Lady of all Nations

“The Lady of All Nations” is the name used to describe the series of Marian apparitions to Ida Peerdeman in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.^[1] Peerdeman allegedly received a total of 207 visions, the first 56 of which involved the Virgin Mary and began on 25 March 1945. After the Marian visions ceased on 31 May 1959, Peerdeman claimed to have received 151 of what she called “Eucharistic Experiences” for 26 years, where she was given divine revelation, usually during Mass.

Ida Peerdeman

Peerdeman was born on 13 August 1905 in the city of Alkmaar, in the Netherlands. The youngest of five siblings, she was an average woman who worked in a perfume factory. The first of 56 purported apparitions is said to have occurred in March 1945.^[2] Ida claimed that she had seen the Virgin Mary as she was huddled by a stove with her sisters and a family friend, Father Frehe, chatting about the war and the possibilities for the future. Ida recalled seeing a light from the corner of the room. From it came a woman who revealed herself as the “Lady of All Nations", and instructed her to repeat everything she was told. Fr. Frehe directed her sister to write down every word.

The first 25 messages, between 1945 and 1950 are typical apocalyptically phrased warnings against communism, atheism, and modernity. Shortly after the promulgation in 1950 of the dogma of the Assumption of Mary, the messages changed. The Virgin requested an image of her be made. The painting was produced in 1951 by German artist Heinrich Repke at the direction of the visionary.^[3]

Ida Peerdeman died in 1996.

New dogma

Followers of the Lady of all Nations have asked for a fifth and final Marian dogma of the Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate, and cite four dogmas that have preceded it:

The Immaculate Conception in Ineffabilis Deus
The Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin^[4]
The Mother of God^[5]
The Assumption in Munificentissimus Deus

Prayer

The prayer that the Virgin Mary is said to have given to Ida Peerdeman reads:

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Father, send now Your Spirit over the earth. Let the Holy Spirit live in the hearts of all nations, that they may be preserved from degeneration, disaster and war. May the Lady of All Nations, who once was Mary, be our Advocate. Amen." ^[6]

In July 2005, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith required that "who once was Mary" must be left out of the prayer given by The Lady of All Nations. The proper ending to the prayer is now "May the Lady of All Nations, the Blessed Virgin Mary, be our Advocate."^[7]

Position of the Church

On 7 May 1956: the Catholic Bishop of Haarlem, Johannes Huibers, issued a finding of "no evidence of the supernatural nature of the apparitions", and prohibited public veneration. This decision was reiterated the following year with approval of the Holy Office on 13 March 1957.^[8]

On 24 May 1972: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, (formerly known as the Holy Office) responding to a letter from the Bishop, re-affirmed its decision.^[8]

On 25 May 1974: upon further review, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith affirmed its earlier decision, and invited the faithful to discontinue all forms propaganda with regard to these alleged apparitions and revelations. Moreover, the Sacred Congregation encouraged rather the faithfull to express their devotion to Mary as Queen of the Universe, as discussed in the 1954 encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam.^[8]

On 31 May 1996: Bishop of Haarlem, Henry Bomers reserved decision on the apparitions, but found no fault in invoking Mary under the title of "Our Lady of All Nations".^[9]

31 May 31, 2002: Msgr. Punt approved the apparitions by acknowledging their supernatural origin, and established a commission to document any experiences and testimony.^[10]

September, 2008, Msgr. Charles Scicluna, Promoter of Justice for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressed the 22nd Mariological Congress in Lourdes, France on the topic of the Church’s 1978 Norms of discerning presumed apparitions and revelations. In 2010, the address was published in the scholarly journal of the Pontificia Academia Mariana Internationalis. In his essay, Scicluna states once a decision of the CDF is rendered on an alleged private revelation, the decision is of “undisputed hierarchical authority,” and a lower authority cannot overturn it. Msgr. Scicluna raised the question as to whether Bishop Punt had the authority to make a determination regarding the Amsterdam apparitions once the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had rendered its decision.^[11]

Analysis

Since the painting of the Lady of All Nations depicts Mary in front of a wooden cross, with the corpus of Christ notably absent, it appeared to advance an interpretation of Mary as co-redemptrist, and in the words of Peter Jan Margry, "it seemed as if a fourth element or person was being added to one of the foundations of Christian theology, the Trinity".^[3] To propose a new dogma in this context was, at the very least, problematic. Margry sees the popular spread of the cultus arising from a reaction on the part of traditional or conservative believers, (originally among Dutch Catholics), to the movement for renewal and liberalization in the 1970s in the Church establishment.^[3]