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chapter 17 Visions of Mary and the Less Than Visionary Press: Religious Apparitions in the Framing of the Modern Media The way the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch described it, there can be little doubt that the sightings of the Virgin Mary are a big and modern business .1 A Web site devoted to apparitions of Mary and Jesus lists dozens of religious sightings all over the world dating back to 1347, with a star indicating full Catholic church approval, a Bible denoting bishop’s approval, and a thumbs down indicating “discouraged by bishop.” In a droll interpretive dig, the columnist Mike Harden added how disappointed he was that his favorite sightings —Jesus on an oil storage tanker in Fostoria, Ohio, and Christ on a burrito in Lake Arthur, New Mexico—did not make the list.2 In recent years, a virtual industry has grown up around spiritual sightings— particularly those of Mary—from around the world. Sites in Portugal, Bosnia, Egypt, Ireland, and the United States, among many others, have garnered press attentionandattractedlargecrowdsof people.InPuertoRico,asitedraws100,000 pilgrims a year, and church leaders are planning a tourism complex, called Mystical City, with a 93-meter statue of the Virgin Mary. At a site in Bosnia, where thousands of visitors a year come, there are new hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops.On Britain’s Achill Island,the church was the target of angry local residents who have seen business and tourism dry up after the church declared a local woman who saw a vision of Mary was a fraud,leading her to shut down her prayer house and shrine. In May 2000, the Vatican made headlines when it disclosed the third secret of Fatima,a prophesy based on an apparition of Mary that appeared to three Portuguese shepherd children and has been tied to doomsday cults, terrorism attacks, and the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.3 But anyone who expects the American press to cover this phenomenon with even the faintest hint of Harden’s gentle, almost tongue-in-cheek skepticism 17.249-252/Unde 1/15/02, 9:43 AM 249 250 from yahweh to yahoo! would be mistaken. Those critics of the press who presume that the secular doubters making up the press corps would cover the visions of Mary phenomenon with dubiousness or impiety do not understand the dictates of the traditional American journalistic reporting methodology or the media’s deep desire not to offend any portion of their audience. It is true that journalists are empirical in orientation and define themselves as debunkers of myth and demanders of hard facts. But when it comes to people claiming to have had religious visions, journalists often present little skeptical, and often no balancing, material in their reporting. An analysis of three years worth of representative stories about the sightings of Mary bears this out.4 The stories were often one-sided, presenting only the religious claimants’ point of view; respectful to the point of pandering; and bereft of context, analysis, or perspective about what might have led to such a widespread phenomenon. Most of the stories simply reported what enthusiasts said and left it at that. Left unsaid were not only the views of skeptics outside the community of believers but also the insights of people of faith who might have had interesting and important things to say about why these sightings seem to have increased in recent years, why so many people make pilgrimages to the sites, and who these people may be. Typical were such stories as a Louisville Courier-Journal column about the many believers who said the Blessed Mother has appeared to them on a local hillside where Rosary beads are draped on the hands of a grotto statue built by volunteers. “The second and the twenty third each month are when the apparitions are, and there’s usually a pretty good crowd,” said one visitor. Skeptics may scoff, wrote the reporter (in the only reference to skeptics), but believers say this only means people today do not have enough faith to follow a star.5 A Knight-Ridder report appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about how an image resembling the Virgin Mary that shimmers on an office building has become a shrine for pilgrims, with crowds reaching 80,000 a day. The reporter noted that the flawless image, which is thirty-five feet tall and fifty feet wide, cannot be explained by scientists. “How can nine panes of glass...

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