The Archbishop of Canterbury visited Lourdes earlier this week, the site where the Virgin Mary is supposed to have appeared to St. Bernadette. He was there taking part in the observance of the 150th Anniversary of the events. While there he gave a sermon and did not qualify any of his descriptions of the Virgins apparitions at the site. This has given rise to a number of stories published afterwards noting that this tacit acceptance of the Blessed Mother’s appearances are a first for a post reformation Archbishop.
In his sermon the Archbishop called attention to the fact that prior to the apparition 150 years ago, the people of Lourdes believed they knew all there was to know about the Blessed Mother. And that St. Bernadette’s initial attempts to tell of her visions were filled with stumbling and struggles to express the experience to others. From this Williams draws the lesson that Christians today may take comfort in St. Bernadette’s success and the acceptance by so many of the new knowledge of Mary that she shared.
But that message seems to have been lost in the reactions. They have focused instead on the implicit endorsement of the visions.
According to an article in the Church Times:
“The Archbishop’s visit to the shrine was criticised by the Revd Jeremy Brooks from the Protestant Truth Society, who described Dr Williams as behaving like a “papal puppet. . . All true Protestants will be appalled. Lourdes represents every thing about Roman Catholicism that the Protestant Reformation rejected.”
An article in the Daily Mail reports that others have similar criticism:
“His words shocked millions of Protestants worldwide because they not only signified a break with Protestant teaching on the Virgin Mary but also Dr Williams’s personal acceptance of the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which is explicitly linked to the apparitions.”
All of this is probably a reminder that the Elizabethan settlement which managed to hold catholic and protestant tensions in an uneasy truce was not an easy thing to manage. The fault lines are still present in the Anglican Communion to this day.