaries claim is true, are they not superior to churchmen? Is Christina Gallagher not superior to the investigators sent by the Archbishop of Tuam? And if it is not true though the girl at Medjugorje was patently utterly truthful does the word "true" go on having meaning? Or is truth no more than the version of revelation that authority happens to back?