On the new Vatican norms for the discernment of supernatural phenomena :
Much of the talk last week was about the new Vatican norms for the discernment of supernatural phenomena—apparitions especially, but not exclusively—presented at a press conference in Rome on Friday. ...
Under the old norms, local bishops had to talk with Rome but were
free to make their own determinations. Also, and more importantly, the
locals had to keep mum about their consultations. Local bishops, in
other words, couldn’t say what Rome said to them about the thing(s) the
locals were examining.
Local bishops, in other words, bore all of the public responsibility
for judgments that were theirs only in part (if they were really the
locals’ judgments at all). ...
Under the old disposition, a local bishop could issue a judgment: Constat de supernaturalitate. A judgment of constat de supernaturalitate does not quite say that a phenomenon is certainly of supernatural origin, but only that “it [clearly] evinces [signs of the] supernatural.”
The opposite of constat under the old scheme was—you guessed it—non constat (de supernaturalitate), which simply meant that there were lacking sufficient grounds for agreement on the origin of the phenomenon.
A judgment of constat de supernaturalitate did not compel an assent of faith, in other words, but only proposed its object as worthy of belief. The point is that it did propose something.
The new norms, on the other hand, borrow from bureaucratic argot to create a new category: Nihil obstat,
which does not propose anything as worthy of belief but only says that
there is nothing standing in the way of believing in the supernatural
origin of a given phenomenon. That’s nice to know, but it really only
tells us something about what isn’t there. ...
On the one hand, it is now unmistakably clear that the Vatican not only gets the final word but is involved in the investigation and adjudication of purportedly supernatural phenomena from the start. On the other hand, the Vatican will henceforth refrain from proposing even thoroughly vetted phenomena as worthy of belief and will limit itself to saying that nothing stands in the way of believing a given phenomenon to be of supernatural origin.
