Searching For Mary:
An Exploration of Marian Apparitions Across the U.S
by
Mark GarveyPlume Press 1998 238 pages
We down here in the Tampa Bay area are no strangers to unusual religious occurrences - over the years, we’ve had our fair share of weeping icons and statues, not to speak of what some might call Our Lady of Finance - the Mary-shaped water stains on a Clearwater office building.
Author Mark Garvey mentions the Clearwater image in his book Searching for Mary, but it’s only a passing reference, for as Garvey’s travels and encounters make clear, a water stain on glass is truly small potatoes in the vibrant and surprisingly extensive subculture that converges on the phenomena of purported Marian apparitions.
Garvey’s book is a report of his personal experiences at
six American apparitions sites. He traveled to New York, Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Arizona and California, witnessing apparition” “events” when possible and speaking to most of the living seers personally, Nancy Fowler of Conyers, Georgia being the notable exception.
For those unfamiliar with this particular aspect of Roman Catholic spirituality, Garvey provides helpful historical and theological background. He carefully explains the Church’s cautious position on apparitions and includes an excellent short chapter on the issue of discernment of spirits and judging the authenticity of apparitions.
Once he’s constructed that more theoretical framework, Garvey gets to work telling us what he’s seen, and it is a fascinating story.
The apparitions Garvey reports on range from the comforting words Mary supposedly offered a group of young people in an affluent parish in Scottsdale, Arizona from 1987 to 1989 to the detailed reports of the locations of Russian submarines and various other conspiracy theories that came from the lips of self-proclaimed seer Mary Ann Van Hoof in Necedah, Wisconsin from the 1950’s to her death in 1984.
The Necedah phenomena, along with the late Veronica Lueken’s visions in Bayside, Queens, New York represent the truly bizarre end of the apparition world, and both evolved into cult-like organizations. The Necedah group has dwindled in numbers since Van Hoof’s death, but the Bayside group is still strong and a deep thorn in the side of Church authorities. Lueken’s messages took the apocalyptic subtext present in most apparition messages and exploded it into predictions that “a giant, fiery comet known as the ‘Ball of Redemption’ was on its way to destroy unreprentant humanity, and that the Church was of no use since it had been infiltrated by “communitist, Freemasons and worse.”
Lueken died in 1995, but her followers still gather in large numbers, as Garvey observed at a cermoney marking the 26th anniversary of her apparitions, held at Flushing Meadow. The Bayside adherents are a vividly clad lot as they process and pray - Mary told Veronica Lueken that she wanted men to wear white berets and women, blue, and everyone involved in the rituals to wear white gloves - “Our Lady called them mittens” one supporter tells Garvey - and are ever ready to share with Garvey their latest conspiracy theories .
Most of the visionaries and followers Garvey encounters, however, are not this strange. For the most part, those he meets are good-hearted people who are seeking meaning and the healing of hurts, both their own personal wounds and the damage they see writ large on a world of pain and sin. Ray Doiron is an older man who has been experiencing visions in Belleville, Illinois since 1989. He tells Garvey, “People come up and say, ‘Let me touch you’.....I say to them, ‘Let me touch you, because there’s no difference’.....All you gotta do is have God in your heart and open your heart up to him.”
The strength of Garvey’s book is that it is a work of objective reporting. He simply describes what he sees, without judgement, presents the words of those with whom he speaks without comment, and for the most part, leaves himself out of the picture he paints.
Searching for Mary is not a scholarly work on apparitions, and leaves many questions unanswered - for deeper exploration on the topic, I would recommend the excellent Encountering Mary by Sandra Zimdars-Swartz. (Princeton University Press, 1991) However, we cannot begin to understand anything unless we first make the effort to apprehend it as it is, without prejudice, and Mark Garvey’s book is a worthy starting point in that journey.
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