Q: Mother Mary has had many visitations to the Earth since her assumption into heaven. Does The Urantia Book have any explanation for this? Was Mary a disciple of Jesus?

A: Marian visitations and apparitions have been going on for decades. I remember as a child in Catholic school, Fatima and Lourdes were very hot topics, and they were always quite a mystery to me…still are! As late as the 1960s, apparitions—supposedly of Mary—were seen for many months by some young girls in Garabandal, Spain and caused quite a stir in the Catholic community. These apparitions are often accompanied by warnings, many very dire, about coming disasters, chastisements, and so forth. I remember in the Fatima visitations, there was supposedly a miracle, where the sun seemed to descend upon many thousands of people. This is pretty well documented through eyewitness reports, but seems to have been somewhat subjective, as many—even believers—saw nothing at all.

Over the centuries since Jesus walked the earth, Mary has been elevated to the status of a virtual deity among Catholics. She is seen as an intercessor, pleading with mortals to mend their ways, lest her son wreak some sort of disaster upon humanity for its wicked ways. She is seen as almost begging us, implying that she cannot stay her son’s hand forever, meaning that Jesus will punish us severely if we don’t repent. It is interesting to note that all of these apparitions occurred to Catholic youngsters, primarily adolescent girls.

The Urantia Book offers no information that I can find about this sort of thing, although I wish that it did. Were these phenomenon purely subjective? Were they a case of mass hysteria? Was there really a good spirit communicating with young children, offering clues to the future? If so, who could it be? As far as I know, there are no documented corroborations of the predictions of any of these visitations. Many, many people experienced healing of ailments, as at Lourdes, but was this a real case of miraculous healing, or was it the faith of the ailing person that cured them? We have evidence of this happening during Jesus’ life, as in the case of the woman with the \spirit of infirmity. Faith is a powerful adjunct to healing.

Unfortunately, I can offer no explanation for these events, and while I find them very interesting—even amazing—I have a hard time believing that they are Divine visitations. Our heavenly Father does not deal in fear and warnings, but in love and salvation. God works from within the individual heart and soul, and I think he would not need to use such dramatic means to call attention to himself. He waits for his children to come to him, and dwells as the “still, small voice, ” leading the way to his will. Having said that, I sometimes wish that there could be some kind of world-wide Divine event that would get the attention of people who need some proof of God, but so far, that has not happened. The truth is that we humans are engaged in a life that requires rugged faith and the religion of personal spiritual experience to produce any real spiritual progress—not apparitions and visitations by supposedly supernatural beings. Consider this Urantia Book quote:

Religion lives and prospers, then, not by sight and feeling, but rather by faith and insight. It consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and spiritual meanings in facts already well known to mankind. The highest religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical emotions. It is, rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind, and as far as such an experience is definable in terms of psychology, it is simply the experience of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a purely personal experience.

(101:1.4)

As to the second part of your question: Mary, the mother of Jesus was not strictly a disciple of Jesus. She was his his mother; and throughout Jesus life, Mary was at various times loving, proud, perplexed, hopeful, and also bitterly disappointed as to the course that her son’s life took. She was quite a normal human mother, with a normal mother’s care and concern for her child’s welfare. You can read more about Mary HERE

The “Marys” who were disciples of Jesus were Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the sister of Lazarus.

I wish I could have given you a better answer, but I hope this has been of some help to you…