Uruguayan priest learned about the faith in Medjugorje and offers his study of Marian apparitions

Marcelo had been kicked out of three Catholic schools, and he had an “allergy to priests.” But in 2003, at 23 years old and with two friends ready to party in Europe, he left Uruguay for a destination that would change his life: Medjugorje. There, a shocking experience of faith was the seed of his conversion, and the first step on the path to the priesthood.

Today, motivated by the fruits of that experience, he presents his book The apparitions of the Virgin Mary. A historical and theological studythe thesis of his degree in Theology, which aims to be a tool for those who go through situations similar to the one he experienced.

A conversion story

To explain the origin of the book, the priest reviews his conversion story: “I was 23 years old and I went on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, without believing in absolutely anything… What’s more, they had kicked me out of three Catholic schools,” he points out.

Together with two friends, and with the excuse of the pilgrimage, they planned a tourist tour of Europe “to bowl” (party). But upon arriving at the place of the apparitions, he lived there “a very strong experience.”

“I was at zero, zero, zero. For me it was all new. And I came back totally renewed, my life changed,” the priest acknowledged to ACI Prensa. “I did not see the Virgin, it was not that I had any mystical experience of anything, but it was the place itself, the spiritual air that was there that led me to make such a big change, I confessed after years of not confessing.” ”, he noted.

There he began a path of greater closeness with the Church, and after putting up a lot of resistance, because “he was allergic to priests,” Marcelo responded to the call to the priesthood.

He completed his philosophical studies at the University of Montevideo and his theological studies at the “Monseñor Mariano Soler” Faculty of Theology of Uruguay. In 2015 he received ordination from Cardinal Daniel Sturla, Archbishop of Montevideo.

At the time of writing his thesis to obtain a Bachelor’s Degree in Theology, Father Marciano wanted to write about something that he really liked, and he chose the topic of apparitions, motivated by his story of conversion, but also by the reality of many people. from Uruguay who make pilgrimages to different parts of the world where apparitions occur.

The book, a tool to know what the Church says about the apparitions

The idea of ​​transforming this work into a book was intended to offer accompaniment from the Church to people who are living a conversion experience.

“When people return, as I returned at the time, many times they go to talk (about the places of apparitions) with a priest or with a reference, and they tell them yes or no according to their personal experience, if they like it or not. “They don’t like it,” he explained.

For this reason, his book attempts to collect “what the Church says on the subject, beyond what a priest, a bishop or a layman may think, so that people have something objective to base themselves on.”

The launch of the book was scheduled for March 2024. However, shortly after his work saw the light, he learned that the Holy See, through the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, would publish new provisions for the study of Marian apparitions.

“It made everything complicated for me, I had to put it in the freezer for a little while until I read the document that came out. And when the document came out I started to reformulate some things. In any case, although the document says that everything above is annulled, it does not give much news because it is a document that talks about Eucharistic miracles, it is not only about the apparitions of the Virgin,” she clarified.

What can the book give us?

First of all, the priest considered, a theological framework is offered to the apparitions of the Virgin, which are part of the “private revelations.” The public revelation, he specified, “ended with the death of the last apostle,” but “from the private revelations we began to find that the Mariophanies, the apparitions of the Virgin, have a foundation there.”

Regarding the recent document of the Church, Father Marciano highlights that “the Church today needs norms adaptable to this reality, because these other norms were from almost 50 years ago. And it often happened that today there is a bishop who approves the apparition. Then the bishop changes, and the one who comes denies it. In the middle are the faithful.”

“Who do we listen to? “To the previous bishop or to this one?” the author said. In its new document, “the Holy See says: let the bishop summon us, we also study it and see what the situation is like.”

The priest emphasized the importance of popular piety: “People love the Virgin, we all love the Virgin. So, when there is something like this, it makes hearts move, and no matter how much the Church says one thing or the other, people end up moving anyway because they find a love that is greater than what we often find in other places. ecclesiastical.

In that sense, he opined that “one has to have theological arguments to say: I may or may not agree with what you are telling me, but the Church has clarity in this document; she says this.”

Quoting the priest René Laurentin, the Uruguayan highlighted that “an important point to make a discernment about whether an apparition is real or not, are the fruits it bears.”

“He saw the spiritual fruits it bore and how people changed their hearts and returned to the Church, returned to the sacraments.” In the case of Medjugorje, for example, “there are about a thousand boys who received their vocation there, which is nonsense in the Church today,” he remarked.

“I think that the more people want to kill popular devotion, the further we move away from that love that exists in people’s hearts for the Virgin, that love that later ends up leading us to the Church,” he considered.

“In some way, what I am looking for with this book is to guide all those good people who at first convert and do not have theological arguments—and who do not care about them—but who later, with the passage of time, begin to interest, because one wants to know a little about the ecclesiastical doctrine on all these topics,” he concluded.