...apparitions, such as Fatima. Eucharistic bleeding miracles, that are confirmed with science? I also recently read in OBOB about a certain saint, that on the celebration of his feast day, every single year, a vial of his blood liquifies before the congregation; the one time it didn't liquify, in 1980, there was an earthquake that killed a lot of people in the region in which this miracle takes place.
Then there's also a bleeding Eucharist miracle that was scientifically tested. The Eucharist fell to the floor, where it began to bleed. Testing was positive for a damaged human heart...
I'll chip in as a raised/confirmed Catholic gone non-denominational on my return to Christ.
I don't have anything against Catholicism actually but I understand how the debate happens and what's going on regarding the 'back to basics' movement of the Protestants who wished to figure it out for themselves over their concerns on whether or not the authority of the church is something they wanted to accept on blind faith (the shoe-string extrema to the other end are the Doc Marquis 'ex-Illuminist' videos claiming that Catholicism via Constantine encapsulated the so called witchcraft religion of Babylon ie. Nimrod and Semiramis, which on further inspection falls a part but a lot of people are still trying to figure out why Christmas and Saturnalia are the same day or where additional sacriments came from above and beyond eucharist, baptism, and marriage).
Admittedly I've done a lot of research to try and figure out the metaphysics of the situation with respect to the bible. My take: I don't think Catholics do their theurgy that much different than protestants. That said I'd also have to add that Eliphas Levi was noted as stating that there was no sorcerer or wizard who could keep up, ie. whatever magick they played with couldn't hold a candle to the theurgic power of the church universal, he apparently (as the 19th century's most studious occultist) gave up his research and practice of magick go to back to the church less for fear of eternal consequences than for an understanding he gained that he was better off just joining the Catholic church.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not at all insinuating that the Catholic church practices occult magick, rather that in the parlance of the academic metaphysics world all prayer and mass is essentially considered under the scope of theurgy much like all healings and divine miracles are what they call sacred/divine magick. Terms like theurgy and magick are utterly repugnant to most Christians understandably but aside from the issue of parlance it seems to be pretty well mapped out, the difference being with Christianity it's prayer to the most high - ie. the trinity; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, whereas people such as Iamblichus and the Egyptians as he wrote about them simply hadn't made the discovery and unfortunately for Iamblichus he actually became anti-Christian due to his feeling that there was an anti-intellectual barbarism that would destroy the progress made by the neoplatonist researchers and cause it to be lost to history.
My thoughts on bleeding eucharist - it's a greater manifestation than what protestants/evangelicals manage only because the Catholic church has more experience/know-how and also leans on a lot of very effective techniques for vertical (ie. man to God) connection that may not be as intuitive or straight-forward hence to some extent if a protestant were to try and do the same they might have to reinvent more of a wheel than they realized. It's more an issue of prayer technology, at least by my best determination, than specifically an issue of denomination.
Just curious how non-Catholics reconcile these things. And of course, Mary's wish for Russia to convert with her apparition at Fatima apparently came to pass with the Russian Orthodox Church.
This is a really, really interesting situation and one that I've been trying to understand for quite a while.
One of the first things that pulled me in was the feeling that this was an extra-biblical phenomena and that this was a goddess of antiquity trying to pull people away from sound doctrine and take as many people into perdition as possible.
The more I researched it however the more I started to wonder how correct that really was. One of the things that tend to worry a lot of protestants a lot is the Mariology/Mariolatry issue. The thing the Catholic church unfortunately has a way of doing is telling people 'believe x' but won't really do a satisfactory job of explaining why, and part of it I think is because they've had a lot of discoveries that might feel very heterodox in comparison to what the exoteric (ie. public level) church would teach.
Many protestants would clearly consider the manifestations of Mary as the problem/headache of the church of Thyatira in Revelations. Completely to the other side of this, aside from Elizabeth's saying to Mary about her being blessed above all women or Jesus saying to John 'this is your mother' - Solomon's wisdom comes to mind, particularly the sheer blunt force of Proverbs 8, particularly what's said in Proverbs 8:30, and the correlation between that and what the apparitions of Mary seem to be saying. Additionally, aside from the Bolshevik Revelution, Russian Orthodoxy had one of the most profound Mariologies. Her added edification in the Russian church may have been an added factor in her manifestations at Fatima.
With that in mind I have to wonder whether the Catholic church largely avoided, perhaps in fear of how such revelation would come off, that in the in the bible we have something of our own Sophia (not the Gnostic aeon however) and in comparing Proverbs 8 to John 1 it seems cogent that they may have worked hand in hand in creating the earth, and for all those afraid that the Marian apparitions are Isis playing with people's minds - for as much as the Egyptians like to speak of her as being the weaver or all material forms on the pre-material fabric loom it may very well be that what they called Isis was simply their culture's creole of Lady Wisdom.
I know I just shared a lot of very controversial thoughts but I think it's wise to look both inside and outside the box, ie. such hypotheses will either stand or utterly unravel based on their own merits or lack thereof. At the same time it seems like one of the bigger challenges the church has (all across denominations) is staying up to speed on connecting all the dots of reality with the bible. People like Tom Horn, Steve Quayle, Chuck Missler, and the late David Flynn haven't done a bad job at probing all the evidence inside and out of scripture but a lot of this kind of overarching research is still rather nacent and for as many new and outside the box ideas as it might present it also has a lot of speculations that are fueled by what may very well be cultural tautologies that may have less to do with the letter of the bible than being a cultural phenomena.
As for myself I don't know that I will go back, mainly that when it comes to the issue of praying 'to' Mary or praying to saints or angels on that particular level I'm not comfortable with it. To be fair I know Catholics are not putting such entities above God and if anything are only asking for amplification or an assist on their prayers, just that I want to do my own research to understand whether I'm comfortable doing that or whether I'd simply prefer to speak to such entities or departed as I would to simply with the level of respect that I would for someone of a very responsible/ethical position in the world. I'd also have to disagree with the notion that one has to be Catholic to go to heaven; the evidence I see of the Holy Spirit working through protestants, evangelicals, and nondenominational preachers is just as much in effect and from what most watchers and current prophets would say on the matter it would seem that believing in Jesus as your Lord and Savior is the most important issue.
