Cardinal Blames Visions on Hunger : ‘Miracles’ Seen Regularly by Faithful of Philippines

The house where thousands of Filipinos flocked to see the Virgin Mary descend from heaven this month is sandwiched between an Italian restaurant and a house of ill repute in the modern Manila suburb of Quezon City.

It was, as many religious analysts later noted, less than an ideal setting for a miracle.

But just after 5 p.m. on Feb. 2, a handful of the devotees at the front of the crowd suddenly stood transfixed, gaping at the top of an olive tree in the front yard.

“The virgin is here!” cried one woman in the crowd, her eyes the size of saucers as she gazed skyward.

Thousands of other eyes quickly followed. Alas, the other devotees later concluded, they saw no virgin in the sky. But what they and thousands of others claimed that they did see that afternoon was even stranger.

The afternoon sun, they all agreed, was dancing and spinning in the sky.

Even in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation, where most people believe in and live by miracles, that was too much. Cardinal Jaime Sin, though officially attributing the apparitions to hunger, has ordered the church’s Permanent Committee on Extraordinary Visions and Phenomena to investigate.

And, ever since, the city’s daily newspapers have been filled with reports of more sightings, as well as optimistic speculation and debate over whether Manila will become another center of religious pilgrimage akin to Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal.

At the very least, experts on religious matters say, the recent apparitions are signs of the times in this poor but pious country, which many say is desperately in need of a miracle. The story of the dancing sun on Quezon Boulevard is the latest vivid chapter in the long history of miracles and hoaxes. Both are as commonplace as the poverty that social scientists believe causes them.

Cardinal Sin himself told a group of foreign journalists soon after the reported miracle: “When you are hungry, you see visions. So my first advice is to eat. When you are not hungry anymore, you will not see visions.”

Order to Ignore

But, as the news stories continued and speculation persisted, fueled in part by Christian evangelists who declared the visions were real and that they were the precursors of “three days of darkness,” the cardinal and the church issued a stern statement, urging the country’s 50 million Catholics to ignore the visions.

“Irresponsible mongers of sensationalism are trying to focus public attention on fantasies that caricature the apocalypse with predictions of bloodshed, darkness and other disasters,” the statement warned. “We warn the faithful against a thirst for an easy acceptance of visions and visionaries with a concomitant danger of paying a less-than-prudent credulity to strange pronouncements, threats or promises.

“Ignore these rumors, and practice instead prayer and penance.”

Finally, the statement thanked all the meteorologists and physicists who had come forward to explain that the dancing sun was a relatively normal phenomenon caused by cloud crystals and air pollution.

‘Take a Long Time’

At the same time, though, the committee on miracles quietly launched its own formal investigation into the vision of the Virgin Mary and the dancing sun. A church spokesman, Father Socrates Villegas, conceded that “it will take a long time” to confirm or reject the authenticity of the vision.

In the case of Lourdes, he noted, it was four years before the reported appearance of the virgin was declared a miracle in 1862 by an investigating commission, and at Fatima, two decades passed after the first reports of apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1917 before they were certified as genuine by the Vatican.

“Time is a criterion,” Villegas said. “If it (the apparition) perseveres, it must really be from God.”

There are many instances in recent Philippine history, however, when such phenomena were not from God.

Litany of Frauds

In explaining that the church’s committee on miracles must be a permanent one, “because there are so many of these things reported in metro Manila,” Cardinal Sin recounted a litany of frauds.

There was one recent case, he said, in which the committee sent a priest undercover to a Quezon City house, where a local businessmen was making a small fortune by charging pilgrims to see his “miracle,” a statue of Jesus Christ that appeared to cry real tears.

“When the priest looked behind the statue of the Savior he found some small machinery like what you find in those toy dolls that cry,” the cardinal said with a smile.

Another priest working undercover, he added, once exposed another fraud in which a con artist was charging admission to see a crucifix that appeared to shed real blood.

“We took a sample of the blood and sent it in for analysis,” the cardinal recalled. “It turned out to be the blood of a chicken.”

In yet another case two decades ago, “eight pubescent girls,” as they were described in reports at the time, said they saw the Virgin Mary appear from heaven and that she told them the precise time and date she would reappear one year later.

Hordes of Pilgrims

So a year later, the church committee traveled to Mindoro Island south of Manila to see whether the prophecy would turn out to be true. It had drawn hordes of pilgrims, who rented ships, cabin cruisers, yachts and fishing boats to reach the remote site. By March 25, 1968, the appointed date, more than 6,000 Filipinos had arrived.

The first disappointment came when the eight girls failed to breathe life back into a woman pilgrim who had drowned while en route to the site. In the end, no one saw the Virgin Mary that year.

“One would think that, going by the country’s experiences with so-called apparitions, Filipinos would have grown cynical and jaded by now,” concluded the Philippine Inquirer, a popular newspaper.

But for each instance of such skepticism, there is at least one similar to a response that Ike Gutierrez, a reporter for the Manila Bulletin, gave to the cardinal’s advice about eating.

‘Neither Hungry nor Sick’

“When I craned my neck skyward, I was neither hungry nor sick, and believe me, I did see the sun dance,” he wrote.

Gutierrez then conceded: “I was not sure whether those with me had taken lunch or not. Most of them were ordinary people--government employees, taxi drivers, cigarette vendors--who do not eat lunch in a plush villa.

“When our stomachs are empty, not due to laziness but to the inequities and hypocrisies of our so-called Christian society, we lean on faith.”

Sociologists could not agree more with the concept behind such statements.

Hope the Top Commodity

In a nation where 43% of the work force has no steady job, where millions live in squatters’ slums, where most prices seem to be rising faster than wages, and where almost everyone attends Sunday Mass, the most important commodity is hope.

President Corazon Aquino, herself a deeply religious Roman Catholic who believes in the miracles of the Bible, has come to symbolize that hope, and she has appealed successfully to the deep religious faith of her fellow citizens to continue to stand by her as she tries to resurrect the Philippine nation.

Such faith, however, can also open the door to con men peddling miracles and evangelists selling salvation, police psychologists here say, and the higher the level of poverty and despair, the greater the number of reported visions--and of potential victims.

Every day now, newspapers are filled with advertisements from travel agents selling expensive tours to Lourdes and Medjugorje, a village in central Yugoslavia where in 1981 a teen-age girl said she saw the Virgin Mary--”to witness first hand the miracles,” as one advertisement declared. Manila television stations are airing documentaries on the Catholic miracles around the world.

Psychic Healing

And the Philippines is also one of the world’s Meccas for psychic healing. Tens of thousands of pilgrims flock each year to the mountainous “summer capital” of Baguio, where faith healing is so commonly practiced and accepted that the city’s most prominent psychic healer was elected mayor last month.

“Although there is some historical basis for the faith healing profession here, much of it can be attributed to the lack of sound, professional health care in the country,” said one government health department official, who asked not to be identified.

“And, of course, that, too, is a sign of the country’s economic problems. As we improve health services in the rural areas, we hope the people’s faith in psychics will diminish.”

Still, there is something eternal about the figure most often seen in visions and cited for miracles in the Philippines. The Virgin Mary was officially made the patroness of the Philippines by the Spanish, who introduced and nurtured Catholicism here during their 350 years as colonial rulers. She remains the principal religious figure in the country today.

Most Appropriate Symbol

For many Filipino social commentators, the Virgin Mary also remains the most appropriate symbol for the country, its hopes and its visions.

“The image of the blessed virgin is the perfect illustration of the romantic agony of the Filipino,” said screenwriter and political satirist Jose Rivera Reyes. “We are taught to love suffering and thrive on suffering. It is only natural that at a time when so many here are suffering, it is this image that would appear in their visions.”