The Internet and the Madonna: Religious Visionary Experience on the Web.

No two topics could seem to be further away than the Internet and the Blessed Virgin. The world of technology and mass communication is as much that of the turn of the millennium, as sightings of the Mother of God belong to the century between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century. With cyberspace on the one hand and on the other the world of a conservative Catholicism that began to disappear at the Second Vatican Council, it is hard to imagine where the Blessed Virgin would still find the pious children and young women that she seems to prefer: chances are that most of them would be watching television or surfing the web instead of spending sufficient prayer time in caves, chapels or hill tops. Sceptics are in for a big shock: you only have to google the appropriate set of words (and it might be a good idea to avoid the word ‘Madonna’), to realize that the BVM (the Blessed Virgin Mary) seems to have been entirely (and, one assumes, bodily) assumed into cyberspace. And in this context it is also not a coincidence that the combination ‘Mary appearances’ gets six times more hits than when one uses the more appropriate theological term ‘Mary apparitions’: the Mother of God has become a pop star and at least one of the ladies involved turns out to be a wrestling star.