Our lady of the tree trunk

You really have to read this story in the Times. I roared laughing all the way through. Here's an excerpt:

Carmen Lopez, of Passaic, N.J., noticed the knot on July 5 while car-pooling to her job at a perfume factory in Edison, N.J. She brought it to the attention of two priests, the West New York police and finally the mayor.

“Here it’s perfectly clear,” she said in Spanish. “It’s the true one.

Ms. Lopez said that in 2003 she was one of thousands who saw a tree stump found in a Passaic junkyard that many believed also looked like Our Lady of Guadalupe (that shrine was vandalized in May of this year). Ms. Lopez added that the difference between the two is that the one in West New York is more vivid. 

Indeed. Go read the whole thing. You need a laugh.

Some people really have a racket

STERRETT, Ala. (RNS) Marija Lunetti, one of six young peasants who claimed that the Virgin Mary began appearing to them in 1981 in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, says the mother of Jesus is aware of the economic crisis in Europe.

Realizing that she stumbled into a great scam when she was a child, this woman turned a simple lie into a lifelong affair. Here's more:

Lunetti spoke briefly in an interview about the economic crisis in Europe and the weather -- "Hot like here," she said -- before she had her daily apparition on Sunday (July 1) night on her visit to Shelby County, Ala. During the apparitions, she says the Virgin Mary appears to her and prays over the pilgrims, even though they cannot see her vision.

She's a real entrepreneur, she is. And get this:

Lunetti's normal time for an apparition Friday morning was while they were on an airplane bound for Alabama. Instead, Lunetti had her vision Friday night after 8 p.m. once she arrived at the Colafrancesco home.

If you let some people get hold of a racket, they never let go. Daily apparitions that no one else can see. You have to give her huge credit for pulling that one off. And yes, it's all from HuffPo, that font of modern knowledge.

How to recognize a "real" virgin Mary apparition

That's the title of a post by Ed Brayton this morning. It lists the church's rules for evaluating potential miracles. My favorite is this:

The subject (i.e., the person closest to the "miracle") must show "habitual docility towards Ecclesiastical Authority". That is so funny. This church is run by mad power queens.