By Joshua McElwee

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -Jesus may answer prayers but he has not made special appearances in a small town in the north of France, the Vatican said on Wednesday.

In a new instruction approved by Pope Leo, the Vatican’s top doctrinal office said stories of appearances by Jesus in the town of Dozule, in Normandy, were not to be considered genuine by the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

A Catholic mother in the town had reported seeing Jesus 49 times during the 1970s, and said he had dictated a series of messages and told her to build a 7.38-metre (24.21-foot) cross on a hillside in the town.

“The phenomenon of the alleged apparitions … is to be regarded, definitively, as not supernatural in origin, with all the consequences that flow from this determination,” said the text

See Full Page