Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  1988 In late summer and early fall, Mary begins speaking to a prayer group of nine young adults meeting every Thursday evening at Saint Maria Goretti Church in Scottsdale, Arizona. During the next year, Mary begins to appear to various members of the group, first and most frequently to Gianna Talone, former model, television actress, now a divorced pharmacologist. Gianna is also regularly assaulted by the devil at night in violent episodes which leave her bruised and scarred. In November 1993, about to marry a physician named Michael Sullivan, Gianna has a vision in which Mary tells her to leave Scottsdale and move to Emmitsburg, Maryland. Michael and Gianna do as they are told. Since then Mary has continued to appear and give messages to Gianna once a week in the Thursday evening prayer service at Saint Joseph Church on North Seton Avenue in Emmitsburg.

  1990 On December 3, Ray Trevino sees a large image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the concrete floor near the shower stall in the restroom of his auto parts store in Progreso, Texas. Soon more than fourteen thousand people are coming to the store every week, leaving flowers, candles, milagros, and holy cards around the image on the floor.

  1992 On January 8, Mary Jo Kalchthaler and a small prayer group are saying the rosary before a statue of Our Lady of Fatima at Saint James Church in Totowa, New Jersey. The statue is a traveling Mary, purchased from the Vatican, which tours different churches and homes in the parish. When Mary Jo asks the white statue for a sign of Mary’s divine presence, it begins to glow blue, then red, green, yellow, and pink. Once permanently installed at Our Lady of Pompeii Church in Paterson, the statue continues to go through its rainbow permutations and is credited with healing physical and mental problems, broken marriages, and fractured souls.

  1993 In September, Santiago Quintero, operator of an auto-body business out of his home in Elsa, Texas, sees the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the bumper of a late-model Camaro he is repairing. That day a local man is shot in the head and the doctors say he will not survive. His wife comes to see the car and the man recovers. Quintero builds a small shack for the Holy Camaro of Elsa and thousands come to worship.

  1995 On two separate occasions in late May, Mary is seen by ten thousand people gathered at a Catholic church in Dong Lu, China. This pilgrimage site was built following the 1900 invasion of Dong Lu during the Boxer Rebellion. In the midst of firing upon seven hundred Christian residents, the soldiers suddenly turned and fled, having seen Mary and Saint Michael the Archangel in the sky above them. Those who witness Mary’s two appearances in 1995 have gathered to worship in defiance of communist government edicts. May is Mary’s special month and they must honor her. As the sound of Gregorian chant and the fragrance of incense waft over the rice fields, the Chinese seers are transported and transformed by her presence.

  1996 On December 17, a gigantic image of Mary appears in four tinted glass panels covering the first and second stories of the Seminole Finance Corporation building in Clearwater, Florida. By January 18, 1997, more than 450,000 people have come to see the iridescent hooded figure with head inclined and no facial features. In addition to filling up the parking lot with votive candles, bouquets of flowers, and baskets of fruit, the faithful have also left 14,000 at the site. Because the image is clearly visible day and night from the nearby coastal highway, it is dubbed Our Lady of the I-19.

  I might not go so far as to suggest a conspiracy theory among world historians to suppress and marginalize Mary, but I do wonder how and why they have so consistently managed to ignore her.

  The conflict between science and religion has occupied thinkers of every century. With the advent of the theory of relativity, the uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, and quantum physics, science has begun to ask some of the same questions as religion: questions of faith, meaning, and God.

  Science can no longer be regarded as the method by which all the mysteries of the universe will eventually be dispelled. Now it seems that each new mind-boggling scientific discovery serves rather to increase both our awe in the face of these mysteries and our awareness of the fact that reality far exceeds our ability to understand it. Some would say that because we are living in an age when things like heart transplants, cloning, computers, walking on the moon, and taking pictures of Mars are no longer the province of science fiction, people are less likely to believe in miracles, apparitions, visions, and the like. But, seen from another angle, such scientific discoveries actually make it easier to be open to the possibility of the miraculous. Until Dr. Christiaan Barnard transplanted that first human heart in a hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, that December day in 1967, few people would have dreamed that such a thing could ever happen. In an age where heart transplants have become a frequent procedure, perhaps anything can be believed.

  Although the apparitions of Mary would seem at first glance to suspend all known laws of physics, in fact, in recent years, some of the quantum discoveries have made them all that much more plausible, adding to the vocabulary of the scientific world a renewed sense of wonder, creativity, and surprise. To paraphrase Saint Augustine, miracles are not contrary to nature or science or history. They are only contrary to what we know (or think we know) of nature, science, and history.

  The languages of faith and science are becoming remarkably similar, but as the physicists and the faithful put their heads together more and more closely over the big questions, the historians are still sitting on the sidelines. They remain obstinately oblivious to what has been going on around them for the past two thousand years, studiously avoiding what Susan Sontag has called “Moments of slippage, when anything seems possible and not everything makes sense.” History is still dodging the questions, still slipping around miraculous Mary, still refusing to acknowledge her presence and her power. What are the historians afraid of? Do they think that by expunging Mary from the annals they will never have to think about her, never have to hazard an opinion as to whether the stories about her are fact or fiction, true or false?

  I have since taken another look at those fat chronologies and I must admit that I have been awfully naive. I have had to revise my picture of the chronologists with their telescopes and vacuum cleaners. I have had instead to picture them picking and choosing from the vast garden of facts. I have had to recognize that the chronologists and other historians are faced with the same decisions that any writer must face: what to leave out and what to put in. These decisions are made on the basis of a conscious or unconscious sense of what matters and what doesn’t. For a long time, I thought those chronologies had avoided this problem by putting everything in, by embracing all multiplicity, and so had in the end served up a look at the world which was the apparent opposite: absolute and complete simplicity. Now I know otherwise. Now I know they can be no more complete, no more absolute, than any other story.

  I took another look at the events that various chronologists have chosen to include in their listings for the year of Mary’s now legendary appearance at Fatima, Portugal. Picking and choosing from what they have already picked and chosen, here is some of what I found.

  In 1917, World War I was in full swing. Many countries declared war on many other countries. There were advances and retreats, victories and defeats, casualties and survivors, more casualties, fewer survivors. The Russian Revolution began. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The United States officially entered the conflict. The first bombing of London by German planes took place. Canadian forces captured Vimy Ridge and later, Passchendaele.

  In 1917, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born. As were Indira Gandhi, Ferdinand Marcos, Dizzy Gillespie, Andrew Wyeth, Heinrich Böll, Thelonious Monk, John Lee Hooker, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, and Robert Mitchum.

  In 1917, the Trans-Siberian railroad was completed. It had been under construction for twenty-six years. In the world’s worst railway disaster so far, a troop train was derailed in the French Alps and 543 people were killed. In the harbor of Halifax, Canada, the French munitions ship Mont Blanc and the Belgian steamer Imo collided. Sixteen hundred people died in the ensuing ex
plosion which leveled the city’s north end, leaving at least six thousand homeless.

  Also in Canada, the National Hockey League was formed in Montreal, Quebec. In baseball, Ernie Shore of the Boston Red Sox pitched a perfect game against the Washington Senators. The Chicago White Sox defeated the New York Giants to win the World Series.

  In 1917, Auguste Rodin died. As did Edgar Degas, Scott Joplin, Tom Thomson, Ferdinand von Zeppelin, and Buffalo Bill Cody. Dutch-born dancer Mata Hari was convicted of spying for the Germans. More than fifty thousand Allied casualties were determined to have been the direct result of her treachery. She was executed by firing squad.

  In 1917, Sigmund Freud published Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Carl Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, and T. S. Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The annual salary of silent-film star Charlie Chaplin reached one million dollars.

  Using equations derived from Einstein’s general theory of relativity, German astronomer Karl Schwarzchild predicted the existence of black holes. The proposal first suggesting their existence was put forth in 1798 by Pierre Simon de Laplace, the same French astronomer whose 1812 mechanistic model of the universe would be displaced in 1927 by Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for which Heisenberg would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.

  Seven years later, in 1939, World War II began. Heisenberg played a leading role in German nuclear research. Heated controversy continues to surround Heisenberg’s activities during the war, thus making the interpretation of his own life a matter of great uncertainty.

  But in 1917, none of this was history yet: it was still the future, which is, by its very nature, always uncertain.

  In the midst of all the history of 1917, there is no sign anywhere of Mary and three children in a valley called Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal. There is no mention made of secrets or the original sun miracle witnessed by seventy thousand people. No mention made of all those lives forever changed.

  With or without the historians’ acknowledgment, the story of Fatima continues. On May 13, 1981, the sixty-fourth anniversary of the first apparition, Pope John Paul II is shot by a Turkish terrorist in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. The assassination attempt occurs just as the pope is bending down to look at a medallion of Mary around the neck of a young girl. The shooter is Mehmet Ali Agca, a trained killer who is arrested minutes later. At his trial, Agca claims to be Jesus Christ and insists that the third secret be revealed. He is given a life sentence in an Italian prison. John Paul II credits Mary with saving his life and, as a gift of thanksgiving, the bullet removed from his body is embedded in the crown of her statue at Fatima.

  A year later, on May 13, 1982, when John Paul II visits Fatima to thank Mary personally, another attempt is made on his life. A Spanish fanatic named Juan Fernandez Krohn, wearing a priest’s black robes and carrying a bayonet, tries to break through the security cordon as the pope mounts the steps to the altar of the shrine. This time the pope is unharmed.

  On May 13, 2000, John Paul II again visits Fatima, despite widespread fears that he is putting himself in danger by doing so. To the statue of Our Lady of Fatima he presents a second gift, a golden ring given to him at the beginning of his pontificate by his mentor, the late Polish Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, and inscribed with his motto, Totus tuus, which means “All yours.” He has come to beatify the two dead children, Jacinta and Francisco. Beatification is the last step before full sainthood and can be performed only after death. The ceremony is attended by over 700,000 people including the one surviving visionary, Sister Lucia, who is now ninety-three years old.

  After performing the beatification mass, John Paul surprises everyone by revealing the third secret, which he had first read days after his election as pontiff in 1978. In addition to predicting the mass suffering of people throughout the twentieth century, Mary had also warned of the 1981 assassination attempt, describing “a bishop clothed in white” who “falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire.”

  From his prison cell in Italy, Mehmet Ali Agca says that he was indeed compelled by a supernatural force to pull the trigger and that if his petition for early release is successful, he will travel to the shrine at Fatima and kneel before Mary for ten days in prayer.

  Five days later, on May 18, 2000, the eightieth birthday of John Paul II is marked in the largest concelebration in the history of the world.

  The pope had requested clemency for his would-be assassin many times in the years since the shooting, and on June 13, 2000, Mehmet Ali Agca is pardoned by the Italian government and extradited to Turkey where he will serve eight years in prison for the murder of newspaper editor Abdi Ipekci in 1978.

  With or without Mary, it seems to me that history itself, the actual unfolding of events through time, takes no prisoners: everybody dies in the end.

  But the writing of history takes them by the thousands: prisoners of interpretation every one; prisoners of revisionism, positivism, determinism, deconstruction, reconstruction, skepticism, subjectivity, twenty-twenty hindsight, tunnel vision, cause and effect; prisoners of the paradox of being stuck in their own place in time.

  Faith

  In terms of faith, what brings meaning and integration to one’s experience, the facts are quite secondary. It’s the story (and not the facts) that grips the imagination, impregnates the heart, and animates the spirit within…

  —Diarmuid O’Murchu, Quantum Theology

  On Saturday morning I stayed in bed until eight o’clock. It was the weekend after all and, although I work at home, I too tend to observe many of its time-honored traditions. I awoke to familiar sounds coming from the kitchen. I could hear the water running, the coffeemaker gurgling, and then the doors of the refrigerator and the cupboards being opened and closed several times. Still groggy, I was transported back to a time when I was a sleepy teenager still balled up in my blankets while my mother made a big Saturday morning breakfast for the family. In her efforts to roust me out of bed, she usually made as much noise as possible in the process. Any minute now she was likely to fire up the blender or even the vacuum cleaner just to get me moving.

  But, of course, it was not my mother. It was Mary.

  By the time I came fully awake and got out there, she was setting the table and there was an open cookbook and a big bowl on the counter beside the waffle iron which she had managed to dig out from its usual hiding spot in the bottom cupboard. The radio was on but it was no longer tuned to my regular station, which would have been broadcasting news at this hour. Instead she was listening to a program of Gregorian chant.

  —Good morning, she said cheerfully. I hope you’re hungry. I wanted to surprise you.

  Usually I eat a small breakfast of yogurt and fruit because I know I should, not because I really want to. I am seldom ever hungry first thing in the morning. But suddenly I was.

  —How wonderful, I said. I’m starving.

  She poured me a cup of coffee and handed me the newspaper.

  —You sit down and relax, she said. I’ll do the rest. I warned you before that I’m not much of a cook, but I figured, with a little luck and the help of this cookbook, even I could manage to whip up an acceptable batch of waffles.

  I could not remember the last time anybody had made breakfast for me and I was touched all out of proportion by her simple gesture. My eyes filled foolishly with tickling tears.

  She patted me on the shoulder and turned back to the counter, measuring flour and cracking eggs into the bowl. I wanted nothing more than to lay my head down on the table and weep. With gratitude, self-pity, and relief. But I did not.

  I sipped my coffee and read the Books section instead. Soon Mary was plopping two fat Belgian waffles onto our plates and passing me the butter.

  This time there was no talk of nutritional self-improvement and the chronic quest for healthier habits. We slathered on the butter and the maple syrup with shameless abandon, admiring the way each perfect square filled up with the
sweet melting mixture.

  —These are definitely the best waffles I have ever eaten, I said with my mouth full.

  —Thank you, she said, obviously pleased. They are pretty good, even if I do say so myself.

  We cleaned our plates with enthusiasm and then I poured us each another cup of coffee. We passed portions of the newspaper back and forth between us and read quietly for a while.

  There were the usual front-section stories of catastrophic weather events, further dangerous developments in the world’s current and/or chronic hot spots, political upheavals and shenanigans at home and abroad, as well as news of another gigantic corporate merger, another celebrity scandal, and another missing child.

  The German philosopher Hegel once described the ritual reading of the daily paper as the secular equivalent to morning prayer. What manner of prayers are these, I wondered, and to whom should I address them?

  I skimmed over all of these stories, unwilling at that pleasant moment in my comfortable kitchen with Mary beside me and more coffee brewing, to contemplate or even acknowledge the massive amount of misery in progress beyond the pretty walls of my home and the tranquil Saturday morning streets of my peaceful neighborhood. Habitually hungry for information though I may be, there are times when I just want to keep my head in the sand for another hour or two.

  —The world is too much with us, I muttered with a nod to Wordsworth and turned to the potentially more palatable section called Life.

  —Amen, Mary said, taking up the Books section that I had set aside earlier.