Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany
In 1876, three eight-year-old German girls gathering berries in the woods claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the village of Marpingen. Dubbed "the German Lourdes," the solidly Catholic village attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims, many claiming miraculous cures from a nearby spring. Prussian authorities intervened with a military occupation, curfews, sometimes brutal policing and arrests, including the incarceration of the three girls, who were accused of deception but later released. Catholic clergy, alarmed by manifestations of popular religiousity, remained silent, while liberals viewed Marpingen as symptomatic of Catholics' superstition and disloyalty to Bismarck's Germany. In this engrossing study, exhaustively researched from German archives, Harvard history professor Blackbourn links the Marpingen visions to severe economic distress and persecution of Germany's Catholic minority. He also provides a social history of Marian apparitions from the French Revolution to the 1980s. BOMC History Club alternate; Readers Subscription Book Club selection.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.