It’s gotta be tough for some of these fringe devotional movements: sometimes a little twist in the story can bring it all to an end. Sometimes all it takes is the exposure of a misdeed, a heresy, a disobedience, and the group’s following may evaporate very quickly.
How fragile is it all when the devotion is centered around a physical object: a rainbow-colored window in a bank building?
The era of Our Lady of Clearwater seems to have ended the night of February 29:
Before: |
After: |
Now what do you do if you’re Shepherds of Christ Ministries, promoting messages by a laywoman and a priest from the Cincinnati area, and you’ve raised and spent $1 million for a bank building in Florida because it came with its own built-in kook magnet — I mean, image of Our Lady — and then some disgruntled teenager with a slingshot puts an end to your miracle?
Well, first, the group is urging supporters to pray for its “spiritual and financial needs”.
And in case that’s not enough to keep everyone’s ears tickled, they’re also changing the lighting, taking pictures at night, and declaring what’s left of the discolored glass to be a image of our Lord. It looks rather ghostly, which — considering that the Gospel makes clear that our Lord was not a ghost — is enough to establish it as false, in my opinion.
The teenager walked right out of the pages of Flannery O’Connor, committing a little act of violence that exposed the emptiness of false images. Good shot, kid.
How much of the $1 million did they spend on the piano in the window, I wonder?
In a nationwide population of 60 million Catholics, all of us fallen short of the glory of God, it’s not surprising to find some really goofy stuff like this. If these misguided folks are as well-intentioned as they seem, they’d do better to go to Eucharistic Adoration and pray for the Blessed Mother’s intercession for the salvation of souls.
Oops! I forgot, this is the St. Petersburg-Tampa diocese. Bishop Lynch canned all Adoration and is telling everyone to help out at the soup kitchen instead. Only interpersonal service to the poor has value, not intercessory service, you know.
At least Lynch got it right by judging the glass phenomenon to be “naturally explainable.” I wonder if the same applies to his actions that drove his male triathlete former press secretary to sue him for $100,000 for sexual harassment.
+J.M.J+
In 1990 – or maybe it was 1991 – some buildings were being demolished on East 71 St. near York Avenue in Manhattan, to make way for new housing. The plan also called for the removal of all the trees in front of the property, to be replaced with younger, smaller ones.
When one of the workmen tore a low limb off of one of the trees slated for destruction, he was surprised to find a 6″ tall beige plastic statue of Our Lady of Grace embedded in the wood of the tree, right where the limb met the trunk!
Word spread, crowds gathered, some devotees proclaimed it a miracle. People prayed, draped the tree with rosaries, scapulars and holy cards (quite a sight!), started picking off the bark and leaves (till a cast iron fence was eventually erected). An outbreak of popular piety on the Upper East Side!
A day or so after the statue had been revealed, someone stole it in the dead of night. Snapped the image of Blessed Mother clear off its base, which remained embedded in the tree. AFAIK, it was never found.
Devotees were disappointed; they hung snapshots of the original statue on the tree with an explanation of its history. They also got the owner of the property to agree to keep the “shrine” in place; the tree was not torn down. Haven’t been there for a while, but AFAIK the tree is probably still there, hung thick with rusting rosaries, scapulars bleached by the sun and holy cards damaged by rain and snow.
Turns out that the statue had been placed there back in the 1970’s by a former resident of the now-demolished buildings. It was eventually forgotten as the tree just grew around it.
Not exactly the miracle they originally thought it was, I guess. I have mixed feelings about Our Lady of the Tree. On the one hand, there was some vain credulity involved; on the other hand, it genuinely inspired some of the faithful, and provoked some old-fashion devotion in the middle of modern Manhattan.
(Granted, there were no questionable apparitions/locutions connected with it, unlike Clearwater.)
In Jesu et Maria,
Rosemarie
PS: If you’re curious as to the style of the statue, I found a picture online of a statue just like it. I really hope this url works:
http://snipurl.com/6c6h