Orsi said that religion “comes into being in an ongoing, dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life.”[1] The pilgrims who travel to touch and pray by statues of Our Lady of Lourdes[2] feel a closeness with religion that can’t be replicated outside of the site. Their voyage to the sanctuary, marked by the purchases of plane tickets, bus fares, and other such very physical and everyday actions, becomes sacred despite the fact that they have been through a whole loop of mundane things before arriving. This is the “dynamic relationship with everyday life” in which Orsi believes. Even in the hustle and bustle of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, hundreds of people each day feel a union with Mary and with Catholicism which they paid and travelled a great deal to experience.
If this apparition, which brings so much joy to Catholics, has been approved by the Church, it’s easy to argue for its place in religion. However, we are met with a new challenge when talking about unapproved Marian apparitions. I consider there to be two fairly well-defined classes of unapproved Apparitions. In the first class are those which have been visited by the Pope, are followed by large numbers of worshippers, and are considered by most Catholics to be genuine. In the second class I would place those objects such as toast burnt in Mary’s resemblance, or stains on walls which take her shape. As one can imagine, it grows more difficult to defend apparitions as religious as one progresses from approved, to first class, and to second. However, Orsi would defend all of these, as they all involve a personal relationship with the religion, even if only by a few. Even if the majority of Catholics would not regard the burnt toast as Holy, some Ebay purchaser paid $71 for it. Like pouring holy water into radiators[3], those who worship the approved and unapproved Marian apparitions feel spiritually fulfilled by their relationship with these objects of worship.
In order to support the relationship between Orsi’s worship-centric theory of religion and the worship of the Marian apparitions, I propose to travel to the site of various approved and first and second class unapproved Marian apparitions. Interviews with worshippers would determine how far pilgrims travel to see these apparitions, and how they feel that their worship has a place in their personal experience of Catholicism. It would be important to ask whether they consider themselves strictly Catholic, especially those at the unapproved sites. If it were revealed that people do indeed consider these apparitions as vital to their experience of religion, and that they will travel far to visit them, I would consider the apparitions to fall into Orsi’s category of the “ongoing, dynamic relationship” with religion which he considers to be as important as any tradition approved by the Church.
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