Marpingen 1876

The parish priest and several villagers were arrested and put on trial for fraud and breaching public peace, while the three girls who started it all were subjected to intense interrogations. Nevertheless, the events extended into the next year. July and August of 1877 saw between 600 and 1,200 believers daily taking communion in the parish church. Finally, the apparitions stopped on 3 September 1877.

While Lourdes had been the blueprint for Marian apparitions since 1858, Marpingen tried to become the ‘German Lourdes’.³⁶ Because the French events were a big topic in the media during these years, especially since the Fig. 7: Marpingen and Trier in Stieler’s Karte von Deutschland in 25 Blatt, Gotha 1875.

36 Cf. Andreas Johannes Kotulla, ‘Lourdes und die deutschen Katholiken: Über die frühe Rezeption eines katholischen Kultes im Deutschen Kaiserreich und die Anfängeder Wallfahrt bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Bernhard Schneider (ed.), Maria und Lourdes:

Wunder und Marienerscheinungen in theologischer und kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, Münster 2008, pp. 139−165.

first organized German pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1875, France offered a role model for later events. The reference to Lourdes is a transnational aspect of the story. Marpingen was deeply immersed in Marian adoration, and the girls were familiar with the transnational text Lourdes had presented. People did not need to be in Lourdes personally but of course there were border- crossing move-ments. National pilgrimages to Lourdes, often on special trains, were organized from Belgium in 1873, from Poland, Italy, and Germany in 1875, from Spain and Ireland in 1876. When a statue in honour of the Virgin was consecrated, 100,000 Catholics were present in Lourdes, among them 35 bishops and 5,000 priests. This event happened on 3 July 1876 – on the very same day when, 894 kilometres away from Lourdes as the crow flies, three girls in the Härtel forest had a vision of a white figure in the early evening.

The second transnational aspect is that Marpingen happened at the peak of Marian apparitions in Europe, not as a local endemic phenomena but as a European tendency. A first wave started in the wake of the French Revolution, especially in the Vendée, followed by a set of weeping statues in Italy. A second wave happened during the pre- revolutionary times before 1848, but the strongest wave occurred during the Italian and German unification wars in the decade between 1866 and 1877. Mary appeared in times of crisis – just as she did later on in the Cold War.³⁷

The third transnational dimension, ultramontanism, went along with the standardization of orthodoxy and orthodox practices. Ultramontanism was clearly a global movement, where the interest of Roman centralization met the needs for orientation among the Catholic flock.³⁸

37 Numbers: Bernhard Schneider, ‘Marienerscheinungen im 19. Jahrhundert:

Ein Phänomen und seine Charakteristika’, in Hubert Wolf (ed.), ‘Wahre’ und

‘ falsche’ Heiligkeit: Mystik, Macht und Geschlechterrollen im Katholizismus des 19.

Jahrhunderts, München 2013, pp. 87– 110, 91, based on: Gottfried Hierzenberger

& Otto Nedomansky, Erscheinungen und Botschaften der Gottesmutter Maria:

Vollständige Dokumentation durch zwei Jahrtausende, Augsburg 1998 (probably not complete).

38 This aspect is about to be analysed in the project ‘Der Ultramontanismus als transnationales und transatlantisches Phänomen 1819– 1914’ within the framework of the Exzellenzcluster ‘Religion und Politik’ at the Westfälische- Wilhelms- Universität WWU Münster. Cf. already Vincent Viaene, ‘Nineteenth- Century Catholic Internationalism and its Predecessors’, in Abigail Green & Vincent Viaene (eds), Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750, Houndmills 2012, pp. 82−110; Vincent Viaene, ‘International History, Religious History, Catholic History: Perspectives for Cross- Fertilization (1830–

1914)’, in EHQ 2008, pp. 578−607. For a transnational approach cf. Thies Schulze

If we compare the pilgrimage to Trier in 1844 with the event in 1876/ 1877, three aspects are striking. While the pilgrimage to the Holy Robe in Trier in 1844 fits very well into the scheme, representing the type of strictly organized mass pilgrimage, Marpingen is about the opposite. It belongs to several types of individual and not organized group pilgrimages. The events were never ap-proved by Church authorities, thus the conflux of pilgrims never was operated centrally. Single persons and families came, mostly un organized and if orga-nized then never centrally. Marpingen would contradict any teleological idea that the degree of organization was increasing during the nineteenth century.

The second comparative observation is that the enthusiasm in 1876 dis-played even more ultramontane traits than the pilgrimage of Trier in 1844.

While Trier exposed the specialty of the Holy Robe, an object nobody else should claim to have, Catholics in Marpingen – the village belonging to the same diocese – shared what Catholics around the world were sharing: Mother Mary. She had gained new prominence since the dogma of 1854, followed by

(ed.), Grenzüberschreitende Religion: Vergleichs- und Kulturtransferforschung zur neuzeitlichen Geschichte, Göttingen 2012; Klaus Koschorke (ed.), Etappen der Globalisierung in christentumsgeschichtlicher Perspektive/ Phases of Globalization in the History of Christianity, Wiesbaden 2012.

0

2 2 3

6 10

13

Marpingen 11

32

Marian apparitions in Europe 1803–1917

10

7 8

11

1803–18091810–18191820–18291830–18391840–18491850–18591860–18691870–18791880–18891890–18991900–19091910–1917 5

10 15 20 25 30 35

Table 3: Marian Apparitions in Europe 1803−1917.

the apparitions in Lourdes in 1858. Marpingen was more ultramontane con-sidering this content but also concon-sidering the fact that the pilgrims had already inherited ultramontane values. They came on their own initiative and did not need to wait for a bishop to centrally orchestrate a mass maneuvre. Anyway, there was no bishop in Trier between 1876 and 1881. Other characteristics of the events in Marpingen underline the ultramontane traits. As in Trier thirty- two years before, it was mainly women who were involved and mainly poor, uned-ucated people. Marpingen’s farmers were poor ‘goat peasants’, and the pilgrims flooding Marpingen represented a low social image. Again, the bourgeoisie was missing, though there were some prominent aristocrats like the mother of the Bavarian King.

The third aspect refers again to the transnational dimension of Marpingen.

Globalization had been gaining momentum since the 1840s. The events of Trier in 1844 were observed in the newspapers in France, Belgium and even Ireland. They shared a transnational component.³⁹ But only a few pilgrims from other countries could join the pilgrimage, most of them from Luxembourg.

Marpingen was different. It manifested many transnational traits and allowed people even from Spain and Mexico to come to this tiny village in the Saar region.