The footprints of religious enthusiasm: great memorials and faint vestiges of Belgium's apparition mania of the 1930s

This article looks at the original context, development and survival of the shrines and cults from the year, 1933, and country, Belgium, in which there were more reported apparitions of Mary than at any other time and place in 20th century Catholic Europe. The investigation results in three categories of Belgian apparition locations from the 1930s as they are to be found eighty years later in 2013: (i) well-visited, internationally-known shrines approved by the Church; (ii) smaller shrines where devotion has persisted despite Church skepticism; (iii) sites where only faint vestiges remain alth... Mehr ...