The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

If Christmas marks the birth of Jesus, then you know who deserves most of the credit. As interest in Mary increases among the unwashed masses, the Church has more trouble trying to manage her image, her meaning, and her legacy.

Anne and Joe were a typical couple. They married young and drove hard for success, and Joe’s career in animal husbandry eventually made them wealthy. After two decades of marriage they were still so in love that friends could only envy them. All but for one thing: Their marriage was infertile, and they ached for a child. There were no effective medical interventions, so they had little more than a hope and a prayer of parenthood. When Joe overheard a client’s off-color joke about his sterility, he finally hit the breaking point, and instead of returning home from work that night, he took off toward the outskirts of town and collapsed on a dusty hillside. He lay there for days, broken and wild with grief, blaming himself.

Meanwhile Anne grew frantic. Joe often traveled for work, but she’d been expecting him home days ago. She stared outside at the birds building their spring nests and felt numb with sorrow. It was in that moment of utter despair that she was seized by a sort of paranormal vision that left her with hope for motherhood and a desperate urge to go looking for her husband. Joe had a similar experience on the hillside, and he immediately sped home. The two met up at the city limits, where they were stunned by each other’s accounts of what they could only describe as a divine message. Flushed with the heat of hope and desire, they raced home. The next morning, Anne was pregnant.

Nine months later she had a healthy baby girl who proved to be exceptional. She could walk seven steps by six months of age, and when she was three, Anne and Joe presented her to their priest. He predicted big things for the girl.

Sometime between her 12th and 14th birthdays, the girl was ready to follow in her mother’s footsteps toward an early marriage. The priest summoned a handful of eligible bachelors. One of them was a carpenter named Joseph, an older man and a widower. As the group convened, a dove somehow emerged miraculously from Joseph’s staff, and perched on his head. The priest pronounced Joseph to be the one God had chosen to be the husband of the young woman.

Unfortunately, Joseph had doubts about the marriage. He worried that friends and family would ridicule him about his youthful bride. Furthermore, he already had two sons of his own. But he took her in, reluctantly, and then left for a neighboring town to go about his trade. Months later, when his wife told him about her unexpected pregnancy, Joseph was unhappy and incredulous, and she cried bitter tears. It took a visit from an angel to declare Mary’s virginity and the immaculate conception of Jesus.

The rest of the story is well worn. Mary’s name is now known the world over—despite the fact that accepted scripture actually makes very little mention of her, and apocryphal texts and legends fill in only a few more blanks. Regardless of this spotty historical knowledge, public interest in Mary—on the popular and scholarly level in Catholic, Protestant, and even secular circles—has existed ever since Jesus was born and died. And after several decades of increasing popularity, attention to Mary is reaching a crescendo and igniting this question: To whom, precisely, does Mary belong? Of and for the people, Mary is attractive to the masses specifically because of her humanity, and because there is so little concrete information about her. She can be whoever you need her to be.

Yet certain institutions, most notably the Catholic Church, have a fervent interest in defining and protecting Mary and her likeness. If religious scholars riff on whether Mary’s mantle should be red or blue—and they do—then it’s easy to see why they’d recoil at the collection of irreverent plastic Mary memorabilia at places like Sister Fun, the oddball gift shop on Lake Street. There, on any given day, you’ll find the image of the Virgin emblazoned on everything from key chains to ashtrays—displayed right alongside the fart powder and hairy soap bars. But taste is a matter of opinion, and the gap between one person’s and another’s is really all that divides the merchandise at Sister Fun from the “relics” at the Marian Library, a service of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton. The library’s collection includes “nearly 100,000 cards depicting Mary in the art of all ages and numerous Marian shrines, attractive collections of statues from around the world, Marian postage stamps, recordings of Marian music, Marian medals, and rosaries.”

Legally and poetically, Mary sits squarely in the public domain, where people are free to make what they will of her, including a profit. As much as the Church may want to be the primary beneficiary of Marian interest, the reality is that more and more people are wanting a piece of Mary for themselves.On October 29, John Paul II officially demanded further research on the Virgin Mary. In some circles “dogma” has a bad name, of course, but in 2004 the Church will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. The latest session of the Pontifical Council for Culture was dedicated entirely to the work of two institutions concerned with Mary—the International Marian Pontifical Academy and the Pontifical Academy of the Immaculata. The Pope has singled out these two academies, specifically charging them “to communicate to the men and women of our time the most authentic meaning and message of this truth of faith.” Protestants have been ruminating on the matter of Mary as well. Last summer, St. Olaf College hosted a major national conference for Lutheran clergy dedicated to rethinking the role of Mary (this, in a Protestant faith not normally noted for its interest in her).

With or without the Pope’s recent proclamation, Mary has been a figure of adoration and controversy since the beginnings of the Christian church. The devout recognize her by dozens of names: The Blessed Virgin, Second Eve, Mother of All the Living, Mother of Life, Morning Star, Mystical New Heaven, Center of Orthodoxy, the all-undefiled Mother of Holiness and Mother of God. Even the Koran mentions her by name (as the mother of the prophet Jesus). Still others refer to her as a mother goddess, a Christianized symbol of more ancient religions dedicated to the feminine.

Recently, Mary’s intrigue has permeated popular culture well beyond the reach of religious boundaries. She has become the subject of innumerable books from every imaginable angle, and she is a recurring theme in everything from women’s studies classes to goddess-worship circles to pop music. She has appeared on the cover of Time magazine more often than any other figure, and Pope John Paul II has dedicated his papacy to her, Totus Tuus, “I am wholly yours.”

On top of all that, in the last 30 years Marian apparitions—reports of Mary appearing and communicating with normal, everyday people—have been occurring more frequently than at any time in history. Tracking the number of these incidents is a tricky business, since it all depends on how they are reported and to whom. One Marian researcher has recorded 4 Marian appearances in each year from 1940 to 1960, 8 in 1970, 30 in 1980, and 15 or more from 1990 to the present. Another researcher claims there were more than 300 apparitions in the 20th century. Every scholar has a different take on the issue. But the one thing no one disputes is that reports of Mary’s earthly visitations are skyrocketing.

Why Mary has been making so many appearances lately is a subject of speculation and a lot of uneasiness, especially for the Catholic hierarchy. Many see omens of an apocalypse in these Marian “locutions”; they bode ill for our world, unless we return to God and prayer. That somewhat paranoid, didactic view of Mary should come as no surprise, considering the cataclysmic last century and the air of fear and uncertainty that persists into this one. People seem to be looking for answers. Consider the immense popularity of End Times, the best-selling series of novels based on the book of Revelations; more than 30 million copies have sold to date. Add to that a recent Time/CNN poll showing that a quarter of respondents believe the events of 9/11 were predicted in the Bible, and you get a strong hunch that the American public is nurturing a renewed fascination with God.

Johann Roten, a Marianist priest who directs the Marian Library and International Marian Research Institute in Dayton, puts it this way: “The increase in reports of apparitions may suggest that there is a spiritual hunger today that goes beyond institutional churches. There’s a need for the mystery to be put back in people’s lives. Apparitions may be one of God’s many answers to these needs. Apparitions remind us that Christianity is a religious tradition based on mediation.” Roten describes himself as a “cautious believer” in apparitions. “God is not immediately present, but he gives himself to be understood and shared. He entrusts himself or his message to Mary, who in turn entrusts this same message to the visionary who passes it on to a multitude of people, who in turn share the message with others.” Michael Duricy, who oversees the library’s encyclopedic web site offers another social context for our current interest. “In a western culture that has a history of hostility toward spirituality, people have been repressing something deep in their hearts. That’s going to eventually erupt.”

But why then is the Catholic Church so wary of Marian apparitions, and so hasty to distance itself from those who report them? Appearances of Mary are almost never accepted or approved by the Church, which works diligently to ensure that reporters of apparitions do not proselytize in the name of the Church. There has never been an apparition reported in the U.S. that has been approved, and in the rare cases where a vision does get the seal of authenticity, it comes only after years of wrangling. Reports are investigated and visionaries must be interviewed. Often they are passed off as hoaxes or waved away as delusions. And the predictable truth is that hoaxes do abound and most of them aren’t very difficult to dismiss. For example, an image of the face of Christ on the wall of a church in Guatemala City inspired miraculous healing for two weeks in the 80s, before it was revealed to be a whitewashed poster of Willie Nelson.

According to Kevin Orlin Johnson, author of Apparitions: Mystic Phenomena and What They Mean, the overwhelming majority of people who claim to see apparitions do so expressly to get into the spotlight. The genuine visions come, invariably, “to people who didn’t want them before they happened, who later wish that they hadn’t had them, or who don’t want them at all, ever. The modesty of their conduct contrasts sharply with the posturings of the fakes and the deluded,” says Johnson in an essay for The Rock, a Catholic publication. “The minute you see self-proclaimed visionaries giving interviews to the press, dashing off reams of prophecies for all and sundry, asserting that they’ve seen Mary and that they have an urgent message that can save the world; the minute you see someone even permitting himself to be interviewed on such a matter; certainly as soon as you see a reported visionary routinely blessing people, ‘curing’ pilgrims, or even receiving pilgrims at all—you can safely assume that the person is a fraud or, if you want to be particularly charitable, that the person is deluded, genuinely believing that what he said he saw was real. Either way, it’s not worthy of your attention.”

To be considered constat de supernaturalitate—the event shows all the signs of being an authentic intervention from heaven—an apparition must meet strict criteria. For instance, any message alleged to be from Mary must be in acceptable theological standing with the Church, which is to say it must not contradict the teachings of the hierarchy in any way. Authentic communication from Mary must also promote positive spiritual assets: prayer, conversion, charity.

Seldom are all conditions met, but sometimes they are. Interestingly, those “approved” apparitions often come to children. One of the most widely publicized visitations is still under investigation by the Church; it involves six children who saw Mary beginning in 1981 on a hilltop outside the village of Medjegorje, in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina. The six visionaries, who were extensively tested and are now adults, claim that they continue to receive messages from the Virgin even now. Most of them insist the messages come on a daily basis—an unprecedented declaration in this rarefied history. Their messages are not unlike those of their predecessors: They urge prayer, conversion, faith, and submission to God. They also claim that Mary says God has “plans” and that new days are ahead of us, and that Medjegorje will be her last visit to the world.

Robert Faricy poses a simple question in his introduction to Janice Connell’s book, The Visions of the Children: The Apparitions of the Blessed Mother at Medjegorje. He writes, “Are people today so spiritually blind that God is drawing very big pictures? Are people today so spiritually deaf that God is shouting at us?” If so, people are hearing the shouts. Since the beginning of the Medjegorje apparitions, more than 20 million pilgrims have traveled to the Bosnian village, including thousands of priests and hundreds of bishops. This, in the midst of the bloodiest, most hate-filled conflict in Europe since World War II. People are looking for something—a sign, guidance, solace, healing, or all of the above. The more you look for Mary the more you find other people who are doing the same. You don’t have to travel to Eastern Europe to discover that.Kettle River is the only place in Minnesota where reports of Marian locutions and promised appearances, as reported by local Stephen Marino, were extensively investigated by the Catholic Diocese. Like every other reported Marian apparition in this country, the Kettle River claims were rejected as inauthentic by the Church.

After receiving his locutions from Mary in the 1990s, Stephen Marino founded Communitas Dei Patris (Families of God Our Father), a “private association of the Christian faithful and consecrated religious living a community-centered life… under the guidance of the Holy Virgin Mother of God.” Marino also initiated Kettle River’s Global Apostolate of Family Prayer Night Devotions, one of a growing number of Marian lay movements around the world. These lay communities are dedicated to the virtues of Mary and are not officially associated with or recognized by the Catholic church, despite the fact that some have had ordained priests in residence. Marino’s community promotes prayer and fasting for the universal healing and restoration of families, and an end to divorce, contraception, and abortion. The grounds of Communitas Dei Patris look just like any other rural Minnesotan setting, with homes dotting a narrow dirt road—except for the statutes of the Virgin perched atop inverted five-gallon plastic laundry detergent buckets.

Reached on the telephone, Marino wouldn’t comment. “I’ve never spoken to anybody about this and I’m not going to start now.” But he did do a great deal of talking to the general public in the 90s, so much so that the Bishop of Duluth at the time, Roger Schwietz, warned him expressly to stop publishing the contents of his Marian messages in the Duluth Diocese. Marino, however, claims (on his web site, Kettleriverusa .com) that Bishop Schwietz told him in a “private meeting” that the locutions were “from God.”

“I don’t believe that’s what was said,” cautions Father Dale Nau from the Diocese of Duluth. “The locutions were investigated and the conclusion was that they were not of supernatural origin. In fact, the content of the locutions was at least partly in direct contradiction to the teachings of traditional Catholic theology. The group in Kettle River has never had any official Church sanction. In fact, the Bishop advised Catholics to stay away from the predicted Kettle River appearance.”

Father Bill Fournier, also of Duluth, had over 100 conversations with Marino over 14 months in the early 90s, and he’s more direct about Bishop Schwietz’s supposed private endorsement of the Kettle River appearances. “Believe me, that’s not true,” Fournier says. “We had somebody look into the locutions and they were in no way of divine origin.”

Still, the Bishop’s sharp public disavowal didn’t stop 3,000 people from gathering on a snow-covered field in Kettle River on Easter, 1993, for a promised (but ultimately unfulfilled) appearance of the Virgin in the sky.

Mary Kaye Medinger, director of Wisdom Ways Resource Center for Spirituality, sponsored by the College of St. Catherine and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, steps back from the issue of apparitions and carefully steers toward a broader context. “Mary means many things to many people today. There is definitely a revival of interest in this person.” Medinger has been doing workshops, lectures, and retreats on Mary since 1986, and she is eloquent in her expression of Mary’s role in the culture. She’s equally eloquent in her silence on the subject of apparitions.

“What I find,” says Medinger, “is that many people are coming back to look at this woman with very different eyes and with very new questions. I’m also finding an increased interest among all sorts of people, not just Catholics. Mary does not belong to the Catholics. The women’s movement is playing an important role in recovering her. They are using their own experience and doing some very fine academic, scholarly work.”Julie Swenson, a Minneapolis publicist, went looking for Mary half-heartedly a few years ago, when she visited Fatima, the Church-sanctioned site where Mary appeared six times to three shepherd children near the town of Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. “I went to Fatima as a stop during Christmas vacation with my fiancee and his dad and a troupe of others, including Deepak Chopra.”

According to Julie, Fatima is a tourist town “not unlike Wisconsin Dells.” Glow-in-the-dark Virgins and other miracle trinkets are plentiful, and Julie still has a half-dozen glowing Mary statues tucked away in the back of a closet. “They definitely freak me out,” she admits.

But what struck Julie most at Fatima was one particular miracle-seeker. “It was a lonely man walking on his knees. He was dirty, I mean the kind of dirty only found among the poorest of the poor. His clothes were threadbare, and I’m sure he hadn’t eaten in days, but there he was kneeing his way to a miracle across the stones in the rain without an umbrella. I wondered what would make him do this. Who was sick? Who was lost? What miracle did he need?”

Michael Donahue, a psychology professor in California, has researched Marian apparitions and is lucent about the changing nature of Mary in these modern times. “I was especially influenced by a book called Encountering Mary by Sandra Zimdars-Swartz,” says Donahue. “This author looks at the development of these apparitions, which had, historically, served to re-inspire devotion or asked for some new form of devotion.”

Donahue points to the recently released memoir Looking for Mary by Beverly Donofrio—author of Riding in Cars With Boys—as a good source for understanding the sort of individual who might tend toward a pilgrimage of Marian devotion. “Donofrio really captures the mentality of the Marian devotees,” Donahue says. “When you read her book, you get a true sense—not from Donofrio herself, but from the crowds she interviews—of the seeking, and the will to believe without question, that typifies these pilgrims. Donofrio recounts her conversations with devotees, who believe that if they ask Mary for something, she will do it. If they expect a miracle, it will happen. Donofrio moved through it not wanting to be sucked in, but the voice you hear of those devotees struck me as very authentic.” Medinger also mentions the pilgrim Donofrio. “She’s hilarious and moving. Ultimately her home becomes a shrine to Mary. What she’s doing internally is creating a shrine for Mary within, waiting for her to come back home and move in.”

Which, according to Pope John Paul II, just may be the most direct route to salvation. No surprise, given his lifelong devotion to Mary and his belief in her divine intervention during the attempt on his life in 1981. In order to learn to contemplate and to love the face of Christ, he says, “We must go to Mary, who, fully accepting the plan of God, formed her Son in a singular way, supporting his growth.”

Formed her son in a singular way? Supporting his growth? That seems a terribly mundane description of motherhood itself. How has such an everyday accomplishment managed to inspire millions and millions of people—not all of them believing in the immaculate conception or even the divinity of Jesus Christ—to trek across the globe to kneel in the dust in the general vicinities where Mary may or may not have? The question asked may be the question answered. It could be Mary’s flesh-and-blood humanity, her earthly motherhood—with all the word implies—that lies at the heart of her enduring capacity to inspire the love and devotion of the masses. Perhaps she is not just the mother of God, but the mother of us all.