Word: madonna
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...Czestochowa, Poland, attendance at the shrine of the Black Madonna has increased to 5 million a year, rivaling Fatima and Lourdes, since John Paul's visit in 1979. Last August the Pope spoke there to 1 million Catholic youths...
Paradoxically enough, the Medjugorje apparitions are a headache for the local Roman Catholic bishop, Pavao Zanic. He flatly asserts that "the Madonna has never said anything at Medjugorje." Our Lady, he snaps, has been turned into "a tourist attraction" and "a bank teller." The Vatican has intervened to determine whether Medjugorje is a fraud. Rome is officially noncommital while the case remains open but advises bishops not to sponsor pilgrimages to the site...
Less spectacular appearances by the Virgin have attracted streams of the faithful in locales from Central America to the Slavic steppes. In Nicaragua, President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro is a strong believer in a series of % visitations by the Madonna in the small town of Cuapa, where Mary was witnessed by a church caretaker several times from May through October of 1980. During a 1981 Mass celebrated at the spot by the Archbishop of Managua, with some 30,000 people in attendance, believers say the sun changed colors. In Hrushiw, Ukraine, tens of thousands of people gathered in 1987 after...
More recently, the Madonna has been seen in the U.S. Devotees by the thousands have been flocking to the Mother Cabrini shrine near Denver, where Theresa Lopez, 30, says the Virgin has appeared to her four times in the past seven weeks. Marian apparitions were reported by parish coordinator Ed Molloy at St. Dominic's Church in Colfax, Calif., for 13 weeks in a row last year, and there was a surprise reappearance six weeks ago. In Our Lady of the Pillar Church of Santa Ana, Calif., Mary's image has been seen by Mexican immigrant Irma Villegas...
...take more satisfaction in the growth of faith in the Virgin -- or feel more unease at some of the pathways it has taken -- than John Paul II. Devotion to Mary was ingrained in the Pope in his Polish homeland, where over the centuries the Madonna has been hailed for turning back troops of the Muslim Turks, Swedish Lutherans and, in 1920, Soviet Bolsheviks. The precious Black Madonna icon was a mobilizing symbol for the country's efforts to throw off communism, and is still a unifying image for the entire nation...