Vatican skeptical of woman’s visions of Virgin Mary
The Virgin Mary usually arrives about 7:30 in the evening. Every day but Friday, believers say, she appears at Gianna Talone Sullivan’s home overlooking a golf course near Emmitsburg, Md., to dispense words of wisdom, advice and, sometimes, warning.
To believers, the details of Mary’s apparitions are well known: She wears a veil, has brown hair and blue eyes, and emerges from a bright light. Her visits vary in timing and duration.
“It depends on what’s going on,” said Michael Sullivan, 53, Talone Sullivan’s husband and spokesman. “If we’re at home and we’re not going anywhere, it’s usually between 7:30 and 8:30.”
Sullivan, a tall, bearded doctor, doesn’t see the Blessed Mother when she appears to his wife. Neither have the thousands who have flocked to Emmitsburg over the years to receive Mary’s messages, transcribed by Talone Sullivan in spiral notebooks.
Roman Catholic Church officials, in Baltimore and at the Vatican, cast a skeptical eye on the alleged apparitions, recently ruling them definitively not supernatural. But many of Talone Sullivan’s supporters remain firm in their faith. And even doubters acknowledge that the apparitions, real or not, have profoundly changed tiny St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Emmitsburg and the town itself, about 70 miles north of Washington, which has one stoplight, 2,300 residents and a long history of devotion to the mother of Jesus.
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Talone Sullivan, a pharmacologist
who as a child was a ventriloquist and acted in television commercials, has declined requests for interviews since 2000, when church officials asked her not to talk to the news media. Through her husband, she declined to speak for this article.
