Bronx Miracle

I

One chapter of journalist Paul Blanshard's best-selling 1949 attack on Catholic influence in American culture, American Freedom and Catholic Power, included a discussion of what Blanshard termed "Science, Scholarship and Superstition." Concluding that the "most important and lucrative form of anti-science in the Church is the exploitation of miracles and relics," Blanshard expressed particular scorn for purported Marian apparitions, beginning with Lourdes and extending to Fatima. He also noticed how in the Bronx, on a rainy November night in 1945, a crowd of twenty-five thousand people had gathered to watch a nine year old boy, Joseph Vitolo, Jr., pray at a vacant lot located just off the borough's main street, the Grand Concourse. At this spot, Joseph claimed, the Virgin Mary had appeared. Fortunately, Blanshard informed his readers, "under the skeptical scrutiny of the world's shrewdest newspapermen," church officials had refused to endorse Joseph's claims. ¹

II

Joseph still hates to enter a crowded elevator. Perhaps his most vivid memory of 1945--beyond his memory of the vision itself--is of the crowds. Lines of people, mostly sick people or those escorting sick people, squeezed into his family's small, dilapidated home on Villa Avenue each evening. Neighbor Joseph Castaldo tried to keep order: "Only one person can talk to him at a time!" "Don't crowd or push--he'll see you all." ²

They begged Joseph to touch him, to touch their rosary beads, to heal the wounds caused by Japanese shells and birth defects. Some of the "crippled" were handed into the house through an open window. Each night, a few minutes before seven, the line outside the house would disperse and family members would prepare for the quick walk over the tiny hill to the apparition site. Then one of the tallest men present--often Joseph's cousin Frank Rufino--would place Joseph on his shoulders and begin the perilous trip, pushing away the grasping hands of the devout. Crowd members begged for pieces of Joseph's hair, lunged for a brush of his hand. Joseph's jacket lost all its buttons. ³

In the beginning, on 29 October 1945, Joseph had been almost alone. He had been playing after supper with a few children from the neighborhood on a fifteen foot rocky ledge that sloped over the western side of the Grand Concourse. He knew the other children on the hillside--John Bruno (9), Anna Ronca (8), Rose Nocerino (9) and Jeannette Nocerino (7)--but not especially well, since he was a thin, unathletic child, the youngest of seven, and more likely to be with his mother in the kitchen than outside with other children. A Time magazine reporter described Joseph as too frail to play with the neighborhood boys, and "small in the underfed fashion of the poor." The same Time reporter described the Bronx as "a drab backwash of a great city." ⁴

Then a figure appeared to Joseph--a lady, dressed first in white, then in blue, and then in black. She told him not to be afraid, to pray, and handed him a candle invisible to the other children who had quieted as they watched Joseph tremble. One girl, Jeannette Nocerino, urged Joseph to "pray like you mean it." Before departing, the lady asked Joseph to return at the same time the next night. ⁵

Joseph told the other children what had happened and hurried back to Villa Avenue to inform his parents. His father refused to believe him; "He didn't believe in nothing." His mother urged him to return to the site. There, Joseph said, the lady appeared again. One observer reported him to be "shaking like a leaf." This time the lady carried a cluster of white roses and wore a crown, and this time she said she would return for the next sixteen nights. One report had Joseph predicting the appearance of a spring and the building of a grotto. A few dozen neighborhood residents gathered at...