Last week we were camping in the “Sand County” area that naturalist Aldo Leopold made famous, a county in the middle of Wisconsin still wild because of its sandy soil and huge swamps. A miserable place, really, made for mosquitoes and deer flies, but wonderful, too, because of its open expanses. We had already hiked the steepest hill in the state – there are no mountains – which was right at our campsite, and were motoring that afternoon to try another state park set along the Wisconsin River when we saw the faded sign: “Queen of the Holy Rosary, Mediatrix of Peace, Shrine” with a large arrow pointing left, up ahead only one mile. My wife and I are devout followers of Mary, and for us, this was like cheese for the mouse. What? We were just outside Necedah, a tiny town in the middle of the pine barrens. Why hadn’t we ever heard of this place before?
We took the left and immediately found ourselves in grown-over farm country, most farms having been long abandoned and left to the weeds and gristly pines. We drove only a few miles, following the signs, before we came to some dilapidated buildings at the end of a dirt road. One, the largest, was nothing but cement walls in an oval pattern extending for at least fifty feet, giving the impression of a burnt-out or abandoned arena. There was a ramshackle farm house to one side and a decent- enough looking official building another one hundred yards further, to which the driveway did not go. Beside the cement walls was another non-descript building that could have been the town hall of a poor and tiny town, like nearby Necedah. We struggled to make out a parking lot, and finally just pulled over in the dirt beneath a tree, because our dog was in back. Then we got out gingerly to explore.
I may have made them out aloud, the sounds of a banjo from the movie “Deliverance,” but I think I was already too creeped-out by what we were now seeing to openly joke. In front of the “burned out” building was a shrine of sorts, a roof build over a slab of polished red marble that told us the beginning of the story: on this site Mrs. Fred (Mary Ann) Van Hoof first saw an apparition of Mary in 1949. To add to the feeling of creepiness, the inscription, although etched in perfectly, was disjointed, sentences broken up in a way that made reading and understanding difficult. By the side of the shrine was a statue of Mary encased in a plastic capsule. I did not want to mock, but like the inscription, she was just plain wrong – a cheap copy, made of what looked like plastic also, of someone else’s vision of Mary. Really, the most accurate word for it was “insipid.” In fact, as we looked further, we saw other shrines with statues of the Archangel Michael, along with several others I now forget, scattered over a couple of acres, each statue and each little open shed housing them equally as insipid. The overall view was one of a cheap carnival that had fallen on sudden hard times, like one might find in the area around Chernobyl. This had tried to be something, a holy place, and had failed miserably. How? Why?
We wanted – no, were compelled as one is to see a car wreck – to look at elements of this carnival more closely, but were quickly approached by a thin, elderly man with the beginnings of Parkinson’s, or some other malady of old age that made him shake. I forget what he first said, but I do remember my first words, which shocked even me: “This place looks like an abandoned carnival. What happened?” I should have listened to his answer more closely, because in that was the truth: to paraphrase, “The 30,000 communist priests put into the church by the New World Order are responsible.” Ho-kay. I could feel a strange terror rise in me, and knew that my wife felt the same, but I did not beg off and run for the car. Heck, I told myself, you’re an anthropologist. You’ve lived with Indians armed with spears and poison blowgun darts. And so I continued to ask him questions as he led us, mostly unwillingly, towards that non-descript building that could have been a tiny town hall.
The building was an information and gift shop, surprisingly normal and well-kept inside. There were rosaries and statues of Mary and posters and books about Mrs. Van Hoof, among other religious curious. On the wall were pictures of crowds of tens of thousands who, shockingly, had once come to this place by a passenger train, the rail just beyond the parking lot used now only for freight. Of course I asked him about these crowds. Of course he told me.
Back in 1951, Van Hoof’s claims of visions of Mary had spread throughout the Midwest (if not the nation) bringing in crowds that summer numbering as many as 100,000 people in a day. Looking at the place now, one would call the newspaper articles that mentioned this nothing but lies, but the pictures were there to prove it. That “burned-out” building was to be the church, an architect’s rendering of it lying before me in a display case (again, it was oddly wrong, oddly amateur in design, like a cheap facsimile of something else). This place had been a big deal. And then the plug got pulled.
Our host continued with more dark invectives: the Men in Black had come; the FBI was involved. It was all foretold by Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin who is infamous still for his communist witch-hunts. I gained some of our guide’s approval when I mentioned a fact few know: after the fall of the USSR, formally secret info (all info in Soviet Russia had been secret) revealed that many people accused of being communists by the senator were indeed communists, some with ties to the Russians. But men in black?
And it got worse. After I purchased a rosary to be polite and we headed for the exit, our host showed us something that was placed for all to see as one entered: an octopus with arms labeled, “Communists, Rothschild’s, Masons, Zionists …etc. (I can’t recall them all now), each emanating from an octopus with Satan at its center. Oh dear.
We drove away, stunned and pleased to still be able to drive away. Really, in a way I feel a little bad about my criticism as I write; the old man seemed harmless, motivated primarily by his belief that the Catholic Church had betrayed its parishioners by abandoning the Tridentine – or original Latin – Mass after the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960’s. With this, his paranoia had led him to believe all this other stuff. But we had the literature from the curio shop. We had quotes from people who said they had seen the sun dance (like at Fatima) and who had sworn to have had visions at that site as well; and we had the quotes from Mary, via Van Hoof, that sounded very similar to Fatima, as well as to Medogorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Except not quite. The Church, obviously, had abandoned the place; was this because of the Church’s innate conservatism, which had sent Van Hoof and the site into the arms of the crazies? Or were Van Hoof and her later followers (after 1951) frauds and dupes and, let’s face it, crazies all along?
I looked it up. Ho-boy. According to ‘Apparition Site Reviews,’ which looks into such things, Van Hoof was investigated by the diocese of La Crosse in the midst of the hullaballoo in 1951, and found wanting. Numbers faded, but still persisted, until the diocese officially called the apparitions “false” in 1955 and admonished Van Hoof to cease and desist, and her followers to go home. They did not, and it was then that "Mary" suddenly became concerned about the communists in the Church. In 1975, the diocese claimed that Van Hoof and co. was a cult, and that if they did not cease, Van Hoof and anyone who had anything to do with the shrine would be excommunicated. That last, I found, is true and official, which is a big deal to Catholics. This review, which looks to be an arm of the Catholic Church, also stated that Van Hoof had originally come from Hungary (it did not mention her maiden name) where she had practiced fortune telling with the Gypsies, which seems a little TOO perfect for fraud. Hungary? Gypsies? Still, other sites, such as Medjugorje, although not yet official, are deemed OK by the Church. This place in Necedah was singled out as really, really bad.
And, in truth, as the reader can tell, we felt its bad vibes and cheapness/fakeness from the beginning. One can believe, if one wants, that Van Hoof got too close to the truth and had to be destroyed, but everything about the place, the works, the wording, everything, seemed off, seemed fake, even before the research. The hair on the back of both my wife and I had been raised many times by the odd delusions of the old man. Instinct had told us to run.
One other item that research provided came near to proving this instinct right, and the banjo music more appropriate than we would have liked.
According to the Associated Press (AP), in May of 2008, the body of a 90 year old woman was found sitting on a toilet, deeply decayed. She had been living in the house of Tammy Lewis and her two children, having come from Washington State to join the “cult.” Said Tammy, her “bishop,” one Mr. Bushey, had told her to leave the old woman there so that he could raise her from the dead. After two months, she was still dead and they were still cashing her Social Security checks. Bushey said the Latin Tridentine mass at a house near the shrine that had been made into a church. Michael Van Hoof, grandson of Mary Ann the visionary, told police that Bushey and his 6 followers had tried to join with the Shrine, but had been refused.
I somehow doubt that last bit, but it is clear that this Shrine has become, as the Apparition Site had claimed, a magnet for frauds and fanatics.
That is the way it felt to us as well, right off the bat. And it hurt. I don’t know why at this moment, but this apparent fraud shook my belief in ANY shrine.
There is a formula the church uses for such things: first, ascertain by deep investigation whether or not supernatural events actually do or have occurred at said site; and then determine if they are from God or the Enemy – that is, whether they bear good fruits or bad. For those involved with this shrine, at least in the past 60 years – including myself – the fruits have been bad.
For a while, it occurred to me that all shrines were frauds, approved by the Church only because they buttressed the power. Some of this might be true, but that is why the Virgin has come to children in the last 150 years, especially children from simple or impoverished and under-educated circumstances. They are not yet corrupt, and if adults are directing them to lie, their deceit would soon be found. This is necessary because it is true, and not only for Gypsies from Hungary – people do deceive, and people are deceived. Which of those two was the case for Mrs. Fred Van Hoof I cannot say, but her fruits, crumbling into the sandy soil of a lost place, tell the tale. And as one deeply flawed statue of Mary attests, as well as one old lady who never should have left Washington, there is little beauty in the tale, except for its being a perfect example of caution. Beware. If it does not feel like love, or beauty, or truth; if the banjo starts to play, let it be.
But the real does exist. Here and there a great force has given us real bridges to help take us past the dead-end parking lot to where we want to go. In the end, faith conquers fraud. In an incredible world spun off an inscrutable hand, it simply has to.
RSS Feed