The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken & the Struggle to Define Catholicism by Joseph P. Laycock (review)

On April 20, 2008, as part of the bicentennial celebrations for the Archdiocese of New York, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass in Yankee Stadium. I was privileged to be there and as I walked out of the park I noticed an inordinate amount of litter (even for the Bronx). The leaflets blowing around the streets that day were hardly accidental. They were printed up by the St. Michael’s World Apostolate, a group whose roots can be traced to the seer of Bayside, Queens, Veronica Lueken (d. 1995), who on multiple occasions beginning in 1970 claimed she had conversations with the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Baysiders, as her followers came to be called, have grown into a world-wide movement of mainly traditionalist Catholics – much to the consternation of the Diocese of Brooklyn, within whose boundaries the apparitions allegedly took place.

With great sympathy for his subjects and expert facility in the archival sources, Joseph Laycock combines field work among the Baysiders with sound assessments of the multiple contexts they inhabit. There are some sensible, driving questions in his work: how is it that a group that wants to call itself Catholic and indeed perceives itself as more Catholic than most, find itself on the lunatic fringe? Who controls the power in defining cultural Catholicism – the hierarchy or the laity? Is there room in the church for the Luekens of the world?

From the very beginning, Lueken and her followers always considered themselves good Catholics and sought to make a place for themselves within an official framework. Yet while trying to be insiders, they were rejected by church authorities who they believed were in the grip of modernism, inadvertently making them outsiders. Laycock rightly points out that Bishop Francis Mugavero (d. 1991), the ordinary during Lueken’s rise, left the matter of dealing with her prognostications and criticisms to his chancellor, Monsignor William King. His approach was rather benign and pastorally sensitive to someone he believed was in a mentally fragile state. The consequence of doing little to assuage Mrs. Lueken or to reply publicly to her left her and her allies to go on the offensive – creating a world-wide following and well-heeled organization with a mailing list of tens of thousands of donors.

It is sometimes hard not to dismiss the Baysiders Laycock describes. Their propensity toward the apocalyptic, the role of “Near Earth Objects” in their cosmology (and the obsessive monitoring of NASA for “evidence” of extra-terrestrial life), and their reliance on anomalies in Polaroids of Lueken shot during her visions, do not stack up as confidence builders. While Laycock is perhaps too generous to their cause in order to secure access, what is revealed about them is important for the study of religion in America. His participation in their gatherings at Flushing Meadows, on the site of the former World’s Fair, reveals a certain degree of normalcy and earnestness in their semi-monthly para-liturgies. One wonders how they carry on with the rest of their week.

The early years of the Bayside Movement focused exclusively around Lueken and her quest to establish a shrine to the Virgin Mary at St. Robert Bellarmine Parish in Bayside Hills, Queens. Unfortunately, the area’s civic association stepped in on behalf of neighborhood residents who for months tolerated thousands of pilgrims who flocked to their front yards. Eventually New York City Police reluctantly disbanded the crowds, eventually forcing a move to Flushing Meadows. When Lueken died, a power play ensued to keep her messages alive. The availability of the internet and the lack of episcopal ability to fully quash the movement allowed it to continue.

As recently as June 2014 Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn felt compelled to reiterate the condemnation of Bishop Mugavero back in 1986, calling the alleged visions of Lueken “theologically and spiritually problematic” (more here: http://thetablet.org/statement-from-bishop-dimarzio...