REVELATIONS AND VISIONS

REVELATIONS AND VISIONS

The world today is filled with Catholic and non-Catholic visionaries, seers and prophets. Hundreds of thousands of faithful have gone on pilgrimages to the sites of private revelations and apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Best-selling books are filled with details of the life of Christ allegedly revealed from heaven. The newspapers regularly cover stories of visionaries turning parishes upside down with their claims and the crowds they draw. TV preachers constantly warn us about the Antichrist and predict that the Second Coming is near at hand. What are pastors, spiritual directors, seminarians and the average layperson to make of all this? Are any of these things true? If so, which ones? How can we tell? A century ago, Father Augustin Poulain wrote this classic work on the guidelines the Church has given us to discern the truth and reject the false regarding visions and revelations. He drew on Scripture, the teachings of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as well as his own experience as a spiritual director and teacher. His work was endorsed by Pope St. Pius X, and generations of priests encountered his ideas at second or third hand in standard textbooks. But Father Poulain didn’t write a dull textbook. His work is concrete, practical, down-to-earth and witty. He provides solid guidelines for judging private revelations, visions and prophecies. The startling case histories he gives read as if they took place just the other day. Here, for the first time, his insights are made available to a wide audience.

About the Author: Augustin Francois Poulain was born in 1836 in France and entered the Jesuits in 1858. He had a long career as a priest, spiritual director, librarian, mathematics professor, author and scholar. After forty years of study and personal experience, he wrote his masterpiece, The Graces of Interior Prayer (1901), from which Revelations and Visions is excerpted. Father Poulain died in 1919.