«Siccome lo attesta la tradizione e lo confermano i fatti». La risemantizzazione delle mariofanie nella seconda metà del XIX secolo: due casi piemontesi

Between the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, cults and devotions represented a language whereby the Church communicated the dangers of modernity. In this context, apparitions – notably the Marian ones – were an especially effective way to denounce the evils of the contemporary world. For this reason, from the pontificate of Pio IX to that of Pio X, not only did several new hierophanic shrines arise, but there were also many intransigent rereadings of past apparitions. At the beginnings of the two shrines herewith analyzed – Valmala and Seleiraut – there were apparitions that occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century that were not interpreted, at first, in an anti-modern way. But in the final decades of the nineteenth century these apparitions were gradually given a new meaning to adapt them to an intransigent ideology and papal militancy.