For legions of Catholics, and not a few church bureaucrats, the supernatural is as real and present as it was for their medieval forebears.

In “The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions and Miracles in the Modern Age,” veteran Catholic journalist John Thavis explores their world of Marian apparitions, relics, exorcisms, doomsday visions and other purported encounters with the supernatural.

Thavis, who for nearly three decades was Vatican bureau chief for Catholic News Service, unfolds the elaborate processes the church employs for scrutinizing the allegedly miraculous. The church accepts enough science to avoid unchecked superstition, but it also affirms the supernatural when it concludes there‘s no other explanation.

“In an age in which Christianity is supposed to be the faith of reason, many are still fascinated by the possibility of miracles, apparitions, encounters with the devil and other signs of the supernatural,” Thavis writes.

Balancing faith and reason “has increasingly occupied the Vatican’s time and resources,” he writes. “In a sense the Vatican is engaged in vetting the supernatural and filtering ‘wondrous’ experiences, to minimize anything it judges unorthodox, superfluous, excessive or bizarre. At the same time, of course, Rome cannot be seen as placing limits on divine intervention.”  (Tribune Content Agency)