What Marian Apparitions Can Teach Men About Strength, Vulnerability, and Hope

There is something strange about the places where people say the Virgin Mary has appeared: a hillside in Portugal, a grotto in France, a hill outside Mexico City, a small village in western Ireland. These are not the places we usually associate with power. There are no armies marching through them, no presidents delivering speeches, no monuments celebrating conquest. Instead, the stories often begin with people who possess very little institutional power—children, peasants, workers, Indigenous people, the poor. That is one reason Marian apparitions have endured. They suggest a different understanding of power, one rooted less in domination or certainty than in presence and care.

For centuries, Catholics have reported hundreds of Marian apparitions. The Church has formally recognized only a small number, and Catholics are not required to believe in any of them. Yet millions continue to visit these places, often carrying grief, illness, family troubles, questions about faith, and questions they cannot easily put into words. They come looking for something that may be difficult to name. Sometimes they come hoping for a miracle. Sometimes they come simply because they need somewhere to put their sorrow. And sometimes they come because the ordinary structures of life- work, family, politics, even religious institutions—have failed to answer the questions that brought them there.

For men, there may be something particularly instructive in these stories. We are often raised to understand masculinity through agency and control. We are told, implicitly or explicitly, that a man should have an answer, fix the problem, make the decision, protect the family, suppress his fear, and keep moving. Vulnerability can be treated as weakness, uncertainty as incompetence, and tenderness as something belonging to another category of person. Marian spirituality offers a strikingly different vocabulary. Its central figures are repeatedly called to receive rather than dominate, and to remain open to something they cannot completely control.

Dr. Luis Dinnella-Borrego, a theologian and educator who has led students on pilgrimages throughout Europe, has witnessed this dynamic at Fátima, where three Portuguese shepherd children reported seeing the Virgin Mary in 1917, during the devastation of World War I. At first glance, the sanctuary can feel surprisingly restrained. It lacks some of the theatrical grandeur associated with other pilgrimage sites, and Dinnella-Borrego remembers being struck by its simplicity when he first visited as a child. “The first time I went to Fátima, I was a kid,” he says. “The place has not changed that much. It feels neo-modern. That simplicity helps you center on what this is about.”

Before the children encountered Mary, however, they were visited by another figure: the Angel of Peace. “Do not be afraid. I am the Angel of Peace. Pray with me.” The children were taught a simple prayer: “My God, I believe, I adore, I hope and I love you.” Dinnella-Borrego describes the angel as “schooling” the children, preparing them for an experience they could not yet comprehend. For him, pilgrimage is not simply devotional tourism. It is an encounter between spirituality and history, an opportunity to see how human beings make meaning amid political upheaval, violence, suffering, and uncertainty. “My goal,” he says, “is to convey the profound and intimate connections between spirituality and the study of history.”

That connection became tangible when Dinnella-Borrego brought students to Fátima. Students who had hurried through other sacred sites slowed down there. “The students connected more with Fátima,” he says. “They chose to kneel and walk the path on their own.” Whatever one believes about the supernatural claims surrounding the apparitions, something about the place invited a different kind of attention. The children at the center of the story were not powerful people. They were young shepherds receiving something they had not sought through political influence, wealth, education, or status. “These were children receiving something heavy,” Dinnella-Borrego says.

That image challenges some of our most persistent ideas about strength. We often associate strength with the ability to impose ourselves upon the world. But there is another kind of strength: the ability to receive something difficult without immediately turning away from it. To listen when we would rather speak. To acknowledge fear without allowing fear to determine our actions. To remain present when there is no obvious solution. These are qualities that have traditionally been undervalued in many models of masculinity, even though they are essential to friendship, parenting, marriage, leadership, and moral life.

The story of Guadalupe introduces another dimension of Marian devotion, one inseparable from the history of colonization in the Americas. According to tradition, the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego at Tepeyac in 1531, speaking directly to him and asking that a shrine be built. But the significance of Guadalupe cannot be separated from the violence and cultural disruption surrounding the Spanish conquest. For Claire Lavarreda, a World History Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University, Marian devotion became entangled with both colonial power and Indigenous agency. “From the perspective of Mexico and Guatemala, colonization brought profound disruption,” she says. “But Marian devotion also became a site of Indigenous agency and cultural continuity.”

What matters, Lavarreda suggests, is not only whether someone accepts the apparition as supernatural but what kind of relationship the story creates. “Mary speaks directly, uses familial language, and engages in acts of care,” she says. “The relationship is immediate and localized.” Indigenous cosmologies already contained important feminine sacred figures associated with transformation, fertility, life, death, medicine, and renewal. Lavarreda points to figures such as Ix Chel and Chak Chel as part of the cultural landscape through which Marian imagery could acquire meaning. “These are not equivalents,” she emphasizes, “but they help explain resonance.”

That history complicates any simple understanding of Guadalupe as either a purely European religious import or an untouched continuation of Indigenous spirituality. Something more complex happened. Religious traditions collided, adapted, resisted, and became intertwined. “There is a tension between institutional control and communal reception,” Lavarreda says. Guadalupe can therefore be understood simultaneously as part of a colonial history and as an enduring maternal presence embraced and reinterpreted by generations of people.

There is another lesson here for men. Power is not only about who controls the narrative; it is also about who preserves meaning when the powerful have tried to erase it. Cultural memory often survives through ordinary people who tell stories, practice rituals, care for children, honor ancestors, prepare food, maintain traditions, and carry pieces of a community into the next generation. Much of this work has historically been associated with women and has consequently been undervalued. Men lose something when we dismiss care as secondary to achievement. Families, communities, and cultures do not survive through domination alone. They survive because someone remembers.

Dr. Michael Rogers places Marian apparitions within Christianity’s larger language of divine encounter. “People think of apparitions as the ephemera of Catholic life,” he says. “But the Incarnation begins with an apparition.” He connects Marian visions to the Annunciation, the Resurrection appearances, and the broader Christian claim that God enters human history. “In a world that wants to explain everything,” he says, “there is a real need for transcendence.”

Yet Rogers is equally careful about the limits of belief. The Church does not require Catholics to accept private revelations, and he remains skeptical about some of the most famous apparition traditions. “I have trouble with Fátima,” he admits. But skepticism does not necessarily require dismissal. Rogers is willing to leave room for mystery, saying that, “at lower case,” something happened.

That may be one of the most difficult forms of humility for modern men. We are frequently rewarded for certainty. We are expected to know what happened, who is responsible, what should be done, and whose side we are on. But there is a different kind of intellectual and spiritual maturity in saying, “I don’t know exactly what happened, but something changed me.” It allows experience to remain meaningful without pretending that every mystery has been solved.

Rogers is particularly drawn to Knock and Lourdes. At Knock, in western Ireland, witnesses reported seeing Mary, Joseph, and John the Evangelist beside a lamb on an altar in 1879. No words were spoken. “Everyone sees her. But she does not talk,” Rogers says. The silence itself may be part of the story. “She wanted them to know they are loved.”

That idea of love without explanation may be one of the most compelling aspects of Marian spirituality. A great deal of masculine culture teaches men to respond to suffering by fixing it. Someone is hurting, so we search for the solution. Someone is grieving, so we offer advice. Someone is frightened, so we tell them not to be afraid. But there are moments when another person does not need our solution. They need our presence. They need someone willing to sit beside them without trying to make the pain disappear.

Karen Bunker has spent more than three decades helping facilitate a Rosary group rooted in prayer, repetition, and community. Her devotion has been shaped especially by Fátima and Medjugorje, the Bosnian village associated with reported apparitions beginning in 1981. She remembers her grandparents praying the Rosary, particularly her grandmother, whose constant prayer became part of Bunker’s spiritual inheritance. Her grandfather was blind, and the Rosary became part of the family’s way of moving through hardship.

After traveling to Medjugorje, Bunker began praying the Rosary every day. Prayer became integrated into the ordinary movements of her life—while running, driving, sitting in traffic, and moving through the interruptions of a normal day. Yet even after decades of devotion, she retains a question: “I have to ask, is that me, the Holy Spirit, or Mother Mary?”

There is something beautiful about that uncertainty. Faith does not always eliminate ambiguity. Sometimes it teaches us how to live with it.

This may be especially important for men because emotional and spiritual maturity requires us to resist the temptation to turn every experience into a contest between certainty and skepticism. We can ask questions without becoming cynical. We can believe without pretending to know everything. We can doubt without becoming closed. We can encounter another person’s suffering without immediately needing to explain it.

Across Marian apparition traditions, a pattern emerges. These stories tend to become especially powerful in places where history feels unstable: Ireland under colonial pressure, Portugal amid political upheaval and war, Mexico after conquest, Bosnia on the eve of another devastating conflict. The stories do not resolve those historical fractures. They inhabit them.

Mary, in these accounts, does not appear after suffering has been neatly explained or repaired. She appears within it, often to people with little political or institutional power and far from the centers of authority. Whether one interprets these experiences as supernatural encounters, cultural expressions, psychological events, acts of collective memory, or some combination of these possibilities, their persistence tells us something about the human need to find meaning in broken circumstances.

That is where Marian apparitions have something to say to men today. They invite us to reconsider what strength actually looks like. Strength may be the father who tells his children that he does not have all the answers but will stay with them while they search. It may be the husband who can apologize without defending himself. It may be the friend who recognizes that another man is struggling and asks the question he has been afraid to ask: “Are you okay?” It may be the son who sits beside an aging parent instead of trying to escape the discomfort of decline. It may be the man who finally admits that he is lonely, frightened, grieving, or overwhelmed.

None of this requires a particular theology. It requires only a willingness to reconsider the narrow definition of strength many of us inherited.

The deepest lesson may not be about whether Mary appeared at Fátima, Guadalupe, Lourdes, Knock, or Medjugorje. Those questions matter deeply to believers and deserve serious historical and theological consideration. But there is another question beneath them: What happens to human beings when they believe they have been encountered by something larger than themselves?

Sometimes they kneel. Sometimes they pray. Sometimes they become more attentive to the suffering of others. Sometimes they carry a story forward for generations. And sometimes they simply become more willing to love.

I do not know whether Mary appeared at Fátima. I do not know what the witnesses at Knock saw, or exactly what happened to Juan Diego at Tepeyac. But I know that human beings have continued to return to these stories because something in them speaks to a persistent human longing: the hope that we are not alone in our suffering, that love can enter history, and that even in a fractured world we might still encounter something capable of calling us toward greater compassion.