January Research Seminar
Date: Wednesday 15th January 2025
Time: 3:00pm to 4:30pm (in the UK)
Venue: Online via Zoom
In our first research seminar of 2025, Dr Chris Maunder (co-founder of the Centre for Marian Studies) will discuss how the desire for peace during World War I was expressed both by Pope Benedict XV and in the messages of the apparitions of Mary at Fátima in Portugal in 1917. The core message of the Fátima phenomenon can be interpreted as a call to the Catholic Church to devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary through peace-making and ecumenical initiative. Fátima’s revelations, which became globally famous in Catholicism towards the end of the Second World War, anticipated the major challenges that Western Europe faced after 1945 in its relationships with the Soviet Union and Islam.
The message of Fátima was called upon at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the consecrations of these countries to the Immaculate Heart by Pope Francis. In his presentation, Dr Maunder will consider how the core themes of Fátima can be seen to restated in the apparitions at Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina which began in 1981 and where Mary is known as the Kraljice Mira, ‘Queen of Peace’.
Guest Speaker
Chris Maunder, a retired senior lecturer formerly of York St John University, is the author of Our Lady of the Nations: Apparitions of Mary in 20th Century Catholic Europe (2016) and Mary, Founder of Christianity (2022). He has edited The Oxford Handbook of Mary (2019), Documents of the Christian Church (4th edition 2011 and 3rd edition 1999), and Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary (2008). He serves as the treasurer of the Centre for Marian Studies and is on the advisory board for Maria: A Journal of Marian Studies. Accompanied by his wife Natalie and daughter Beatrice, born in 2022, he is also a keen visitor and pilgrim at Marian shrines.
Register
If you would like to receive the free Zoom link, please send an email to Catherine O'Brien at info@marianstudies.ac.uk