They come for divine healing brought by a visionary. The visionary came for the nephrology center down the road. 
On the edge of an Alabama field that holds a shrine to the Virgin Mary, on the eve of the Fourth of July, Lenore Ojibway told me she feels the pain of the world sometimes. Physically, she said. Like a charley horse in her calf.
Lenore, a thirty-something daughter of the Sault St. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians, had driven all the way from her Lansing, Michigan, home to “atone” for a late-term abortion she’d had almost twenty years before. She had expected during this journey to grapple with her personal sense of loss, but when she got to a family farm turned pilgrimage site, Caritas of Birmingham, she felt instead the weight of a world of wombs. Now her mission has grown, she believes, from saving herself to healing all womankind.
If this self-described “failed mother” seems an unlikely candidate for such lofty work, so too were many other mothers in the annals of religion. In Genesis, it seemed ancient Sarah would never bear Abraham a son until God made room for Isaac in her ninety-nine-year-old body. A few chapters later, Rachel was another improbable candidate for holy matriarchy—a shapely shepherdess, apple of Jacob’s eye—until God opened her womb and gave them Joseph. And Mary was just a Nazarene teenager when an angel burst in on her at her mother’s house to announce the most impossible of good news: “You are blessed among women,” the angel said, “and will bear the Son of God.”
According to some strains of Christian tradition, the Virgin Mary has been startling ordinary people with miraculous greetings of her own ever since.
In 1917, Mary is said to have visited a few young shepherds in Fatima, Portugal, with three secrets about the end of the First World War. In 1981, in what was then Yugoslavia, the faithful say she appeared again, to unassuming children in a field called Medjugurje. Among those children was sixteen-year-old Marija Pavlovic, who a few years later was invited to Birmingham. For twenty years—since she was first brought to Alabama in 1988—Caritas has been a home away from home for both the visionary and her visions.
“God can choose anyone he wants, to do what he wants,” says Caritas community leader Terry Colafrancesco, a grey-mustached son of the South whose ruddy tan shows his years of working the land. As further proof of the divine ability to choose improbable messengers, he continues, “This election year, an unlikely choice, Sarah Palin, a woman, rallied the nation to hope again.”
As director of the nonprofit religious organization Caritas Mission, dedicated to promoting the ongoing Marian apparitions imported from the former Yugoslavia to his home in rural Alabama, Colafrancesco says he doesn’t endorse any political candidates. Nevertheless, he was so exasperated with contemporary politics this year that he encouraged thousands of Caritas pilgrims to write-in the Blessed Mother on the presidential ballot.
“Our Lady has already told us peace won’t come through the president,” he explains. “George Washington can’t change things in Washington. It’s a graceless system.” Writing-in “Our Lady,” he told the Birmingham pilgrims, would be a way of “showing God we’re serious.”
Colafrancesco’s talk of peace doesn’t refer to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We are a nation torn by a cultural civil war,” he says. “And that war is over the body: Christ at the center of society, the Blessed Mother who keeps the family together; the womb where life begins.”
Perhaps that is why so many come to this farm twenty miles south of Birmingham in search of healing, of both spirit and flesh. A place of apparitions, prophecy, and mystic visions, Caritas is likely a world alien to the general American public. Most of us turn more often—and more reasonably, we insist—to the realm of science when it comes to fixing our bodies, and even our souls.
And yet the great paradox of the ongoing dispute between religion and science today is that in the lives of many, the two are not separate at all. Caritas itself may be the best proof of this, for it was science that brought the visionary to Alabama in the first place.
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Terry Colafrancesco and his wife Annette first opened their home to Marija Pavlovic Lunetti (her married name) for healing in 1988. While on pilgrimage to Medjugorje the year before, the couple learned that the then twenty-three-year-old visionary was planning to donate a kidney to her brother.
Colafrancesco suggested that they do the transplant in Birmingham, where the University of Alabama’s renowned nephrology center is not far from the land he’d bought for his family. When he went further and invited Marija and her brother to stay at his home for recovery, Marija accepted.
It was during that first trip to Alabama that Marija says the Blessed Mother visited her in the Colafrancescos’ bedroom (left). Some Caritas community members think the Virgin chose the bedroom because that’s where the family begins. Some wonder if it’s because she recognized the crucifix from Medjugorje over the bed.
Annette had been eight months pregnant with the Colafrancescos’ first son when she and Terry brought a crucifix back from Yugoslavia. Terry was planning to put the crucifix over their bed, but Annette didn’t want it there: She had been raised Southern Baptist, and though she had converted to Roman Catholicism to marry Terry, she wasn’t going to go so far as to decorate her house as a cradle-Catholic might. On the plane home from Medjugorje, however, Annette woke up three times with a burning urge to put the crucifix over the bed. According to Marija, that’s where the Virgin appeared most every day of her two-and-a-half-month stay in Alabama.
Thanksgiving Day national news broadcasts of Marija’s apparitions in Alabama sent nearly one hundred Cubans flocking by bus from Miami to Birmingham, according to a November 27, 1988, Birmingham News article. They joined about three hundred other spontaneous pilgrims—many of whom couldn’t make it to Medjugorje for health or financial reasons, to “get closer to God,” as one pilgrim said.
For many of these devotees, getting closer to God means being in the presence of the Virgin Mary when she visits a visionary on earth. Marija had been brought to Birmingham in hopes of procuring the best miracle medical science can offer; those who came to hear her came looking for something at once similar and nearly opposite.
Speaking through an interpreter, she told the crowds that Our Lady extended her arms and prayed over the field with a message for them.
“Do not forget that I am your Mother,” she said, “and that I love you.”
Lenore is one of thousands of Caritas devotees who believe Marija’s words come from Mary herself. As she explains it, she became the Virgin’s servant on the day designated for repentance in Caritas’ five-day program “For the Consecration of our Nation.”
On the side of the Field of Apparitions, waiting in a line of pilgrims to make confession, Lenore told me the story of her conversion—“from a sinner to God’s will.”
In 1989, she had a late-term abortion. But when she got home from the clinic she discovered the doctor hadn’t completed the procedure.
“It came out of me,” Lenore said, recalling the foot and hand and blood she saw. She put the body parts in a tin she’d bought and asked a priest what to do with it. He said to bury it in the ground and pray over the unborn child. She went to the local offices of Project Rachel, a post-abortion ministry run by the Roman Catholic Church.
“They give you a rock, name your child,” she said, “and do a little funeral service.”
Lenore got a teddy bear for her unborn child’s grave and brought it to Caritas, to have the bear blessed. She also brought a porcupine quill basket—an artifact of her Sault St. Marie tribe—filled with gifts for the Virgin Mary: a red rose, an Our Lady of Sorrows prayer card and a Rosary of the Unborn. On the day for individual consecrations at Caritas, she took the basket of offerings to the bedroom where Marija sees the Virgin on her visits.
Lenore knelt and put the basket on the bed. While saying a novena prayer, she says, she received a message of her own. Not a vision like Marija’s, but a voice in her ear, speaking to her about her quill basket filled with offerings to the Virgin.
“Heaven is delighted by this gift,” it said.
* * *
Since her 1988 apparitions, Marija has returned to Alabama every few years to deliver the Virgin’s messages for America. The Caritas family has grown from Terry and Annette Colafrancesco into a forty-member community dedicated to living the simple back-to-the-land life called for in the visions. Together this gathering of Medjugorje devotees plays hosts to the throngs of the faithful whenever the visionary is in town.
Terry Colafrancesco believes that, through Marija, the Virgin initiated a plan at Caritas to bring spiritual restoration to the family and to the United States. He had been trying for years to get Marija to Birmingham for Independence Day, “to consecrate our nation back to God.” This year, it finally came to pass.
Usually, Our Lady appears at 11:40 a.m. in Alabama, the same time she comes to the other visionaries back in Medjugorje—6:40 p.m., Central European Time. For this special gift to America, however, Marija explained that the Mother of God would come at 10 p.m. on the night of the Fourth of July. Thousands of Caritas pilgrims gathered that evening in the Field of Apparitions.
Couples, widows, and families pulled their blankets, tent tarps, and sleeping bags as close as possible to the Lady of Medjugorje shrine: a statue of a blond young woman with a crown of stars and a peach-skinned toddler sitting upright in her left hand, his feet crossed neatly at the ankles. Flickering candles in rows of red, white, and blue surrounded the statue. Wedged in on the periphery were all the objects pilgrims had brought for blessing—little American flags, miracle medals depicting saints, Lenore’s porcupine basket and teddy bear.
Throughout the crowd, men and women prayed privately—many on their knees, moving rosary beads through their fingers behind their lower backs—until the Caritas community leaders began a cycle of communal prayers they called “the Patriotic Rosary,” Hail Marys interwoven with quotations of the Founding Fathers, “America, the Beautiful” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
Near ten o’clock, the singing stopped, and the field hushed into near-silent expectation.
“Dad, what happened?” a child’s voice asked. “Why did they stop the Hail Marys?”
“She’s probably here,” another child said. “She’s here if we smell the roses.”
There is a long devotional tradition of sensing roses as a sign of the presence of the Virgin Mary. The smell of roses and the sight of rose petals falling from the sky were reported in accounts of the Marian apparitions at Guadaloupe in 1531, Lourdes in 1858, and Fatima in 1917. In popular medieval legends, the Virgin Mary appears as the Blessed Rose, the Mystic Rose, the Rose Without a Thorn and the rose-crowned Queen of Heaven—imagery in which roses symbolize devotion, healing and transformation.
After a moment, the first child replied, “I smell them so much. Yes, it smells like roses. It’s her. It’s Mary!”
Marija stayed out later than usual on that Fourth of July night, singing prayers by guitar and candlelight with all who had come to be in the presence of Mary during her unusual nighttime apparition.
The next morning, Marija told a crowd of pilgrims the story of a woman who’d come to Medjugorje for healing from her many abortions. She had no peace, she said. Every time she would close her eyes, she’d see the children—one by one. She went to confession, and the priest gave no solution. Marija told her to find other women who were suffering like her, to hear their testimonies, to pray with them. Through this, Marija said, the woman was reborn; she had the peace of heaven now. “Our Lady gives the experience of heaven,” she said.
Lenore told me later she felt something similar at the Fourth of July vigil. She’d brought her porcupine quill basket—filled with a red rose for Mary and the teddy bear for her unborn son —to the shrine in the middle of the field, she said. On her way back to her tent that night, Lenore noticed that the rose in the quill basket had turned from red to purple.
There was of course a scientific explanation: carried around without water in a basket all day, the rose had perhaps dried and darkened in the summer air. Yet Lenore preferred to see it as a change of another kind. In the language of Catholic symbolism, red is the color of Jesus’ passion and torment, purple is the color of Christ’s majesty and royalty.
She thought she’d had the chance to make a similar change. In a Field of Apparitions brought into being by an organ transplant long ago, she believes she was healed in a way no hospital could offer.
Ashley Makar is a religion writer and student at Yale Divinity School’s program in religion and literature. She has published essays in the Birmingham News, American Book Review, and Watani International (an English-language Egyptian weekly) and contributed non-fiction narrative pieces to therevealer.org and KillingTheBuddha.com.
