The faithful find power even in ruins of Mary site
By MARY JO MELONE
Published March 5, 2004
The news will break the hearts of believers, but here it is: The shattered windows of the Clearwater building where an image of the Virgin Mary has appeared for seven years will be replaced with $1,100 worth of clear glass.
That means the rainbow-colored image that appeared when the windows were mirrored won't return, barring a miracle.
I'm not going to make any predictions. There's enough strangeness already associated with the building, which houses the offices of Shepherds of Christ Ministries, lay Catholics who are about the business of spreading the Lord's word.
The decision to install clear glass rather than more mirrored glass, for instance, came from a message God delivered to a Cincinnati homemaker who regularly gets information and guidance from him.
I'm not making this up. I heard it from a very sincere man, an engineer and the Ministries' president, John Weickert. He identified the homemaker as Rita Ring and said she'll be at the shrine tonight to lead a live recitation of the rosary, if you're interested.
Weickert shared with me a copy of the second volume of Mrs. Ring's writings called God's Blue Book 2. He said the messages come straight from God, often in the middle of the night, and when Mrs. Ring writes them down, she never makes a single wrong scribble as she goes along. God does all the work.
Weickert suggested I open any page to see what Mrs. Ring had heard from the Lord. Strangely enough, I opened to an entry made 10 years ago Thursday, the day I finished writing this column.
If that coincidence wasn't creepy enough, get this: God's message for the day was that Mrs. Ring would suffer greatly for her beliefs and would be ridiculed for them.
A lot of people, including myself, have giggled over the prayer book-toting faithful who have flocked to those windows, people with bowed heads who left behind flowers or candles, and treated like the Vatican this dull building alongside the perpetual roar of U.S. 19.
These were people so obsessed with Our Lady of Clearwater, as she is sometimes called, that they tried this week to steal some of the thousands of shards of broken glass, as though they were holy relics of a saint. The thefts became such a problem the glass has been hidden. Weickert won't say where.
The devout and the bizarre so intertwine here that even the Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg has kept a distance. There was after all a scientific explanation for the image. The windows were old. Metallic elements of the mirrored coating corroded.
But there never was an explanation for why the corrosion took the form it did - a rainbowed Virgin echoing the 473-year-old Mexican apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
My own skepticism aside, it was impossible not to be saddened by the destruction of the windows. Never mind what I thought. If people found comfort in what they saw there, good for them. Solace is always in short supply.
I have a theory, probably baseless, that whoever hurled the small ball bearings that shattered the windows also vandalized the St. Petersburg public art exhibit on coexistence last December - somebody who couldn't stand the call to goodness that both the windows and the art exhibit represented.
The slashing of the canvases only made the message of coexistence more powerful. They were witness to a belief so strong it would persist no matter what.
The same could be said of those broken windows. They were so important that someone had to destroy them. They are more eloquent in their absence then they were in their presence.
If faith is about believing what can't be seen, the clear glass windows will be more evocative than the mirrored windows they replaced. There will still be solace to be had.
Weickert said the vandalism of the windows left a hole in his heart. He also said God can always create a greater good out of evil.
