ABSTRACT
The Age of Mary refers to a conglomeration of apocalyptic and millennial beliefs associated with the popular Catholic piety springing from alleged apparitions and miracles of the Virgin Mary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Devotees, a politically conservative, loosely knit group within the larger church, describe the Age as a special, circumscribed time in history when the Mother of God comes to her children to grant them special favors and to herald the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. They explain the present and the near future in millennial and apocalyptic terms, although the exact contents of their eschatological convictions change with historical, sociological, and even personal circumstances. Throughout the Age, believers associate Mary with sentimental piety, ultramontane Catholicism, and Victorian moral values, while they connect her enemies to atheistic rationalism, cultural secularization, and moral decline. Many of the believers point to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as the intellectual sources of what they see as cultural degeneration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ultimately, the devotional life and apocalyptic imaginings of the Age constitute an ongoing romantic response to societal changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution.
