After a mere 150 years (the Vatican’s wheels turn slowly), the Roman Catholic church has decided that Mary really did appear in a Wisconsin chapel, now a popular pilgrimage site.
In one striking sign of a divine presence … the shrine’s grounds and the terrified crowd who gathered there were spared the flames of the Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871, which devoured the surrounding lands and homes and caused more than 1,200 deaths.
If I survived the Peshtigo Fire, I would be a believer too.
The economic effects of an authenticated Marian “apparition” are not to be sneezed at either.
Good for the shrine and all the Mary devotees. But my own sense of American Goddesses is that Mary arrived rather late to the Deity and Guardian party in this hemisphere. And more crashed than had an invitation.