God is often performing miracles around the world that cannot be verified quickly by the local bishop or Vatican, in the form of apparitions, allocutions, visions, healings, the stigmata, crying statues, holy people levitating in prayer, incorrupt bodies, and the like. Sometimes the phenomenon is not authentic, heterodox, and taken advantage of my charlatans.
That said, could not the new Vatican document making ecclesiastical investigations more judicious and efficient not result in at least a partial suppression of signs from heaven meant to convey the Christian message?
Modernists deny the supernatural, and therefore dismiss these phenomena as medieval superstition. And since modernists have a stronghold in the Vatican, how much will they use this document to suppress the supernatural?
The new rules have the local bishop and Vatican officials investigate and judge the case asap, to determine whether or not to support the laity engaging it, or to forbid doing so. But it has to go relatively quickly with a final decision. Why not allow in some cases a longer process, or to suspend judgment when the phenomenon is difficult to figure out but not harming the faithful?
There are many of these phenomena around the world, resulting in a local following of popular piety, Catholics traveling to pray and ask God’s blessing at the sight of these phenomena. God frequently performs miracles in different parts of the world, to increase people’s faith. Small chapels and shrines are built. It is a form a piety going back to the early Church.
But throughout Church history, the Church allows these forms of popular piety to help develop and spread faith, at times intervening to promote or forbid that piety, but often not making any official judgment. Devotion to private revelations and miracles has always been part of the life of the Church.
Let’s look at the case of Sr. Wilhemena’s incorrupt body at the convent in Missouri, discovered last year. Last I heard the bishop told the faithful they could not venerate Sister’s body. What is wrong with touching her body, or rather the encasement of her body, to venerate her for her holiness, and ask for her prayers? Why does that require the bishop’s permission?
I have my doubts the diocese will rule the incorruption is worthy of belief and veneration. Especially after this new document. The document seems to be trying to root out false phenomena without promoting the existence of these true phenomena. Without affirming that God continues to intervene with miracles that can be verified. I don’t think it denies this, but it seems focused on cracking down on false phenomenon, which comes across cynical about the supernatural. That is my impression reading the document and commentaries on it.