Vatican to hold press conference on ‘apparitions and other supernatural phenomena’

The Vatican is set to hold a press conference announcing updated church doctrines on “apparitions and other supernatural phenomena” on Friday.

Notice of the press conference, which will be held in the Holy See Press Office at midday (8pm AEST), sparked a wave of tabloid headlines earlier this week inaccurately claiming the Vatican could be making an announcement about “aliens.”

Rather, Catholic Church officials will “present the new provisions of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith for discerning between apparitions and other supernatural phenomena”, the notice states.

Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the DDF, will speak alongside Monsignor Armando Matteo, secretary for the Doctrinal Section of the DDF, and Sister Daniela Del Gaudio from the Pontifical International Marian Academy.

The announcement will be live-streamed on the Vatican YouTube channel.

The church last addressed questions around discerning the validity of “presumed apparitions or revelations” in the 1970s.

The most famous such apparition occurred in the Portuguese town of Fatima in 1917, when three young shepherd children reported a series of prophetic visions of the Virgin Mary.

While the church officially recognised the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima as legitimate in 1930, it wasn’t until the centenary of the events that two of the children, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, were canonised as saints by Pope Francis.

In its 1978 missive titled “Norms regarding the manner of proceeding in the discernment of presumed apparitions or revelations,” the church outlined its conclusions following discussions of the “problems relative to presumed apparitions and to the revelations often connected with them.”

“Today, more than in the past, news of these apparitions is diffused rapidly among the faithful thanks to the means of information (mass media),” the note said.

“Moreover, the ease of going from one place to another fosters frequent pilgrimages, so that Ecclesiastical Authority should discern quickly about the merits of such matters. On the other hand, modern mentality and the requirements of critical scientific investigation render it more difficult, if not almost impossible, to achieve with the required speed the judgments that in the past concluded the investigation of such matters and that offered to the Ordinaries the possibility of authorising or prohibiting public cult or other forms of devotion among the faithful.”

The note goes on to outline a series of positive and negative criteria for judging presumed apparitions or revelations, including the personal character of those involved and any evidence of a search for profit or gain.

The norms were deliberated in the 1974 Plenary Session of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and were approved by Pope Paul VI in 1978.

It comes after a series of recent declarations of Catholic doctrine issued by Pope Francis, including last month’s “Dignitas Infinita”, which notably took aim at gender theory and transgender surgeries.

That followed 2023’s “Fiducia Supplicans”, which controversially allowed priests to bless couples not formally considered by the church to be married, including same-sex couples.

News that the Vatican would be holding a press conference on “apparitions” and the supernatural sent a wave of excitement through the UFO community on Wednesday, given long-running conspiracy theories tying the Catholic Church — which operates one of the world’s oldest astronomical observatories — to aliens.

“Pope to hold press conference on aliens and the supernatural — and people are confused,” read one headline in the UK’s Daily Star.

Last year, a Pentagon “whistleblower” who claimed the US has collected crashed UFOs over the years said America retrieved one such saucer from World War II Italian dictator Benito Mussolini after getting a tip from Pope Pius XII.

David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former intelligence official, claimed the “Vatican was involved” in the first-ever mission of America’s alleged top-secret UFO retrieval program.

Mr. Grusch, however, did not provide any evidence for these claims.

“1933 was the first recovery in Europe, in Magenta, Italy,” he told NewsNation.

“They recovered a partially intact vehicle, and the Italian government moved it to a secure air base in Italy until around 1944-1945. The Pope back-channelled that and told the Americans what the Italians had, and we ended up scooping it.”

Mr. Grusch claimed that the Vatican was “certainly” aware of alien existence and that UFO sightings over Italy during Musolini’s dictatorship were widely known.