A short, stout woman in white robes, a veil draped biblically around her face, Maria Paula smiles beatifically and stares up at the sky as she walks through the crowd. Her lips move, talking without sound, presumably to Mary. Some drop to their knees. Others take Polaroids of the sun. They say that things show up in these pictures that you can’t see with the naked eye.

POLAROID WOMAN: Look at that! Isn’t that wonderful? I hit the jackpot!

DONOFRIO: Maria sprinkles holy water on believers. She gazes deep into people’s eyes, gives long hugs, and makes the sign of the cross on their foreheads. She looks like she loves every one of them. They weep and they tremble, and look like they love her back. She approaches me. Part of me is cynical, another part wants the hug. I think, ”What do I have to lose?” Maria’s right in front of me. I meet her eyes and ready myself for the embrace. But, as I do, someone steps between us . . . and Maria hugs her instead.

DONOFRIO’S MOTHER: Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with Thee . . .

DONOFRIO: That’s my mother. Sitting in her living room in Wallingford, CT, the town I grew up in. The blinds are forever drawn against the sun, the television is never off. This afternoon, a Carmen Miranda movie. Lately my mother spends most of her day on the couch, looking pale and tired. She has emphysema, which is slowly suffocating her. As a child, one of the first stories I remember my mother telling me was about the Virgin Mary. My mother was 12, and her mother had just died. She was an orphan, sent to live with an aunt. One afternoon my mother was swimming in a lake with some friends, and started to drown. Flailing and swallowing water, she went under once, twice . . . the third time she didn’t come up. Then she had a vision.  

MOM: All I could see was the Virgin Mary with her arms outstretched, calling me, and it was a warm feeling that went through me. The next thing I know I was on the beach, they were bringing me around, and that’s all I remember. It’s hard for anybody to believe. It was the Virgin Mary.

DONOFRIO: Huh.

MOM: I wish could see her now. Because my time is coming soon.

DONOFRIO: (Laughs)

MOM: You know, it was a peaceful way to go if you’re going to go.

DONOFRIO: Huh.

MOM: It was a wonderful sight.

DONOFRIO: Whenever I hear that story, I can’t tell whether she was happy to awake on the beach, saved, or wished the Blessed Mother had lifted her out of the soup and up to heaven.

My parents never went to Church when I was a kid, but sometimes my grandmother would take me. Whenever she did, I steered her to the side alcove where there was a statue of the Virgin. Her eyes were kind, her arms wide open. I felt safe near Mary, and loved.

It didn’t last long. At 13 I was kicked out of the Catholic Youth Organization for having a ”smart mouth.” At 17 I was pregnant and married. At 19 I divorced my husband because he’d become a junkie. A few years later, I got a scholarship to college, and as soon as I graduated, my son Jason and I moved to New York City. He was 13. I was 30, and dead to religion. I was working as a typist, and writing at night, mostly letters. I was lonely, and wondering about people I’d lost touch with. I thought of an old friend from college named Meg. I loved her: she was smart and so beautiful. For some reason she took me under her wing. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in years, and wrote a chatty letter in which I imagined all the different lives she might be living.

A few weeks later, I received a note from her mother saying that Meg was dead. She’d suffered a brain aneurysm on the way to work and died instantly on the street. I wept and wept . . . I sat back at the typewriter to write a condolence letter, and saw a yellow something fall out of a window across the avenue. There on the sidewalk was a little girl. People screamed. Men made a circle and stretched their arms out like she was on fire and they couldn’t touch her. The baby’s mother appeared, pulling her hair and wailing.

I couldn’t believe it. I got so depressed I was nearly comatose. Finally, I pulled myself out of it. I wrote a bad poem; the first poem I ever read in public. It was about Meg, the little girl, her mother . . . and mostly about Mary. At first I thought the impulse to put Mary in the poem was anger — a need to understand the suffering and blame someone for it. Now I think I was looking for a mother. Mary had suffered unbelievably. She’d seen her son nailed to a cross, yet forgave. I needed her strength, and her comfort.

(Sounds of dialing numbers)

1-800-345-MARY

PHONE TAPE: (Ring.) Thank you for calling. We want to make known that in recent times the Virgin Mary and Jesus have been appearing in Long Island, New York.

DONOFRIO: I left my address on the machine, and soon received a packet in the mail. They call themselves ”Our Lady of the Roses” and are dedicated to the messages that a housewife named Veronica Leukens claimed to have received from Mary from 1970 until her death two years ago. Believers meet 30 times a year, at the site of the old World’s Fair in Queens.

(Sounds of Hail Mary’s and airplane noise.)

It’s a cold night at the desolate fair grounds. Despite the temperature, there are a couple of hundred faithful here — mostly older people, kneeling on the frozen ground, waiting for the Blessed Mother. In front of them, a small altar on the site where the Vatican Pavilion once stood. The same altar on which Veronica Leukens delivered hundreds of messages from Mary. Each apparition carefully tape recorded by followers, like Michael Mangan, the director of this shrine.

(Roses song.)

MANGAN: Normally there would be call lights. They were usually like blue Communion-like hosts in the sky.

LEUKENS: Now you can see the beautiful blue lights.

MANGAN: And when she saw those, that was indicative of our lady coming forward to give a message.

LEUKENS: Now Jesus and our Lady are close enough — I can see what they’re wearing. Our Lady has on the most beautiful light luminous gown. It’s shining. I can not see any of her feet. And Jesus is coming down . . . I can see Jesus’ slippers. His are tan . . .

MANGAN: And she would go into this deep ecstasy, and then she repeats exactly what the Virgin Mary and Our Lord are saying.

LEUKENS: The world has not progressed as the Eternal Father has asked. Man has become obsessed with sin . . .

MANGAN: What our Lady is saying is that if we don’t get our act together we’re going to be severely chastised in the form of World War III and a fiery comet, and that when this strikes, billions — that’s with a B — will perish. And that this is scheduled to occur before the end of this century if not sooner.

LEUKENS: I have great hopes for rescuing most of my children. But the Eternal Father makes it known that the numbers saved will be counted in the few. Now Jesus is . . .

(Sounds of ghostly voices of older believers talking to Beverly.)

DONOFRIO: The prayers drone on, but no Mary tonight. No miracles. I look up at the sky and shiver. A small group of elderly men and women approach–working-class Irish and Italian–they look like they could be relatives. They offer me the coats off their backs, their scarves, their hats, their gloves. I’m touched. They tell me of cures and miracles, of kneeling through blizzards. They tell me that they’re in church every day, even though the diocese considered Veronica a kook. They have no doubt that Mary spoke to her. I have no doubt about their sincerity. I want to experience something, anything, so I can tell them that I understand. Then suddenly . . . commotion . . . they tug at my coat . . . hands shoot up towards the sky . . .

DIFFERENT VOICES: See the doves? Look at the doves! See the white doves? See all the doves? Oh yes!

DONOFRIO: A flock of white birds swoops overhead. Then another flock, and another. The air is illuminated with camera flashes. It’s stunning.

Later, I tell friends about the doves. How they filled up the sky, how they’re not supposed to fly at night. When they refuse to believe in even the slightest possibility of a miracle, I feel resentful.

Then I listen to the tape. Just before the doves fly overhead, I hear a voice from one of the vigil organizer’s walkie-talkies.

SQUAWK: The Birds are up.

DONOFRIO: It sounds an awful lot like ”The Birds are up.” Listen again.

SQUAWK: The Birds are up.

DONOFRIO: Was it a set-up? I’m embarrassed that I fell for it, and retreat back into my skepticism.

By the time I turned forty, my son was grown, and I’d gone from teenage mother to Born Again Virgin. I’d split up with yet another man, and landed broken-hearted in a tiny village in New York, surviving off some money from a book I wrote about my life. I was alone. Lonely. And Mary snuck up on me. For some reason, I started to collect Virgins. Within a couple of years, I’d collected so many images of Mary — pressed in tin, painted on fabric and canvas, and molded in wax — that my house was in danger of being declared a shrine.

One night I gave a dinner party and invited a neighbor, a psychiatrist named David Schlager. He’d never been over before, so I gave him a tour. Afterwards, I heard that he asked a friend, ”So . . . What do you think about Beverly’s Mary cathexis?”

I tossed in my bed over that one. I wasn’t exactly sure what ’cathexis’ meant, but I could guess: a delusional who thinks she’s an important historical personage, like the Queen of Sheba, or in my case the Virgin Mary.

SCHLAGER: It just means an investment of emotional energy in . . .

DONOFRIO: I went to talk to David about Mary and me.

SCHLAGER: Initially I thought that your kind of attraction to or interest in the Virgin Mary came from the fact that she was a mother without a father, that she had literally conceived this son on her own, and your identification with her was through that. Then of course there was the notion of her having conceived her child in holiness and purity and grace, and your having had to struggle with notion of having done it in shame and disgrace. And I kind of thought it was a reparative fantasy; one that although you had felt kind of disgraced at the time, on some level you felt an identification with her. But . . . I should say that as the perhaps token Jew of this interview that literally the only thing I know about Mary is what I learned from knowing you and from listening to the Beatles Song ”Let it Be.” And it’s literally the only exposure I’ve had to her, those two . . .

DONOFRIO: What are the words?

SCHLAGER: I’m going to play it for you at the end.

(Clicks on stereo.)

You know he was a Catholic, and his mother was a Catholic. His mother was named Mary and had died . . .

DONOFRIO: Paul McCartney?

SCHLAGER: Yes. And had died when he was a lad. Maybe seven or eight, and you know for most non-Catholics I bet it’s the most they ever thought about Mary because she is the center of his song.

SONG: When I find myself in times of times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. Whisper words of wisdom, let it be. And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer . . . let it be . . .

(Sounds of outside, birds.)

DONOFRIO: Conyers, Georgia. America’s most famous apparition site. Its unofficial motto: ”Eat, Drink and See Mary.” Each year, on October 13th, tens of thousands of people converge on this remote farmhouse in the middle of Baptist country to hear the message that Mary has given to a housewife named Nancy Fowler.

Believers come here the rest of the year as well, although in much smaller numbers. They wander the green, peaceful grounds, sit on benches and pray, collect water from Fowler’s Holy Water well. At three o’clock, they make their way to her farmhouse for the daily prayer service.

(Sounds of Hail Marys.)

There are about forty pilgrims here this Friday, sitting in neat rows of folding chairs. The inside has been converted into a small chapel. There’s a large fireplace at the front, its mantle covered with flowers. On the side wall hangs a painting of Mary like I’ve never seen her before. She’s not young and beautiful, but middle-aged and distraught. Nancy Fowler is also plain looking: an overweight woman with tired, worried eyes. Fowler doesn’t speak to reporters, and almost never comes to afternoon services. Although believers do pause every so often to read transcripts of her apparitions.

WOMAN’S VOICE: Message from March 6th, 1991. I am blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of God and your loving mother. Live your life for my son. Live your life for my son. Pray. Avoid homosexuals. Ban television . . . or soon armies of Chinese soldiers will tramp on American soil.

DONOFRIO: The message is not so different from others I’ve heard. Nor are the miracles believers say they’ve witnessed.

BELIEVERS:

— I first came on June 13th, 1993. I smelled roses. I cried, just like now for no reason.

— The sun tells the story here, the roses tell the story here. The birds tell the story here.

— I have seen the sun in colors. I smelled the roses three times.

— The smell of roses knocked me over.

— My rosary turned golden.

DONOFRIO: Rosaries turn to gold, metals turn to gold, people smelling roses. It’s constant. Common.

BELIEVERS:

— It’s had a profound influence on my life.

— When I come here I can really feel the blessed mother.

— I just came to find peace and I found it.

DONOFRIO: Everyone I speak to here tells me they’ve gone through crises: failed businesses, failed marriages, unexpected deaths, illness. One man tells me things got so bad that he laid down on the ground here and said ”Either kill me or show me a sign . . . I can’t go on like this.” When he got up, the eyes on the statue of Jesus in front of him had changed from brown to blue.

People suffer, they max out on pain, are crushed into a state of hot need, and then they surrender to Mary. They relinquish control, and are protected. They feel safe because everything is guided by God and according to plan. It’s called faith — and it’s something that I want to have too.

A visit to the Marian Library in Dayton, Ohio, the world’s largest collection of materials about the Virgin Mary, to learn more about why there are so many apparitions these days.

FATHER THOMPSON: Could it be the Church has become a bit too cerebral? They haven’t addressed the deep religious aspirations of the people. They want something they can identify with. Something which talks about union with God, something that talks about the warmth of God’s love, huh?

DONOFRIO: That’s father Thomas Thompson, director of the Library. He tells me about apparitions, which the Church refers to as ”Private Revelations,” and the people who receive them.

FATHER THOMPSON: I have no doubt about it. They are very good willed people. Catholicism has been around for a long time, and they have these rules for discerning private revelations, huh? Are you sure this is not a projection? Are you sure you sure you are not deluding yourself, huh? There has to be something clearly beyond human explanation, something which we would call miraculous, something which is supernatural.

DONOFRIO: How many apparitions have been approved in the history of the Church?

FATHER THOMPSON: I would have to say between 10 and 15.

DONOFRIO: And how many have been approved in the United States?

FATHER THOMPSON: None. The message of Mary is always one of consolation, of encouragement, of love. It is not one of sensationalism nor is it one of trying to induce fear in people, huh? So that much is certain.

I suppose the best attitude is that which was found in the Acts of the Apostles: If this is not of God, it will eventually disappear, but if it is of God we can not stop it, huh? We’ll see what comes out of it, huh?

DONOFRIO: All along my journey, I kept hearing the same message from Mary fans: Go to Phoenix, Arizona and see Estella Ruiz. I saved this apparition for last.

(Sounds outside of Estella Ruiz’s home)

On the first Saturday of every month, believers flock to the Ruiz home in South Phoenix — the city’s roughest neighborhood, the heart of the Mexican ghetto. A sign in the driveway reads: ”Our Lady of the Americas Shrine,” and points visitors towards the backyard. An oasis, lush with grass, trees and cacti. Religious music welcomes pilgrims as they get out of cars and buses. There’s a beautiful home-made altar next to a life-sized statue of Jesus, hand-carved and bloody on the cross.

(Sounds inside of Ruiz home.)

Inside the house, Estella Ruiz, the visionary, relaxes in the hours leading up to her apparition. She’s a warm and pillowy woman; a shock of white hair against lovely olive skin. Her laugh is easy. She hugs me. I confess that I’m a skeptic, and she says she knows what I mean.

RUIZ: I do know what you mean.  

DONOFRIO: Estella tells me that she was never very religious. In her 40s, after raising seven kids, she went back to school to earn a college degree, and then her masters. She became a successful school administrator. But while her work life thrived, her children’s lives fell apart: drug addiction, broken marriages . . . until one morning nine years ago, when she passed a painting of the Virgin Mary hanging on her wall.

RUIZ: You see that picture hanging over there? Well, I was walking by and I heard a voice speak to me. I heard her say to me, ”Good morning daughter.” And I thought, ”Who’s talking to me?”

DONOFRIO: She wondered if it might be Mary . . . and began to pray. Constantly. Especially for her youngest son, Little Rey, who’d become addicted to crack.

RUIZ: There was nothing I could do anymore. And I told her ”I can’t do anything.” So I closed my eyes, and I opened my eyes, and when I opened them, there was this beautiful woman. She was like clothed with a tremendous light. Then she spoke to me and she said, ”Don’t you know that I’m going to take care of your children?” And when I heard her speak to me, then I had no doubt. I could not deny it any more. And then at that point she told me, ”I’m going to leave now.” And I remember yelling, ”No . . . No . . . Don’t leave us, don’t leave us!” And then she was gone.

DONOFRIO: Estella cried that whole night. She was terrified. But by the next morning, her fear was replaced by a sense of peace. Mary appeared again, and asked Estella to become her messenger. Estella couldn’t refuse.

REYES: Those of you that can sit down, there’s space right here.

DONOFRIO: Near sunset, Estella’s husband, Reyes Ruiz, ushers in a few dozen pilgrims from among the hundreds in the back yard to join Estella in the living room for the night’s apparition.

They are the elderly and the sick. A mother and her child with cancer, a broken woman in a wheelchair with six months left to live. Estella sits quietly on a chair in one corner of the living room. Before her a small shrine with a painting of Mary, illuminated by a bare bulb, the only light in the room. I sit next to Estella, cross-legged on the floor. People pack the room around us. Soon the vigil begins.

(Sounds of prayer: ”As it was in the beginning . . .”)

DONOFRIO: Estella’s husband has told us that when Estella sees the Virgin, he’ll hold up his hand to let us know. And about a half hour into the vigil, Estella’s fingers freeze on her rosary, and his hand goes up. Estella’s lips begin to move. She nods, smiles. She’s talking to the Virgin Mary, who is supposedly standing right in front of her. Pilgrims begin to weep. Time stops. I feel light-headed, dizzy, like I’m standing on top of a mountain. I’ve been told that when Mary appears, the picture in front of Estella does strange things for people. The mouth moves, the eyes come alive. I see nothing, but my heart feels hot in my chest. The air is electric. The apparition lasts for maybe ten minutes. The vigil ends soon after.

(Sounds of crying.)

I look around the room. One woman clutches her heart and looks longingly at the picture of the Virgin. Another goes up and kisses the Virgin’s mouth. The woman in the wheelchair with six months to live looks twenty years younger. Her face is radiant.

REYES: I know that some of you saw her. I don’t know why some of them see her and some of them don’t. It’s not because we’re good and it’s not because we’re bad. She just allows certain of us to see her . . .

DONOFRIO: As I get up, Estella wraps me in her arms and says that Mary gave her a message for me.

RUIZ: She loves you so much. She wants you to believe that with all your heart — that she loves you so much. And that she has you doing a great work that will bring many people back to God’s love. And she thanks you. She thanks you. I thank you.

DONOFRIO: At first I don’t believe it. But then I start to think. What if? Millions of people are going to hear this on the radio. Was it even my idea? How do I know Mary didn’t plant the seed for this six years ago when I stumbled across my first Virgin painting at a yard sale? Or even 60 years ago, when she appeared to my mother, drowning in the lake?

(Sounds outside Estella’s home.)

We make our way to the back yard to join the rest of the pilgrims. Estella takes a microphone to give Mary’s message to the crowd: Jesus loves us with an incomprehensible heart.

No flaming comets. No mass destruction.

There’s a line in the book of Matthew that says we’ll know our true prophets by the fruits that they bear. If that’s the case, Estella may be on her way to sainthood. Behind this yard, in what was a vacant lot, where gun shots cracked the air every night, Estella and her husband have built a Montessori charter school for 450 kids. The National Football League recently donated a million dollars for its expansion. And their son Little Rey, who was addicted to crack? He stopped taking drugs two weeks after his mother’s first meeting with Mary, and hasn’t touched the stuff since. He’s now the custodian at the school, and DJ at his mother’s apparitions.

A miracle? Maybe. Is Mary really appearing here? I don’t know. What I do know is that something is happening here . . . something I never imagined I’d see. This apparition is doing more than just comforting the troubled; it’s infusing people with the power to be better than they were, giving them the belief that they can change the world.

Something happened to me in Phoenix as well. Since witnessing Estella’s apparition I’ve been saying Hail Marys like a mantra. I even go to Church at lunchtime to say a rosary now and then. I feel a little less afraid. A little more hopeful. A little more willing to forgive. Sometimes I even feel a presence. It’s really good and powerful. It feels like love. When I give it a face, it’s Mary’s.

And, for a woman with a heart as scarred by doubt as mine, that may be the greatest miracle of all.

RUIZ: She loves you very much.

DONOFRIO: I’m Beverly Donofrio.

(Ruiz continues to speak to crowd; fades into music.)