Church unlikely to swallow holy toast

By Daniel Chang and Erika Bolstad
Knight Ridder Newspapers

J. PAT CARTER / AP Diana Duyser talks about the grilled-cheese sandwich she cooked 10 years ago, Wednesday at the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Fla., before turning it over to the new owner. The sandwich sold for $28,000 on eBay.

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MIAMI — For nearly 2,000 years, the Virgin Mary reportedly has appeared before hundreds, maybe thousands of people, usually in visions of brilliant light and often carrying a message of compassion.

And while the Roman Catholic Church has sanctioned only three of these visions — with each case approved by the Vatican — it almost never discredits the possibility that they were genuine encounters with the divine.

The grilled-cheese sandwich purported to bear the image of the Virgin Mary, which sold for $28,000 on the Internet auction site eBay last week, likely will not meet the church's criteria of a divine apparition, according to Catholic experts and theologians.

The church follows a formal process for recognizing miracles and sacred apparitions, said Bill Ryan, a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C. It begins with an investigation by the bishop of the diocese in which the supernatural event occurred.

Representatives for the Archdiocese of Miami could not be reached for comment.

But Ryan described an exhaustive procedure by which church officials examine the object in question, interview the visionaries and rule out any other conceivable explanation.

"If the local bishop determined it had merit," Ryan said, "it would go to the Vatican for a final pronouncement by the Holy See."

The Vatican's criteria for a bona fide apparition require, among other things, that the report not be made for material gain.

In that category and others, the 10-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich that Diana Duyser of Hollywood, Fla., sold to an Internet gambling site does not carry the hallmarks of the three Vatican-approved apparitions: the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico and the visions at Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal.

In each of those cases, according to lore and church record, the Virgin Mary usually requested a chapel be built on the site of the encounter and left some evidence of her divinity.
 
In Guadalupe, Mexico, believers say Mary emblazoned her image on the cactus-fiber cloak of the Aztec peasant before whom she appeared in 1531.

In Masabielle, France, near Lourdes, a fountain of healing water sprung from the site where a young girl said Mary appeared 18 times in 1858.

And in Fatima, Portugal, three children said Mary revealed three secrets, including a vision of hell and a foretelling of World War II, when she appeared before them in 1917.

Often, the faithful do not wait for the church to sanction an apparition. Thousands have made a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, the Bosnian village where the Virgin Mary reportedly revealed herself to five children in 1981 — even though the church has not sanctioned the site.

In Florida, people have reported seeing the Virgin Mary in many places. One of the most recent examples involves another Hollywood woman, Rosa Lopez, who has welcomed thousands to her home since reportedly seeing the Virgin Mary in her bedroom shrine in 1994.

"It's almost everywhere," said William Christian Jr., who has authored several books on apparitions.

The advent of the Internet, Christian said, has only encouraged reports of Marian apparitions. About 1.7 million people logged onto eBay to look at the sandwich, and many more saw its image on television or reproduced in newspapers.

But some theologians see hucksterism in the grilled-cheese sandwich, which is being carried by Miami Herald columnist Jim DeFede on a cross-country trip from Florida to its new home in Las Vegas.

"This kind of stuff is just crazy," said Ole Anthony, president of the Trinity Foundation, a Christian nonprofit that investigates religious fraud and publishes The Door magazine. "How can you know it's Mary? "Nobody has ever seen her."

Others contend that the need for earthly evidence of the divine, even in something as humble as a sandwich, is inherent in many faiths.

The Catholic Church's sacrament, the Eucharist, fits this description, said Margaret Poloma, a professor of sociology of the University of Akron in Ohio.

"It's an outward sign of an inward grace," she said.

Unless Bishop John Favalora of the Archdiocese of Miami launches an investigation into its divine claim, the grilled-cheese sandwich likely will dwell in the vague realm of that which cannot be proved or disproved, said Ryan of the Conference of Catholic Bishops.

"But," he added, "if it felt necessary to take a look because they felt people were getting taken advantage of, I suppose the church might have an obligation."

Knight Ridder Newspapers reporter Howard Cohen contributed to this report.