Customer Reviews

The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions

5 star:		(34)
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3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I really enjoyed this book. Very well written and expertly researched, it was a joy to read. I found it to be a very fair and balanced account of Marain visions. The book is 90% neutral investigative journalism and 10% about the author's own spiritual journey through various phases of doubt and faith, which added a lot to the story. It's mostly centered on Medjugorje, though events in Arizona are also given a fair amount of attention. Beyond that, Lourdes and Fatima get a little time along with a few other events. The accounts of various healings and miracles are fascinating.

What I most appreciated about the book was it's neutrality and easy to read style. The author is not a Bible thumper who is looking to convert the reader, nor is he an atheist attempting to disuade us. He maintains a high degree of journalistic integrity throughout, presenting the results of his in depth research and letting the reader make up his or her own mind. Was Medjugorje real? After reading this, I believe, at least in part, that it was. Though one wonders if over the years, due to basic human limitation, the seers and their Franciscan keepers have lost their way a little bit. Reading about the visions of Medjugorje in context of the past and present history of the region, was extremely educational.

I don't agree with some of the criticism found at Amazon. The book is the result of 8 years of research and travel. It's a big story that covers a lot of ground and I found it to be reasonably well organized. As for the editing, the story reads very well and I didn't find virtually any typos or things of that nature.

I'm not a Catholic, but after reading this book, I'm itchin' to travel to Medjugorje and do a little investigating myself. Bravo Randall Sullivan, keep up the good work!

Reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary run from the sublime (At Fatima to three Portuguese children in a pasture) to the silly (In Florida to a jewelry designer on a grilled cheese sandwich). It was news reports of a Boardman, OR Marian apparition in the winter of 1994 skewing toward the silly which first piqued Portland author Randall Sullivan's interest and sent him on a ten year journey that resulted in The Miracle Detective: An Investigative Reporter Sets Out to Examine How the Catholic Church Investigates Holy Visions and Discovers His Own Faith.

Sullivan is an investigative journalist and contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine specializing in non-rock and roll feature stories often focusing on crime or offbeat themes with a mysterious slant. In 1994, Sullivan was neither a Catholic nor a believer in the divine but he did have the open mind of a journalist. As Sullivan sets the stage early in the book, it was the sincerity of the purported witnesses to a glowing image of the Virgin Mary in an Eastern Oregon trailer park and the fact that the incident was "under investigation" by the Diocese of Baker that induced him to look into how reported miracles were investigated by the Catholic Church.

Dubbing these Church investigators "Miracle Detectives" Sullivan writes that with virtually no firsthand knowledge of the Catholic Church he naively intended to produce an account detailing the official Church process for authenticating miracles focusing on the current apparitions of the Medjugorje seers. Armed with Vatican and Medjugorje introductions supplied by Father Milan Mikulich from St. Birgitta's Parish in Portland and Father Steve Sunborg of the Oregon Curia, Sullivan began his research in Rome and Bosnia.

On a superficial level, Sullivan accomplished what he set out to do. The Miracle Detective does feature interesting and insightful explanations and commentary on the Church's rigorous process for looking into reported miraculous incidents. Sullivan interviewed many clerics including an Eastern Oregon parish priest, a Postulator from the Sacred Congregation of the Causes for Saints at the Vatican and others including Father Benedict Groeschel C.F.R..

Additionally, Sullivan makes a welcome contribution to the body of Medjugorje-themed literature by providing a sober and thorough review of the numerous medical and psychological studies conducted on the six seers from 1981 to the present and objectively reviews the divisive reactions to the reported apparitions among world Catholics and Yugoslav government officials alike. Also, almost unique in writing on the subject, Sullivan masterfully frames the spiritual story of Medjugorje within the broader context of Balkan history from the pagan times of late antiquity through the medieval clash between Christianity and Islam, Communism and perhaps most importantly the Bosnian war of the 1990's.

Although the Church's study of events in Medjugorje was intended to be the focus of the book, it ultimately serves, as one element in a shotgun blast of a story that at times reads like a gripping detective thriller at others like a history text but ultimately becomes a moving faith journey, as the authors own experiences take center stage.
Many people have traveled to Medjugorje and claim to return changed. Unexpectedly and despite his impeccable popular culture credentials, Randall Sullivan spends much of the book detailing the peaks and valleys of his own conversion story. Beginning with an incident in the Purple Room at Powell's bookstore in Portland to his arrival in the Bosnian village, a brush with evil in a Roman piazza and finally circling back to an update on events in Boardman, Sullivan's unlikely story of coming to terms with God is at times fascinating, frustrating and uplifting.

In some ways, Sullivan's tale is reminiscent of The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton. Although he is now remembered as a great spiritual sage, the young Merton outlined in his first book was also a thoroughly secular young man busy listening to jazz records and getting kicked out of college. It was only slowly and through the gift of grace that he refashioned his focus and became the man we remember. If the conversion story detailed in The Seven Story Mountain is told more gracefully than The Miracle Detective it is perhaps because Merton wrote from the benefit of hindsight while Sullivan admits to remaining in the thick of his.

The Miracle Detective is difficult to categorize, it is at once a survey of modern era Marian apparitions and a detailed summary of the major events and personalities that make up the Medjugorje story to date. Mostly it is the personal story of a man deeply immersed in American popular culture whose life takes a much-unexpected turn in response to grace.

Because this book runs in so many different directions and the author freely admits his personal involvement in the subject matter compelled him to throw out the notion of journalistic objectivity, some readers may find the scattershot organization of the book lacking cohesion. I suggest it is a strength; The Miracle Detective is the sprawling output of a well-educated thoroughly organized secular mind reeling from a profound experience of the divine.

Randall Sullivan spent eight years researching and examining the miraculous apparitions at Boardman Oregon, Scottsdale Arizona and Medjugorje in Bosnia. The results is one of the best books on the phenomenon of miraculous apparitions ever to be written. Although he starts locally with Boardman, he spends most of his time in Medjugorje and Rome.

Medjugorje is undeniably the most important miraculous appearance of our time and is often compared to those at Lourdes and Fatima. Sullivan provides wonderfully balanced reporting, while at the same time he is open enough to show how his interviews have personally influenced him. He does a wonderful job of presenting the many points of view on these events, yet is always reaching for the objective truth behind the presentations of the seers, the Church, the theologians, the believers, and the scientists.

My favorite chapter comes towards the end of the book when he interviews Father Benedict Groeschel. He quotes Groeschel as saying:

"If you no more than dismiss these things, you're simple an obscurantist. If you mindlessly embrace them, you're just a dope. we have to resist the obsessive-compulsive demand for a clear, definitive answer to these questions. This is a field for people who don't have to have it all figured out, who don't need it cast in black and white. There's a lotta gray mist around this stuff, and you have to be prepared to deal with that. Once in a while a bright, shining lightcomes through, and we should be grateful for it. Because the rest of the time we have to feel our way through the twilight."

If you have an open mind, I recommend this book. However, if you come to it to either prove or disprove a preconceived idea, you will probably feel upset with the author's approach.

What happens when, to his own surprise, an irreligious agnostic, ambivalently betrothed Rolling Stone contributing editor and savvy, irreverent investigative journalist finds himself saying to his publisher that his next book will be about the "miracle detectives" of the Vatican and the process of investigating holy visions and miracles? "You know what the third Secret of Fatima is, don't you?" one postmodern priest asks him with a sly smile. "The bill for the Last Supper."

"In its entire history, the Holy See has never recognized any apparition of the Virgin, not even at Lourdes or Fatima, Father Gumpel informed me during my first interview at the Vatican. This was something, the priest added, that even most Catholics did not know."

"Among the things I learned at the Vatican was that while [my] ignorance may be a crude facsimile of innocence, it enjoys many of the same advantages, the main one being that people want to educate you, and that in so doing, they inevitably disclose their deeper intentions. No less surprising, I found I was learning as much from those who shunned me as from those who drew me close. The doors shut in my face, the phone calls not returned, the claims that someone else was better qualified to answer such questions, and especially, the demands of confidentiality made by those willing to reveal a good deal about both the nature and the scale of conflict in the Holy See."

If you aren't aware of the increasing Marian apparitions and "miracles" happening around the world -- and especially of the political and other disturbing complexities in the ongoing apparitions in eternally war scarred Medjugorje, Bosnia-Hercegovina -- former intellectual existentialist Randall Sullivan is precisely the miracle detective to tell you all about them, Pope John Paul's amused glance and his own "accidental" gradual awakening. "Faith is no more the elimination of doubt than courage is the absence of fear." Eight years in the making, highly recommended reading for both skeptics -- "You should pray for the gift of discernment, Randall, because you need it tremendously" -- and believers alike. (Badly in need of the meticulous index this landmark work so seriously deserves and sadly full of editorial and proofreading typos and fact checking errors -- thus, very regrettably, four not five stars.)

If you have faith, are searching for faith, or have ever struggled with your faith this book is for you! I read a lot of spiritual/religious books (everything from Surya Das to Elaine Pagels)and this one has sparked more conversations with my friends than any in a long time. Everyone I know who's read it, loves this book -- mainline Protestants, Catholics, lapsed Catholics and spiritual seekers alike. If you're none of the above but care about spiritual issues, you'll like MIRACLE DETECTIVE, too.

Without plot-spoiling, Randall not only examines the nature of miracles and faith, but has direct encounters with good and evil (apparitions?) himself. One was so terrifying spiritually that after reading it my friend lay in bed awake all night with her reading glasses and bedside lamp on.

If you like accounts of Marian apparitions this has the goods, but don't be fooled you don't have to be into them at all to love this book. More than anything this book tells of an amazing spiritual journey that makes you think about your own relationship with belief. It's a great read (very interesting and well-written, but not at all academic like a lot of religion books)!

This book will mean different things to different people, depending on what you see as the primary source of ultimate truth. To a scientist, this might be a case study in group psychology: the incredible lengths to which the human mind can go in its search for meaning and order. To a spiritual person, this might be part-inspirational story, part-cautionary tale, detailing the continuing presence of messengers of the Almighty (and/or the Evil One) in a world that has largely forgotten them both. Much like the author, I feel cursed and gifted with the ability to approach the question of miraculous events (and life in general) from both directions simultaneously. My Catholic upbringing makes me unusually susceptible to supernatural persuasion, while my throughly modern lifestyle often conflicts with what I once considered dogma. And if you're wondering what all of that has to do with a book review, know that it is impossible to approach a book like this without noting, analyzing, and calling into question one's own biases and assumptions.

I found the book to be well-written and profoundly compelling. It is only secondarily about supernatural events, which might surprise you after reading the subtitle: "An Investigation of Holy Visions." The real meat of this book lies in the author's own journey: physical, emotional, and spiritual, throughout the book's research. It might be more aptly subtitled "One Man's Investigation of Himself via Holy Visions." The author goes into the undertaking obviously primed for the experiences he is about to have, but that makes the reality as he perceives and relays it no less compelling. While he has far too great of a personal stake in this matter to be capable of an ostensibly objective analysis, he does an admirable job of making that clear to the reader; truly "baring his soul." And in the end, we are surprised and yet strangely comforted that the power and wonder of what he experiences makes his life no less a walk of faith than it was at the outset.

This book confirmed a couple of key points for me about my own truth. 1) Life really is stranger than I *can* imagine, and 2) Life requires faith, and faith requires that we choose to believe.

Other books have been written on the topic of holy visions and spiritual mysteries; what makes Randall Sullivan's The Miracle Detective: An Investigation Of Holy Visions so well deserving of an on-going recommendation, is that it stands out from the crowd on this fascinating topic with its deeper inquiries into what makes a miracle, how to determine 'miracle' status, and who decides these things. Sullivan's is no casual study: eight years of research went into this narrative, which provides a running history of over 100 years of raptures, holy apparitions and experiences. Current events enter into play in a consideration of these miracles, which also embraces believers, skeptics, religious zealots, and others. The Miracle Detective offers the reader an inherently fascinating journey of spiritual discovery.

Father Joe, a wonderful Catholic faith journey unexpectedly written by The-Spinal-Tap-Guy got all the press this spring but The Miracle Detective is another wonderful Catholic faith journey by an unlikely author that was published around the same time and is well worth reading too.

The Miracle Detective is at once a detailed survey of Marian apparitions focusing on Medjugorie, a peak inside the official Vatican process of miracle investigation and authentication and finally a moving faith journey written by a Rolling Stone feature writer. Randall Sullivan, whose previous book investigated the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls at first seems as unlikely a candidate as Tony Hendra to write a passionate exploration of Catholic faith but is just as welcome.

We need more guys like these: Successful popular culture figures willing to break through the limitations of that mold and speak from their hearts about their faith without descending into the new age babble so prevalent in the spiritual-zone of our pop culture. Do these two books mark the start of a trend? I hope so.

Incidentally, these books motivated me to pick up Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, another Catholic faith journey from an unlikely seeker.

This is a really valuable contribution for those of us who are finding it difficult to fully understand what is going on in places like Medugorje. Many people will identify with Randall's frustrations and many doubts.

His measured and informative writing style added to his brilliant research made this book an absolute joy to read.

Father Groeschel's contribution is an amazing insight into the considerations, trials and pitfalls in attempting to evaluate and fully understand this incredible phenomena. I am grateful to Randall Sullivan for this truly wonderful work and can identify with so much of what he has been through.

Kind regards
Phil Gordon
Scotland

This book is a must read for those who doubt - and I count myself among them. Sullivan takes us along on a tour de force of Marian apparitions, and invites us to speculate along with him. It turns out to be a fascinating journey. I got lost along the way a few times, but kept coming back to find where the next twist in the road would lead. He's full of surprises - right down to the last page. It's intelligently written, and raises questions, some of which you'd rather not struggle with, but that's what makes it such a fascinating book.