The Vengeful Virgin
Case Studies in Contemporary American Catholic Apocalypticism, Michael W Cuneo
Woman as World Savior
The Feminization of the Millennium in New Religious Movements, Susan J. Palmer
in Millennium, Messiahs and Mayhem
Robbins Thomas, Palmer Susan
ISBN 0-415-91649-6 1997 Routledge, New York.
INTRODUCTION When Veronica Lueken (or Veronica of the Cross, as she is sometimes referred to by her most loyal followers) died on August 3, 1995, American Catholicism lost probably its greatest native-born prophetess of the apocalypse. For more thanlwenty years, Veronica had regaled (and sometimes terrified) her followers with tales of sin and salvation, killer comets and bloodthirsty vampires, flying saucers from hell, and, perhaps most famously of all, an imposter pope from central casting. Some of this (the vampires and UFOS, for instance) was simply vintage Veronica, without any real precedent in Catholic tradition, but the driving theme behind all of her messages was something that Catholic mystics and seers had been preaching for generations: as punishment for its recalcitrant sinfulness, according to Veronica, virtually the entire world stood on the brink of a horrible chastisement. In lust a matter of years (it is almost always lust a matter of years) countless millions would be incinerated in a nuclear holocaust, and any sinners that still survived would then be swept away by a cleansing ball of redemption." Veronica, of course, is only part of the story here. Over the past thirty years or so, apocalyptic fantasies of this sort have circulated freely within some of the rather murkier regions of what may be described as the netherworld of American Catholicism. Especially among Catholics deeply aggrieved by the enormous changes that have befallen both their church and the wider society during this period, these fantasies have provided relief and consolation and also a powerful sense of spiritual vindication. For the most part, moreover, they have been composite creations-doomsday hybrids made up of elements taken from an almost bewildering variety of sources. Whatever else might be said of it, contemporary Catholic apocalypticism is a remarkably eclectic phenomenon.
THE SOURCES OF AMERICAN CATHOLIC APOCALYPTICISM
In general terms, Catholic apocalypticism in contemporary America has drawn its primary inspiration from five more or less distinct sources, and the most important of these by far has been the miraculous realm of Marian apparitions. During many of her earthly visitations over the course of the past two centuries, the Virgin Mary has warned of the horrible catastrophes that lie ahead unless women and men repent of evil and dedicate themselves to the pursuit of righteousness. In some cases, these warnings (such as those associated with the apparitions that presumably took place at La Salette, France, in i846, and Fatima, Portugal, in i9l7) have received the imprimatur of the institutional church, but church approval hasn't always been a decisive consideration. The apparitions that have been reported in recent decades at Garabandal, Spain; Necedah, Wisconsin; and Bayside, New York, for example, have failed to pass ecclesiastical tests of authenticity, but the messages connected with them have nevertheless been enormously influential within certain sectors of American Catholic apocalyticism.' Second in importance to Marian apparitions are the endtime prophecies and private revelations that have been attributed over the centuries to a wide variety of Catholic mystics and visionaries, including the likes of Anna-Katarina Emmerick, the eighteenth-century German stigmatist; Michel de Notredame (or Nostradamus); and even Pope Plus X. With very few exceptions, these prophecies have been tantalizingly vague and open ended, and hence susceptiu.e to an almost limitless range of interpretation. In 1936, for example, the visionary Teresa Neumann is reported to have said that "The furies of hell are now set loose. Divine punishment is inevitable." And Plus X, a couple of decades earlier, was only slightly less oracular: "I saw one of my successors taking to flight over the bodies of his brethren. He will take refuge in disguise somewhere; and after a short retirement he will die a cruel death. The present wickedness of the world is only the beginning of the sorrows which must take place before the end of the world." The malleability of prophetic utterances such as these-their ready adaptability to present circumstances-is precisely what gives them value. The divine retributions and disasters of which they speak are always looming just ahead, or lurking around the very next corner.' And then, of course, there's also the so-called prophetic literature of the Old and New Testaments, and especially the Book of Revelation. While generally of subordinate importance to Catholic apocalypticism in America, biblical prophecy is sometimes invoked as a kind of legitimation or corroboration of the Marian messages and private revelations mentioned above. Marian apparitions, mystical revelation, and scripture are the three most important explicit sources for Catholic apocalypticism in America, but there are also two rather important implicit (or less frankly acknowledged) sources. The first of these is Protestant millenarianism, particularly as it has been filtered through the popular media of televangelism, religious radio, and best-selling books such as Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. With their fondness for affixing precise dates to the approaching chastisement, their penchant for schematic interpretations of history, and their sensationalistic depictions of the suffering lying in wait for the unrighteous, Catholic apocalypticists have sometimes betrayed heavy indebtedness to themes more commonly associated with Protestant Adventism and fundamentalism. Occasionally, moreover, this indebtedness has bordered on outright plagiarism. In what appears to be a case of direct borrowing from Darbyite dispensationalism, for example, the followers of Veronica Lueken have been assured by their movement's leadership that they will be miraculously "raptured" to a place of safekeeping on the eve of the apocalypse.3 Almost as important as Protestant millenarianism, and by no means unrelated to it, is the conspiracy culture of America's extreme political right. In recent years, in fact, many Catholic apocalypticists have invested heavily in the ideology of the contemporary militia movement. Alongside their warnings of an impending chastisement, they have inveighed against the United Nations and the threat of one-world government, they have accused the Clinton administration of sabotaging constitutional freedoms, and, in the aftermath of Waco, they have persistently claimed that America is on the verge of declining into a repressive police state.4
IDEOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Although Catholic apocalypticism is quite often a belief system espoused by scattered individuals, or by small, relatively unstructured groups, it has sometimes also given rise to full-fledged social movements. And not surprisingly, considering their shared reliance upon the sources identified above, these movements have tended to hold a number of ideological characteristics in common.
1. The approaching chastisement. As punishment for its rampant infidelity and selfishness, according to Catholic apocalypticists, virtually the entire world stands on the brink of catastrophic damnation: the Virgin Mary has delivered the verdict personally through her specially appointed seers, and the chances of having the sentence either commuted or deferred must be considered exceedingly slim. (The precise timing and disposition of the approaching chastisement are matters upon which Catholic apocalypticists themselves are in serious disagreement.)
2. Holy elites. During her appearance at La Salette in 1846, the Virgin Mary apparently called for the creation of a special community that would be entrusted with preaching the necessity of conversion to the entire world and whose members would be known as the "apostles of the last times" (ZimdarsSwartz 1992, i84). This appellation (or its equivalent, "disciples of the latter days") has been adopted by most Catholic apocalyptic movements in contemporary America. The members of these movements (or, at least, the full-fledged members) regard themselves as spiritual elites responsible for warning the world of the catastrophes that almost certainly lie ahead.
3. Political passivity, premillennial fatalism. Outside of preaching the necessity of conversion (or, in one notable case, the necessity of consecrating Russia to Mary's immaculate Heart), Catholic apocalypticists have pursued a course of almost complete worldly withdrawal. Far from entering into strategic alliance with other right-wing Catholics (or right-wing Protestants) over issues such as abortion, they have mostly been content with cultivating their own salvation while awaiting the consummation of world history. It is only through divine intervention, in their view, that the affairs of the world might possibly be set straight.
4. Anticommunism. As is almost always the case with Marian-based movements, Catholic apocalyptic movements in contemporary America are fanatically anticommunist.5 Despite popular impressions to the contrary, they insist, international communism is as dangerous and insidious a force today as ever before.
5. Conspiracy mentality. Hand in hand with their strident anticommunism, Catholic apocalypticists are positively drenched in conspiracy. Absolutely nothing, in their view, can be taken at face value; one must always probe far beneath the surface of events for their true meanings and hidden significance. (As often as not, moreover, this conspiracy-mongering has been cloaked in an anti-Semitic rhetoric.)6
6. Catholicism-in-crisis. Catholic apocalypticists, without exception, believe that the institutional church has fallen into a state of unprecedented crisis in the years following the Second Vatican Council. Its priesthood, its moral teaching, and its ritual life have all been deeply corrupted by secularism, and only through some miraculous stroke can the church be restored to its former glory.
7. The papacy-in-crisis. Since the Second Vatican Council, according to Catholic apocalypticists, the papal throne has been occupied either by exceedingly weak and vulnerable men-or by outright imposters.7
8. Thaumaturgical authority. in the final analysis, Catholic apocalypticists defer not to the papacy or the traditions of the Catholic past but rather to the sacred apparitions and seers upon which their movements are variously based.
9. Sectarian impulse. As a result of their spiritual elitism and several of the other tendencies enumerated above, Catholic apocalypticists have tended to define themselves apart from the institutional church-and sometimes have broken away from it altogether. Despite these shared characteristics, Catholic apocalyptic movements are by no means all of a single piece. As the following case studies should amply attest, they may vary widely in terms of both their systems of belief and their basic organizational structure.8
THE FATIMA CRUSADE
Of the dozens of Marian apparitions that have been reported worldwide over the past two centuries, none has been a richer resource for Catholic apocalypticism in America than Fatima. According to Catholic apparitional lore, the Virgin Mary made six miraculous appearances to three peasant children, Lucia dos Santos and her younger cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, in the small Portuguese village of Fatima over a five-month stretch in I9'7. During one of these appearances, on JulY I3, the Virgin apparently communicated a threepart secret that the children refused to reveal to their interrogators. The socalled Fatima secret was kept under tight wraps for more than twenty years, but in a memoir she wrote at the request of her religious superiors in I941, Lucia (who was by then a Carmelite nun) disclosed the contents of its first two parts. The first part of the secret, according to Lucia, consisted of a horrifying vision of hell, and in the second part the Virgin Mary requested (among other things) that Russia be consecrated to her Immaculate Heart. As the Virgin herself apparently put it to the three young seers: "if my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated" (quoted in Zimdars-Swartz 1992, Igg). Lucia's memoir seems to have been taken quite seriously by church officials, and on October 3 I, 1942, POpe Plus XII consecrated not just Russia but the entire world to Mary's Immaculate Heart. While being interviewed by a Dutch priest named Father iongen in I946, however, Lucia indicated that Plus XIIs consecration fell far short of what the Virgin had actually requested. "The exact petition of Our Lady," she reportedly told Father Jongen, "was for the Holy Father to make the consecration of Russia to Her Immaculate Heart, commanding that at the. same time and in union with His Holiness, all the bishops of the Catholic world should do it" (quoted in Alonso 1995, I3). At about the same time, moreover, Lucia apparently committed the third part of the July I9I7 secret to writing, and following a directive from the Virgin she sealed it in an envelope and instructed that it not be released to the public until 1960. Pope John XXIII apparently read the secret in 1959, but 1960 came and went without it being made public. And in later years, John XXIII's papal successors likewise elected to keep it under wraps. Finally, on May 13, 1982, and then again (for good measure) on March 25, 1984, John Paul II became the second pope to consecrate the world to Mary's Immaculate Heart, but like Plus XII forty years earlier he neglected to make specific mention of Russia or to undertake the consecration in absolute unison with all the bishops of the Catholic world (Zimdars-Swartz I992, 204-2i8). Although the Fatima apparitions were pronounced authentic by the bishops of Portugal as early as i930, it wasn't until the 195os and the onset of the cold war that the apparitions became the object of widespread devotion in the United States. With its call for the consecration of Russia, in fact, Fatima was regarded by many American Catholics in the 195os and early ig6os as the West's best hope for neutralizing the military might of the Soviet Union and halting the spread of communism (Zimdars-SwartZ I992, 2o6-207). During this time as well, the third part of Lucia's secret (now known simply as "the third secret of Fatima") was a topic of feverish speculation within certain quarters of the American church. Did the secret warn of an impending nuclear holocaust? Or of a forthcoming period of tribulation for the papacy? Speculation of this sort never really caught on within the broader Catholic world, however, and during the midto late ig6os devotion to Fatima in general faded into the woodwork of the American church. In the newly modernized Catholicism that was emerging in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Fatima and other apparitional pieties were widely dismissed as relics of a benighted and bestforgotten past. over the past ten years, no one has worked harder at restoring a sense of relevancy to Fatima than Father Nicholas Gruner. Born in Montreal in 1942, and ordained to the priesthood in Avellino, Italy, in I976, Gruner made his initial foray onto the North American Fatima scene in I978 when he launched a new Marian ministry that was centered around a quarterly magazine called the Fatima Crusader. At the outset, the Crusader was a blandly pious, small-circulation affair, mostly taken up with articles on the spiritual benefits of the rosary, but in the mid-ig8os Gruner fastened upon the issue that would lift the magazine to sudden prominence. However much the Vatican might want to deny it, Gruner advised his readers, the consecration of Russia requested by the Virgin Mary at Fatima was still waiting to be done. Both Plus XII and John Paul II had failed to carry out their consecrations in temporal unity with every bishop throughout the Catholic world, and both had neglected to make specific mention of Russia. In Plus XII's case, Gruner argued, this failure to comply with the Virgin's specific demands may simply have been an oversight, but in the case of John Paul II a far more insidious dynamic was at work. In the first place, a great many Catholic bishops had undergone secret (or not so secret) conversions to communism since the Second Vatican Council, and there was no way these bishops would agree to participate in a public consecration that seemed to single out communist Russia for special criticism. And in the second place, the Vatican was still bound to a secret agreement that Pope John XXIII had signed with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on the eve of the council, with John XXIII promising to go soft on Soviet communism in return for Khrushchev's promise to go soft on Catholics living behind the Iron Curtain. This Vatican-Moscow accord might have made limited sense at the time, Gruner argued, but now, more than twenty-five years later, it was one of the chief factors holding back the consecration of Russia demanded by the Virgin at Fatima. And to make matters worse, communist sympathizers inside the Vatican, led by Secretary of State Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, were fully committed to keeping the accord in place.9 As Gruner and his Crusader staff railed against the Vatican-Moscow pact and other related evils throughout the late ig8os, they succeeded in giving the Fatima cause a new (and decidedly sexier) lease on life. Far from being the object of a merely grandmotherly piety, Fatima was now fully caught up in the mysterious world of Vatican Ostpolitik, clandestine deal-making, and geopolitical brinkmanship. To many of the Crusader's readers, all of this was undoubtedly heady stuff: in return for their support of Gruner's ministry, they were being given a privileged window into the inner workings of the most critical historical developments of the age. And the most critical development of all, as the Crusader consistently pointed out to its readers, was the mounting military might of the Soviet Union. in an endless parade of articles bearing such redbanner headlines as "URGENT! COMMUNISIM IS ADVANCING" and "THE GREAT SOVIET DECEPTION," the magazine did everything possible to set the record straight: Perestroika was a hoax, Gorbachev was every bit as diabolical as Stalin, and, despite all the sweet talk coming out of Moscow, communist Russia was assembling the pieces for a final military assault on the entire free world. Not that any of this should have been surprising. The Virgin Mary had warned at Fatima that Russia would spread error and misery throughout the world unless her requests were granted; and now, more than seventy years later, the Virgin was still waiting." Determined not to keep her waiting any longer, Gruner pursued vigorous action on several fronts simultaneously. in early i988 he tried to pressure the pope into rescinding the iniquitous Vatican-Moscow accord by sponsoring a letter-writing campaign to the Vatican, and later the same year he unleashed a furious journalistic campaign against more moderate Fatima organizations such as the Blue Army. (Both the Blue Army and the Fatima Family Apostolate, Gruner's chief competitors on the North American Fatima scene, held that the consecration of Russia had already been properly carried out by Pope John Paul II and that the era of subsequent world peace promised by the Virgin Mary at Fatima was now in the process of being realized.) At roughly the same time, moreover, he launched a daily radio program, Heaven's Peace Plan, that was slotted on forty-three stations in the United States and Canada, and he followed this up with a weekly television show called Fatima: The Moment Has Come. All of these initiatives were enormously expensive, of course, and during the late ig8os Gruner began sending out personalized pitch letters that, for sheer chutzpah, would have caused even Oral Roberts to blush in appreciation. "You are so important," he assured each of his supporters (or potential supporters) in July ig8g. "I am writing you today-as one of Our Lady's dearest ones-to plead urgently for your help.... Our bank account is now practically empty.... Please say a Hail Mary with me now that you and all of Our Lady's children will respond generously FROM THE HEART to this desperate appeal.... Our Lady's FULL Fatima message is our only hope. If She is not heard in time then the whole world including the United States will be enslaved by Communist Russia and many entire nations will be annihilated. PLEASIE HELP NOW. It is almost too late." To the chagrin of his competitors, this high-pressure salesmanship helped Gruner make significant inroads into the North American Fatima market, and by the early iggos the Crusader's circulation had increased exponenti to more than four hundred thousand, and his overall ministry had grown into a $5 million a year enterprise. As time went on, moreover, Gruner demonstrated impressive rhetorical resiliency. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, and much of the former communist world embraced the principles of free markets and open elections, he insisted that nothing had changed except the color of the uniforms. Despite all the fanfare over the emergence of a new and gentler world order, communism remained a force of apocalyptic reckoning and Fatima was still the free world's only defense against enslavement and eventual annihilation. And when he came under attack from the-Vatican for suggesting that John Paul 11 was either too weak or too afraid to carry out the consecration of Russia according to the precise terms requested by the Virgin, Gruner defended himself by invoking the famous Third Secret of Fatima. Although the Third Secret had still not been formally revealed, he told his readers, the very best evidence indicated that it referred to a horrible apostasy that would strike the church toward the close of the century. And as the mounting attacks against his ministry from the institutional church made vividly clear, this period of apostasy was already well underway. When Sister Lucia herself, moreover, suggested in a 1992 interview that the consecration of Russia had in fact been properly carried out by John Paul Il in i984, Gruner's second-in-command, a freelance priest named Paul Leonard, raised the specter of brainwashing. "Why has Sister Lucia made such a fool of herself'.?" Father Leonard wrote in the Winter 1993 issue of the Crusader. "Her present state of mind is in itself a strong indication that Sister Lucia has been mentally abused by her superiors who 'trained' to say that the consehave subjected her to mind control. She has been cration of Russia is already accomplished, that Russia is converted and whatever else the Ostpolitik-minded officials of the Vatican want her to say." To this point at least, the great majority of Gruner's supporters (most of whom seem to be women, middle-aged and older) have elected to stay with him throughout all of this frantic maneuvering. Of course, all things considered, Gruner offers his supporters a relatively cheap ride. Not much more is expected of them beyond making financial contributions and attending the occasional public lecture, and in return they're given the satisfaction of participating, however vicariously, in a spiritual struggle of cosmic importance. As Gruner himself told me during an interview at his ministry's headquarters in the Buffalo/Fort Erie area: "The peace of the world and the salvation of millions of souls hinges on the truths of Fatima. What we're doing is a matter of life and death."
THE APOSTLES OF INFINITE LOVE
In comparison with the Apostles of Infinite Love, a radical monastic community based in St. Jovite, Quebec, Gruner's Fatima ministry seems almost boringly mainstream. Founded in 1962 by an itinerant preacher named Brother John (n6e Gaston Tremblay), the Infinite Love community has long been one of the most widely vilified (and abidingly controversial) Catholic groups in North America. Practically since its inception, the community has been plagued by accusations of sexual abuse and brainwashing. It has been the target of police raids and media exposés, and at one point its leader actually spent six months in jail after being convicted of illegal sequestration and contempt of court. For more than twenty years now, the community has ordained married men and both married and single women, and yet on most other counts it has been time-stoppingly conservative. And on September 10, 1968, in what may have been the most controversial development of all, the community announced that its founder had been mystically elevated to the papacy under the name of Gregory XVII (Gregory XVII 1989; Cote 1991). Despite its French-Canadian roots, the Infinite Love community warrants inclusion in any discussion of contemporary American Catholic apocalypticism. Slightly more than two-thirds of its three hundred full-fledged members and roughly the same proportion of its several thousand lay supporters (or tertiaries) are American, and since the late i97Os the community has operated mission centers in Brooklyn, New York, and Paterson, New Jersey. Even more important than this, however, is the symbolic significance of the community for the broader Catholic right. Since i968 and the mystical coronation of Brother John, the Apostles of Infinite Love have defined the outer limits of right-wing dissent for Catholic apocalypticists and traditionalists of every imaginable stripe-in the United States no less than in Canada. While other apocalyptic groups have been openly critical of the institutional church, the Apostles have repudiated it altogether and opted for outright separatism. And while other groups have invested their guiding mystics and seers with varying degrees of supernatural authority, only the Apostles have gone so far as to declare theirs the supreme ruler of the universal church of the endtimes. In a 27o-page encyclical entitled Peter Speaks to the World, which he issued in 1975, Brother John (or Gregory XVII) reminded his readers that the Virgin Mary, during her miraculous appearance at La Salette, had warned that the day was coming when "Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of Antichrist." And with the rise of theological liberalism and promiscuous ecumenism after the Second Vatican Council, he said, this day has now arrived. The entire institutional church has fallen into apostasy, and a new church, headed by Gregory XVII, has been brought into being to preserve authentic Catholicism. Regardless of how small this new church might be, or how fiercely persecuted, Brother John wrote, it will persevere in truth until the very end. When God chastised the world by the Flood, only a tiny portion of humanity was spared by entering Noah's Ark. Thus, the True Church of Jesus Christ, which God has charged Us to direct, is the Ark of the new times raised up by Providence to save a portion of Christendom. "Fight, children of light," said Our Lady of La Salette, "you little number who see; for behold the time of times, the end of ends." (Gregory XVII 1993, 21I 2I2) In conjunction with its spiritual elitism, the Infinite Love community subscribes to a full-blown theology of doomsday. When the very best prophetic evidence is taken into account, the community claims, there seems little question that the final drama of world history will be played out according to the following three-stage scenario: (i) The first chastisement. In this opening stage, which is already underway, an anti-pope is installed in Rome and the authentic Catholic Church is reduced to a small and persecuted remnant. Following a series of wars and natural disasters, which will result in billions of deaths, communism (or some functionally equivalent force) will assume ironfisted control of almost the entire world. Eventually, however, a Great Pontiff (Gregory XVII or his divinely appointed successor) will lead a Catholic counterforce into battle and succeed in establishing a new Christendom on earth. (2) Period of peace and virtue. With the establishment of a renewed Christendom, there will be a brief period of peace and prosperity on earth. The church will receive millions of new converts, and its religious authority will be uncontested. (3) The second chastisement. This Catholic utopia, however, will prove short-lived. over time, there will be a widespread return to infidelity and wickedness, and a second period of war and calamity will bring a final end to world history." Considering the salvific stakes involved, it's little wonder that the Infinite Love community has placed inordinately heavy demands upon its members. In addition to taking mandatory vows of celibacy, all full-fledged brother and sister Apostles are required to swear absolute and unflinching allegiance to Gregory XVII, and all newcomers are required to turn over their worldly possessions to the larger community. Although the Apostles of Infinite Love haven't succeeded in reaching as wide an audience as Gruner's Fatima Crusade ministry, they remain the most commitment-intensive and frankly sectarian Catholic apocalyptic movement, and also the most deeply threatening to both the religious and secular establishments.
VERONICA LUEKEN's BAYSIDE MOVEMENT
For the most entertainingly eclectic of Catholic apocalyptic movements, one need look no farther than the Our Lady of the Roses ministry of Bayside (Queens), New York. During the summer Of 197o, as the story goes, the Virgin Mary began making regular appearances to a working-class housewife named Veronica Lueken on the grounds of St. Robert Bellarmine's parish church in Bayside. Despite opposition from the resident pastor, the apparitions were soon drawing anywhere from 500 to 2,000 pilgrims at a time, and Veronica was well on her way to becoming a major celebrity within American Catholicism's Mar ian underground. In the summer Of 1973 the Roman Catholic diocese of Brook lyn investigated the apparitions and concluded that they were the product, at the very most, of a "highly fertile imagination," and later the same year the parish staff of St. Robert's fenced off the church property and forced the pil grims onto the street. Still undeterred, Veronica and her followers conducted their vigils for a year or so at a nearby traffic mall, and then, in May I975, they negotiated a permanent meeting place on the grounds of the 1964-65 World's Fair in Flushing Meadow Park (Nobile 1978; Grant 198o; Donovan i988). Over the next twenty years, the Our Lady of the Roses vigils (as they were christened by the Virgin Mary) followed a familiar pattern. Upon arriving at a makeshift shrine set up on the vigil site, Veronica would fall like clockwork into an ecstatic trance and begin receiving messages from the Virgin and some times also from Jesus and other heavenly beings. (The messages would be tape recorded on the spot and then later transcribed and sent out to Veronica's growing legion of followers across North America.) Most of the pilgrims would pray the rosary constantly throughout the vigils, with some occasionally tak ing time out to snap Polaroid pictures in the hope of capturing some sign or token of the Virgin's presence. These so-called miraculous photographs, which generally featured (at least to the uninitiated) indecipherable streaks of light or 0 splotches of color, would sometimes afterward be taken to Veronica for an authoritative interpretation (Wojcik I992, 181-220). The highlight of the vigils, of course, were the sacred messages that the Virc gin Mary communicated directly to Veronica. And throughout her extended engagement at the old World's Fair grounds the Virgin proved surprisingly voluble. In addition to condemning abortion and homosexuality and modern biblical criticism and a host of other evils, she found time to pontificate on everything from zombies and UFOS (which she described as "transport ships from hell") to the United Nations and the threat of one-world government. 12 The Virgin was particularly distressed by the upheaval within the Catholic Church after the council, and on September 27, 1975, in what may have been her most startling scoop of all, she informed Veronica that the real Pope Paul VI was being held prisoner in the Vatican while an imposter Paul VI, who was the beneficiary of acting lessons and cosmetic surgery, ruled in his place on the papal throne. It was this imposter pope, operating at the behest of a traitorous clique of modernist cardinals, who was responsible for banishing the beloved Tridentine Mass and throwing the church into disarray. As outrageous as the imposter theory might seem, it went a long way toward helping Veronica's followers make sense of some of the more disturbing changes that were unfolding in the church in the wake of the council. And what's more, it gave them both incentive and justification for staying in the church and fighting these changes rather than following the Infinite Love community's path into outright schism. It wasn't the real Pope Paul VI, after all, who was presiding over the dismantlement of traditional Catholicism but rather the cosmetically enhanced stooge who had taken his place on the papal throne (Our Lady of the Roses Shrine 1993, 116-29). As the years passed, the topic that the Virgin turned to with increasing frequency was the approaching chastisement. In the very near future, she told Veronica on at least a dozen occasions, there will be a Great Warning, in the form of some horrible natural catastrophe, that will result in immense suffering throughout the world. The warning will be of short duration, and will be followed by a celestial miracle that will provide added inducement for people to surrender their hearts to God. In all likelihood, however, the great majority of people will persist in wickedness, and God in turn will unleash a furious chastisement upon the world. The chastisement will take place in two distinct stages. First, there will be a major global conflict (World War Ill) in which countless people will perish, and then virtually the entire world will be destroyed by a great comet, or Ball of Redemption (Our Lady of the Roses Shrine 1993, 36-46). As the Virgin took pains to emphasize, however, there was still a slight chance that the chastisement might be averted, or its severity mitigated. And in this respect, Veronica and her followers had been given a momentous role. They were the Disciples of the Latter Days, the chosen few who had been charged with the responsibility of preaching the necessity of conversion to the entire world. And if (as should be expected) the world turned a deaf ear to their preaching, the Virgin told Veronica, the Disciples would be miraculously raptured to a place of safekeeping on the eve of the apocalypse. "I give you great grace of heart, My children, to know that many shall be taken from your earth before the great Chastisement. it will be of great mirth, My child, to reveal to you that there will be much consternation and conflicting thought when these beloved children disappear from the earth. Many of your news medias [sicl shall state that they have been carried off by flying saucers. Oh no, My children, they were carried off into a supernatural realm of the F-ternal Father to await the return of My Son upon earth" (Our Lady of the Roses Shrine 1993, 40). As is normally the case with long-running enterprises of this sort, Veronica's ministry eventually developed a fairly rigid hierarchy of both status and authority. At the top were Veronica, her husband Arthur, and several of her closest confidants-the so-called inner circle. Next in line came a dozen or so young men known as full-time workers who lived together in a community called the Lay Order of St. Michael and who were responsible for both promoting the ministry and safeguarding its orthodoxy. (The sacred messages were supposed to mean exactly what Veronica said they meant-nothing more, nothing less.) After the workers were the people known as organizers. These were especially dedicated devotees of Veronica from outside the New York City area who were responsible for organizing prayer vigils in their local communities and also arranging pilgrimages to the old World's Fair grounds. And finally, there were the rank-and-file adherents who supported the ministry through their prayers and their (mostly) modest financial donations. over the years, it has mainly been the full-time workers and organizers who have upheld what Veronica sometimes referred to as "the total Bayside gospel," while most rank-and-file supporters have tended toward a decidedly more selective commitment. In June 1995 Oust two months prior to Veronica's death) I interviewed a dozen Bayside supporters in New York City, and while all of them seemed convinced that Veronica was a holy woman, and that she was truly in touch with divine and redemptive forces, none seemed to think that this meant accepting everything she said with absolute literalness. During a time of unsettling change within their church, Veronica had given them spiritual consolation and reassurance of salvation, and for this they were enormously grateful. Even if some of Veronica's rather more exotic teachings (such as those dealing with UFOs and killer comets and imposter popes) were not strictly true, the supporters suggested to me, they were at least an excellent source of religious entertainment. 13
DISCUSSION
As these three case studies indicate, Catholic apocalypticism may assume strikingly different forms. Of the three cases, Gruner's Fatima Crusade ministry is the most closely wedded to a church-approved apparitional tradition, and is also the most outwardly conformist to established church authority. Even here, however, the sectarian impulse has never been far from the surface. In assigning ultimate religious authority to the Fatima apparitions and their chief seeress, and in positioning himself as an impresario of sorts of the three-part Fatima Secret, Gruner has left little doubt as to where his true allegiance lies. if it were ever to come down to a choice between Fatima and Rome, Fatima would almost certainly win out. The Infinite Love community is a hybrid case. The community bases itself simultaneously on the famous (and church-approved) La Salette apparition and on the mystical-hieratic authority of its founder and made-to-order pope. And over the years, as we've seen, this combination has proved highly subversive. In addition to ordaining women to the priesthood, the Infinite Love community has rejected the legitimacy of the post-conciliar Catholic hierarchy and broken away entirely from the institutional church. Veronica Lueken's Bayside movement, for its part, has operated almost entirely outside of the church's approved apparitional traditions while somehow managing to avoid (at least to this point) outright schism. In terms of concrete organizational structure, the picture is equally one of diversity. With its entrepreneurial, pay-as-you-please approach, Gruner's Fatima Crusade ministry has thus far functioned as a model audience cult (Stark and Bainbridge i985, .27-28). For a modest admission price, its supporters have been given front-row seats to an ongoing performance that Gruner has billed as the greatest apocalyptic drama of the century. The Infinite Love community, in contrast, by virtue of both its radical withdrawal from the broader culture and its intensive membership requirements, has operated very much as a classic introversionist sect (Wilson I959). And for much of its history, the Bayside movement has been characterized by an organizational split personality. Whereas its hard-core devotees (namely, the workers and organizers) have demonstrated an extraordinary level of personal commitment to Veronica's messages, the great majority of its supporters have been primarily concerned with covering their eschatological bets and supplementing their thaumaturgical diets. At one point or another, all three of these movements have incorporated elements from secular apocalypticism into their belief systems, and today they are almost as likely to be found expatiating on the debacle at Waco or the machinations of the FBI Or the specter of one-world government as on the woes of the contemporary church. Much of this, however, is nothing more than ideological riffing, and it would be wrong to regard these particular movements for anv others within the Catholic apocalyptic fold) as Catholic militias-in-themaking. With their premillennial fatalism, political revolution is the last thing on their minds, and stockpiling rosaries is their preferred way of preparing for the coming storm. The dominant image of the Virgin Mary within popular (or colloquial) Catholicism is generally assumed to be that of the marvelously munificent mother, eternally solicitous of her children's welfare and never reluctant to intercede on their behalf. But there is another side to Mary in the popular Catholic imagination-one that has rarely received notice and that would surely repay concentrated psychological scrutiny. For Catholic apocalypticists in contemporary America, the Virgin Mary is certainly maternal and certainly loving, but she's also stern and reproachful and vengeful. Rather than simply offering words of comfort and condolence, she imparts messages of unspeakable catastrophe and punishment. Mundane history is on the verge of crashing to an apocalyptic end, this vengeful Virgin promises, and women and men have no one to blame but themselves.
NOTES
1. For splendid scholarly accounts of these various apparitions, see Zimdars-Swartz (I992) and Carroll (i986).
2. For the Teresa Neumann and Plus X prophecies cited above, see Dupont (I973, I4, 22). Dupont's volume is probably the most useful anthology of Catholic endtime prophecy currently available in English.
3. On the notion of a "miraculous rapture" from a Protestant millenarian perspec tive, see Sandeen (1970, 62-64).
4. To this point, Catholic apocalypticists have mainly invoked secular or "out sider" themes such as these as a kind of second-order legitimation of their cat astrophic worldview. For a provocative discussion of the contemporary militia movement, see Wills (1995)-
5 On the deployment of Marian piety in general for right-wing political pur poses, see Perry and Echeverria (i988). And for an attempt at constructing a more liberationist Mariology, see Gebara and Bingemer (1989).
6. Virtually everything that distresses them, from the decline of the Tridentine Mass to the rise of moral permissiveness within the broader culture, Catholic apocalypticists tend to blame (at least in part) on a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy.
7. As Norman Cohn (1970) has made vividly clear, conspiratorial fantasies cen tered upon the papacy have a venerable tradition within the mystical and mil lenarian undergrounds of Roman Catholicism.
8. The following three accounts are based in large measure on field research I con ducted over a ten-month period in 1995. For a much lengthier (but differently focused) discussion of the three movements in question, see Cuneo (1996).
9. The so-called Vatican-Moscow accord had been a leading bete noire of the extreme Catholic right in Europe since the mid-1970s, and Gruner's initial con tact with it was through the reactionary Scottish-Catholic Approaches maga zine. According to some accounts, the accord was also negotiated in order to clear the way for Russian Orthodox observers to attend the Second Vatican Council. In his landmark study of the church's political entanglements, it might be noted, Hanson (1987) makes no mention of a clandestine Vatican Moscow pact. For samples of the Crusader's rather fevered approach to the issue, see Leonard (1986, 1987).
10. Gruner hasn't been at all hesitant over the years about tapping into the broader (and frequently secular) anticommunist literature. In addition to printing excerpts from the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, he has given full play in the Crusader's pages to such right-wing screeds as Conquest and White (1984)-
11. I have distilled this three-stage scenario from Barette (i988) and St.-Pierre (1994), which are the two most important volumes of prophecy produced by the Infinite Love community. For a similar endtimes prospectus, see Dupont (1973, I-2).
12. For a fairly comprehensive compilation of the earlier messages, see Our Lady of the Roses Shrine (1990).
13. At the time of Veronica's death, her ministry's mailing list consisted Of 3 5,000 names in the United States, and roughly 55,000 worldwide. About 30 percent of this total actually supported the shrine with financial donations. Shrine officials estimate that at least 60 percent of these active supporters were women.
REFERENCES