Vatican sharpens rules on investigating supernatural events

The Vatican sharpened its rules for investigating supernatural events such as visions of Christ or the Virgin Mary, acknowledging on Friday that overactive imaginations and outright “lying” risked harming the faithful.

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The new norms allow for a more “prudent” interpretation of events that generally avoids declaring them outright a supernatural event.

They were published by the Holy See’s powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and approved by Pope Francis.

“In certain circumstances not everything is black or white,” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, who leads the dicastery, told journalists.

“Sometimes a possible divine reaction mixes with... human thoughts and fantasies,” Fernandez added.

The history of the Catholic Church is filled with episodes of strange or unexplained phenomena involving religious statues or other objects.

The new guidelines come two months after the Church said that a series of widely reported miracles attributed to a statuette of the Virgin Mary – including making a pizza grow in size – were false.