Under Her Mantle

On Approval

What the Church Means by "Approved"

An approved apparition is not an article of faith. The Church's teaching is bound to Scripture and Tradition alone; no private revelation — however well attested — can add to what has been handed down once for all. A Catholic remains free, in conscience, to withhold assent from even a fully approved apparition. What the bishop's approval protects is narrower and, in its way, more demanding: a formal finding that nothing in the reported events or messages contradicts faith or morals, that the visionaries show no sign of fraud or delusion, and that the fruits — conversion, prayer, charity, the flourishing of the sacraments — testify to a good origin.

Historically this finding was expressed in Latin as constat de supernaturalitate — "it is established to be of supernatural character" — or more modestly as worthy of belief, granted by the local bishop after years, sometimes centuries, of investigation, medical scrutiny of any physical phenomena, and theological review. A separate and lesser step, approving public devotion or a shrine without pronouncing on the apparition itself, appears in the record for a handful of very old or informally attested sites.

In May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith replaced the Church's 1978 norms with a new six-tier framework, allowing a bishop to permit prayer and pilgrimage at a site — recognizing its pastoral fruit — without being forced into a final ruling on the visionaries' claims. The classifications run from Nihil obstat ("nothing stands in the way") through Prae oculis habeatur, Curatur, and Sub mandato, to Prohibetur et obstruatur and, at the far end, a formal declaration that the phenomenon is not supernatural. Every case below received the fullest recognition available under the norms of its own time.

Sixteenth Century

1531

Tepeyac, Mexico City · Mexico

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Four days running in December 1531, a radiant young woman speaking Nahuatl met the Aztec convert Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac and asked that a church be built there in her honor. When the bishop demanded a sign, she sent Juan Diego to gather Castilian roses from the frozen hilltop — flowers that had no business blooming in December — and to carry them to the bishop in his tilma, a cloak woven from cactus fiber. As he let the roses fall before the astonished bishop, her image was found imprinted on the cloth: a Marian figure clothed in the sun, standing on a crescent moon, dressed in the pictorial language of the Aztec people themselves. The tilma hangs in the basilica at Tepeyac still, its pigment and preservation unexplained nearly five hundred years on.

"Am I not here, I who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection?"Words remembered by Juan Diego

Seer: St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin
Approved: 1555, Abp. Alonso de Montúfar; crowned 1895
Feast: December 12

Seventeenth Century

1594–1634

Quito · Ecuador

Our Lady of Good Success

From the year she entered the Conceptionist convent of Quito as its abbess, Mother Mariana de Jesús Torres received visions in which Mary spoke of trials to come — for the convent, for the Church, and for a century Mother Mariana would not live to see. In 1611 a statue of Our Lady was begun for the convent choir; the sculptor left it overnight and returned to find the hands, arms, and a small bell miraculously completed, more finely than any tool of the age could achieve. The statue and Mother Mariana's incorrupt body remain in Quito to this day.

Seer: Ven. Mariana de Jesús Torres
Approved: 1611, Bp. Salvador Ribera Avalos
Feast: February 2 (regional)

1608

Šiluva · Lithuania

Our Lady of Šiluva

In a field where a Catholic chapel had once stood before it was seized and its records buried during the Reformation, shepherd children — Catholic and Calvinist alike — saw a weeping woman holding an infant, standing on a bare stone. An old, blind Calvinist catechist, asked if he remembered a church ever standing there, admitted that he did — and in confessing the long-suppressed truth, regained his sight. Buried documents proving the chapel's existence were later unearthed exactly where he pointed. It became the first Marian apparition in Europe to receive full Church recognition after the Reformation.

Seers: A group of shepherd children
Approved: 1775, Pope Pius VI
Feast: September 8

1652

Guanare · Venezuela

Our Lady of Coromoto

Twice a luminous woman carrying a child rose from a stream near the cornfields of the Cospe tribe and spoke to their chief, Coromoto, in his own language, urging him toward baptism. When at last, on September 8, 1652, he lunged to seize her rather than submit, she vanished — leaving behind a tiny painted image, scarcely the size of a fingernail, of astonishing and inexplicable detail. That image is enshrined today at the national basilica in Guanare, and Our Lady of Coromoto is patroness of Venezuela.

Seer: Cacique Coromoto
Approved: 1942, declared patroness; crowned 1952
Feast: September 11

1664–1718

Saint-Étienne-le-Laus · France

Our Lady of Laus

To a seventeen-year-old shepherdess named Benoîte Rencurel, Mary appeared not once or a dozen times but by some accounts 2,500 times over fifty-four years — the longest sustained series of apparitions in the Church's recorded history. She asked Benoîte to build a shrine of mercy and reconciliation in the high alpine pastures, and pilgrims came to her in such numbers that Benoîte heard their sorrows through a small window in the church gallery until her death in 1718. Rome did not formally rule on the case until 2008 — two hundred ninety years later, the longest interval between an apparition's end and its approval on record.

Seer: Ble. Benoîte Rencurel
Approved: May 4, 2008, Bp. Jean-Michel di Falco
Feast: May 3 (regional)

Nineteenth Century

1830

Rue du Bac, Paris · France

Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal

Twice in 1830, a young novice of the Daughters of Charity named Catherine Labouré received visions in the convent chapel on the Rue du Bac. In November, Mary appeared standing on a globe, hands lowered and streaming light, framed by the words O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee; the reverse bore a large M beneath a cross, above two hearts encircled by twelve stars. Catherine was told to have a medal struck to this design. Millions have been distributed since — it is simply known as the Miraculous Medal — and Catherine's body, exhumed over a century later, was found incorrupt.

Seer: St. Catherine Labouré
Approved: 1836, Abp. Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen
Feast: November 27

1846

La Salette-Fallavaux · France

Our Lady of La Salette

Two shepherd children, Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, found a "Beautiful Lady" seated in tears on a mountain stone, her face buried in her hands. She spoke to them of neglected Sundays and a people grown deaf to her Son, of famine already at the door — and entrusted to each child a secret never revealed to the other. Then she rose from the rock and dissolved slowly into light, first at the head, then the whole figure, until nothing remained but brightness. Her tears, more than any single warning, became the image that endured.

"If my people will not submit, I shall be forced to let fall the arm of my Son. My people, come to me. Come, my children."Words remembered by Mélanie and Maximin

Seers: Mélanie Calvat & Maximin Giraud
Approved: Nov. 19, 1851, Bp. Philibert de Bruillard
Feast: September 19

1858

Massabielle Grotto, Lourdes · France

Our Lady of Lourdes

Eighteen times between February and July 1858, a fourteen-year-old miller's daughter named Bernadette Soubirous met "Aquerò" — "that thing," in the local Occitan she spoke — in a squalid grotto used to shelter pigs. The small figure in white, a blue sash at her waist and golden roses at her feet, asked for penance, for a chapel, for processions; she directed Bernadette to scratch at the bare earth, where a hidden spring rose that flows still. Not until the fourth month of apparitions did the lady give her name, on the feast of the Annunciation: I am the Immaculate Conception — a title Bernadette, unlettered in theology, could not have invented. The Church has since certified seventy medically inexplicable healings at the spring, out of tens of thousands claimed.

"I do not promise to make you happy in this world, but in the next."Words to Bernadette Soubirous

Seer: St. Bernadette Soubirous
Approved: Jan. 18, 1862, Bp. Bertrand-Sévère Laurence
Feast: February 11

1859

Champion, Wisconsin · United States

Our Lady of Good Help

Between a hemlock and a maple in the Wisconsin backwoods, a Belgian immigrant named Adele Brise met a lady dressed in dazzling white, a yellow sash at her waist, stars circling her head. "I am the Queen of Heaven, who prays for the conversion of sinners," she told Adele, and asked her to gather the settlers' children and teach them the truths of salvation. Adele walked up to twenty-five miles a day for the rest of her life, founding a school and a community of catechist-sisters. In October 1871, as the deadliest fire in American history swept the region, parishioners carried Mary's statue in procession around the shrine grounds through the night — the one parcel of land in the district left untouched by flame. It became, in 2010, the first Church-approved Marian apparition in the United States.

Seer: Adele Brise
Approved: Dec. 8, 2010, Bp. David Ricken
Feast: October 9

1871

Pontmain, Mayenne · France

Our Lady of Pontmain

With Prussian troops advancing on their undefended village during the Franco-Prussian War, and the village's own men away at the front, children in a farmyard looked up to see a silent, smiling lady in a star-strewn deep-blue robe standing above a barn roof in the night sky. Over the following hour, letter by letter, a message formed in the stars — visible only to the children, who called it out as it appeared: But pray, my children. God will hear you in a short time. My Son allows Himself to be moved. That same night, without explanation, the Prussian advance turned back. Not a house in Pontmain, nor a single one of its sons at war, was lost.

"But pray, my children. God will hear you in a short time. My Son allows Himself to be moved."The message written in the sky

Seers: Eugène & Joseph Barbadette and companions
Approved: Feb. 2, 1872, Bp. Casimir Wicart
Feast: January 17

1877

Gietrzwałd, Warmia · Poland

Our Lady of Gietrzwałd

Under Prussian rule, at a time when the German imperial government was actively suppressing the Polish language and Catholic worship, two girls, Justyna Szafryńska and Barbara Samulowska, saw a lady seated in the branches of a maple tree — and heard her speak Polish. Asked who she was, she answered, "I am the Blessed Virgin Mary, Immaculately Conceived," and asked simply for the daily Rosary and penance. A blind girl was healed at the spring that rose beside the maple. It remains, to this day, the only Marian apparition in Polish history to receive full Church approval.

Seers: Justyna Szafryńska & Barbara Samulowska
Approved: 1877, Bp. Filip Krementz; reaffirmed 1977
Feast: September 8

1879

Knock, County Mayo · Ireland

Our Lady of Knock

In driving evening rain, fifteen villagers — ages five to seventy-five — saw a silent tableau appear against the south gable of their parish church: Mary robed in white, a golden crown on her head, hands raised in prayer; at her right, St. Joseph, his head bowed toward her; at her left, St. John the Evangelist, gesturing as if teaching, beside an altar bearing a lamb and a cross, ringed by adoring angels. Not one word was spoken in two full hours. And though the witnesses stood soaked to the skin reciting the Rosary, not a single drop of rain was seen to touch the gable, or the figures upon it.

Witnesses: Fifteen villagers, ages 5–75
Approved: 1879 & 1936, commissions of enquiry
Feast: August 21

Twentieth Century

1917

Cova da Iria, Fátima · Portugal

Our Lady of Fátima

To three shepherd children — Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto — "a Lady more brilliant than the sun" appeared six times above a small holm oak between May and October 1917, amid a world at war. She asked for the daily Rosary, for penance, for devotion to her Immaculate Heart, and entrusted the children with three secrets: a vision of the souls of sinners, a warning of a war worse than the one still raging unless Russia were converted, and a vision — kept from the public until the year 2000 — of persecution and suffering within the Church itself. On October 13, some seventy thousand people gathered in pouring rain and watched the sun appear to spin, radiate color, and plunge toward the earth: the Miracle of the Sun. Francisco and Jacinta died within two years, in the influenza pandemic Mary had foretold; Lúcia became a Carmelite nun and lived until 2005.

"Pray the Rosary every day, to bring peace to the world."Words to the shepherd children

Seers: Lúcia, Francisco & Jacinta
Approved: Oct. 13, 1930, Bp. José Correia da Silva
Feast: May 13

1932–33

Beauraing · Belgium

Our Lady of Beauraing

Five schoolchildren — the youngest just nine — saw a lady in white walking above a hawthorn bush near a small Lourdes-grotto replica by their convent school, over thirty-three appearances across five weeks of winter. She asked, simply, for prayer and pilgrimage; and on her final visit, opened her arms to reveal a heart of gold, ringed in light, upon her breast — the vision that gave her the name of the Virgin with the Golden Heart.

"Pray, pray very much."Words to the five children

Seers: Voisin & Degeimbre children
Approved: July 2, 1949, Bp. André-Marie Charue
Feast: November 29

1933

Banneux · Belgium

Our Lady of Banneux

In the small garden of a poor mining family, an eleven-year-old girl named Mariette Beco saw a luminous lady beckon and followed her into the woods, to a spring Mariette had never noticed before. "I am the Virgin of the Poor," the lady told her, over eight appearances that winter, asking for a small chapel and "a great deal of prayer" — and of the spring itself: "This water is reserved for all nations, to relieve the sick."

"This spring is reserved for all nations, to bring comfort to the sick."Words to Mariette Beco

Seer: Mariette Beco
Approved: Aug. 22, 1949, Bp. Louis-Joseph Kerkhofs
Feast: January 15

1973

Yuzawadai, Akita · Japan

Our Lady of Akita

In a small convent chapel, a wooden statue of Our Lady of All Nations bore a cross-shaped wound on its right hand that bled before a deaf novice, Sister Agnes Sasagawa. The statue spoke to her three times in 1973, asking for prayer, penance, and fidelity, and warning of chastisement if humanity did not turn back. Over the following six years the statue wept — one hundred and one times, before witnesses that included skeptics and non-believers — tears and blood later confirmed by forensic analysis to be of human origin, from a statue with no mechanism to produce either. Sister Agnes's deafness, as foretold, was healed.

"If men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity."Message received by Sr. Agnes Sasagawa

Seer: Sr. Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa
Approved: Apr. 22, 1984, Bp. John Shojiro Ito
Feast: June 12 (regional)

1976

Finca Betania, near Cúa · Venezuela

Our Lady of Betania

María Esperanza de Bianchini, a wife and mother of seven who had received visions since early childhood, spent decades searching Venezuela for a farm that matched signs she believed Mary had long been giving her. She found it at Betania. There, beside a small waterfall, Mary appeared and named herself: "Mary, Virgin and Mother, Reconciler of Peoples and Nations," calling for family prayer, reconciliation, and reverence for creation. On March 25, 1984, some hundred and fifty pilgrims gathered at the farm reported seeing her together, and thousands more over the following years reported witnessing the sun spin above the shrine.

Seer: María Esperanza de Bianchini
Approved: Nov. 21, 1987, Bp. Pío Bello Ricardo
Feast: March 25

1980

Cuapa · Nicaragua

Our Lady of Cuapa

Bernardo Martínez, a rancher and sacristan, was closing up his small chapel one night in April 1980 when he found a luminous cloud enveloping the parish statue of Our Lady of Fátima, resolving into a shining young woman. Over six months she asked him to pray the Rosary meditatively, to gather families in prayer, and warned that a nation already scarred by earthquake and civil unrest would suffer further without conversion. On her final appearance — October 13, the anniversary of Fátima's Miracle of the Sun — witnesses at Cuapa reported the sun spinning in the sky as well. Bernardo was ordained a Catholic priest fifteen years later, at the age of sixty-four.

"Nicaragua has suffered greatly, and will continue to suffer if all of you do not change."Message received by Bernardo Martínez

Seer: Bernardo Martínez
Approved: Nov. 13, 1982, Bp. Pablo Vega
Feast: May 8 (regional)

1981–89

Kibeho · Rwanda

Our Lady of Kibeho

Naming herself Nyina wa Jambo — Mother of the Word — Mary appeared to three schoolgirls, Alphonsine Mumureke, Nathalie Mukamazimpaka, and Marie-Claire Mukangango, urgently calling Rwanda to conversion and teaching Nathalie the Rosary of the Seven Sorrows. On August 15, 1982, before hundreds of witnesses, the vision turned terrible: a river of blood, severed heads, abandoned corpses, a land torn apart by hatred. The children begged the crowd to believe what they were seeing. Twelve years later, the Rwandan genocide fulfilled the vision with a precision no one in 1982 could have imagined — and Marie-Claire, one of the three seers, was among those killed. It remains the only Church-approved Marian apparition on the African continent.

"If you do not convert your hearts, if you do not turn back to God, you will fall into an abyss."Vision of August 15, 1982

Seers: Alphonsine, Nathalie & Marie-Claire
Approved: June 29, 2001, Bp. Augustin Misago
Feast: November 28

1983–90

San Nicolás de los Arroyos · Argentina

Our Lady of the Rosary of San Nicolás

Gladys Herminia Quiroga de Motta was an unschooled housewife with a hard early life when, in September 1983, she began receiving near-daily visions of Jesus and Mary that continued for nearly seven years — more than eighteen hundred messages in all, calling for the Rosary, frequent Confession and Communion, and consecration to the Immaculate Heart. Mary described appearing at the foot of a large stone in the parish garden; when the ground was later excavated, the stone was found to bear a natural formation resembling the very image Gladys had described. It is among the most recent apparitions to receive full Church approval anywhere in the world.

Seer: Gladys Quiroga de Motta
Approved: May 22, 2016, Bp. Héctor Cardelli
Feast: September 25

Due Diligence

Further Approved Apparitions

Smaller in fame but no less formally recognized, these apparitions received the same diocesan or papal approval as the entries above.

Our Lady of Lézajsk

Poland · 1578

A vision to Tomasz Michałek at a wayside oak tree; the tree's remains are preserved beneath the high altar of the basilica built on the site. Approved 1606, confirmed 1631–35.

Our Lady of the Hens

Pagani, Italy · 1609

Hens scratching at a garden wall uncovered a buried image of Mary, giving the shrine its enduring name — Madonna delle Galline. Devotion approved 1786.

Our Lady of Filippsdorf

Bohemia, Czech Lands · 1866

A small printed image of Mary, kept by an ailing weaver's wife named Magdalena Kade, was seen to weep; she was healed soon after. Pope Leo XIII had the shrine crowned in 1885.

Our Lady of Tears

Campinas, Brazil · 1930

A statue's eyes were seen to weep before Amália Aguirre. Approved March 8, 1931 — among the fastest turnarounds from event to episcopal approval on record.

Our Lady of the Rosary of Cimbres

Pesqueira, Brazil · 1936–37

Approved October 13, 2021 — deliberately dated to the anniversary of Fátima's Miracle of the Sun — by Bishop José Luiz Ferreira Salles.

What Is Not Included

A Note on Discernment

Not every widely reported apparition appears in this catalogue. Some of the best-known modern cases — Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ongoing since 1981, and Garabandal in Spain, 1961–1965, among others — remain formally open: still under study, or holding a lesser classification under the Church's norms, without a declaration that they are of supernatural origin. Catholics are not obliged to give assent to any of them, approved or not. This catalogue includes only apparitions that reached the fullest recognition available under the rules of their own era — a bishop's or the Holy See's finding that the event was worthy of belief, or an equivalent formal approval.

One case sits outside this framework by its very nature. At Zeitoun, near Cairo, luminous figures resembling Mary appeared above a Coptic Orthodox church for nearly three years beginning in 1968, witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people of every faith, including government officials and journalists. Pope Cyril VI of the Coptic Orthodox Church and, separately, the Coptic Catholic bishop of Egypt both affirmed it — but because it occurred outside a Latin diocesan structure, it was never carried through the Holy See's ordinary apparition process, and so it does not appear in the main catalogue above despite the weight of testimony behind it.

A Closing Prayer

Sub Tuum Praesidium

Sub tuum praesidium confugimus,
Sancta Dei Genetrix.
Nostras deprecationes ne despicias in necessitatibus,
sed a periculis cunctis libera nos semper,
Virgo gloriosa et benedicta.

We fly to your patronage, O holy Mother of God; despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin.
— the oldest known prayer to the Mother of God, found on an Egyptian papyrus dated to the third century.