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Virgin Mary Film-Oregonized
[Source: The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon.), March 24, 2006]

For Mike Rich, Christmas came early this year. The bard of Beaverton, with five films already silver-screened, got word his latest screenplay is being fast-tracked, so we can all pack the movieplex come December.

"The Nativity" tells the tale of two years in the life of Mary, the virgin who gave birth to a boy who went on to cause a bit of a commotion.

Rich, tracked down Tuesday deep in Hollywood, came up for air long enough to chat.

Q: Mary often has been seen as a pre-menopausal madcap whose biological clock was loudly ticking. You took a different approach?

A: We took what is generally acknowledged to be the more historically accurate approach. She was a teenager when she walked 110 miles to Bethlehem.

Q: So, Keisha Castle-Hughes?

A: Her performance in "Whale Rider" showed vulnerability, strength, devotion, faith. She acted without saying a word. The youngest person ever nominated for a best-actress Academy Award, she's still just 15.

Q: And Joseph?

A: There's no historical record. He could have been 90.

Q: So it's Jack Nicholson?

A: We're still looking.

Q: Herod: Good cop or bad cop?

A: Bad cop. You could seriously write a movie on King Herod, a complicated man, a complicated ruler.

Q: The wise men: Greek chorus, or comic relief?

A: The Magi were an interesting group, classic fish out of water. When they headed west toward Judea . . . think an ayatollah showing up in Nebraska.

Q: And the shepherds?

A: There were no bit parts.

Q: Catherine Hardwicke directs?

A: She works so well with young actors: "The Lords of Dogtown," "Thirteen." And it was important to us to have a woman's perspective.

Q: You wrote this one on spec. Was that scary?

A: It was really invigorating. "Finding Forrester" was spec. The others (assigned stories) have been really rewarding, but on some level you're fitting with their vision. I'm back to the roots that I felt in 1998.

Q: When will shooting start?

A: May 1 in Morocco. Release date is Dec. 1.

Q: Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" grossed more than $600 million worldwide. Can you match Mel?

A: We're just very glad that that his film was able to break down the walls. I certainly hope families will come.

Q: Mel wrote his movie in Aramaic. Did you learn any Latin in high school in Enterprise?

A: None in Wallowa County. We're probably not going to go wall-to-wall Aramaic, but we do want to honor the authenticity of the story with echoes of the language.

Q: You sound pretty excited.

A: This one, I'm really feeling excited about.

Madonna Statue on Local Tour
[Source: The Boston Globe, March 23, 2006]

With her eyes closed and hands clasped in her Lawrence bedroom, Elizabeth Veloso prayed to the Virgin Mary last week as she has every week for the past 25 years.

She prayed for protection for her family, for comfort, warmth, and good health. On her bureau with her lips slightly pursed and eyes downcast, a 2-foot statue of Our Lady of Fatima stands in silent vigil, as if praying along with her.

"She's the first thing I see when I walk into the room," Veloso said of the statue. "And she is the last thing I see when I leave."

This week, Veloso, along with thousands of other area devotees of the Virgin Mary, will have a chance to venerate the Madonna when a well-traveled replica of Our Lady of Fatima arrives in North Billerica tomorrow night and begins a 17-day tour of local churches.

The 4-foot statue, which is a likeness of a vision reportedly seen by three children in Portugal 90 years ago, has been circling the globe for 60 years. Organizers are hoping to draw several thousand visitors from the Merrimack Valley area. Their goal: to rekindle a sense of hope and peace they believe the statue engenders and that the clergy sexual abuse scandal has diminished.

"It's like being hugged," Veloso said of the feeling she gets when she prays to Mary. "Like being swept up in a warm embrace."

The statue, which has been to every continent except Antarctica, was last in the area in 1995. The visions on which she was modeled began on May 13, 1917, in the small town of Fatima, Portugal. There, her devotees believe that during a succession of six visits she spoke to three children and told them to spread a message of peace, repentance, and daily prayer.

After the sightings, Fatima became an enormously popular pilgrimage sight, particularly for Catholics. The statue that will be in the area tomorrow was carved from mahogany in 1947 from the description of one of the seers, who went on to become a Carmelite nun. The statue has been on the road, drawing crowds nonstop, ever since.

Carl Malburg, a former lumberjack who has shepherded the statue around the world for the last 13 years, will arrive with it strapped into the passenger seat of his white minivan the one bearing the license plate Fatima1. Arriving along with her a reputation for the mystical and miraculous. There are stories of the statue crying, cancer patients being healed, and alcoholics and drug addicts finding sobriety after visiting the statue and praying for the Virgin Mary's help.

Then there was the day the Madonna answered a cell-phone in Indiana five years ago. Two children twice called their father, who was praying to Mary in front of the statue in a church. Since he was in a church, he switched the phone off. It rang anyway. He switched it off again. When he got home, his children asked him who answered his phone. He told them no one.

"They said, 'But a lady answered the phone,' " Malburg said. "She told them everything was going to be all right."

"We don't investigate these claims," said Malburg, who added that he collects donations at the sites to cover his travel expenses and a modest stipend. "But what I can tell you is that people come here feeling confused or hurt and then leave with a feeling of peace. It happens all the time."

That a statue memorializing a 90-year-old vision still attracts crowds, prompts tears, and inspires such devotion is part of a phenomenon that has prompted some observers to call this the Age of Mary.

At one point in the 1990s, 60 people in the United States said they were having regular visits by Mary, said professor Timothy Matovina, the director of the Cushwa Center for the study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. Since 1950, there have been twice as many reports of apparitions than in the past 300 years.

Among them: In 1992, thousands of people flocked to the home of a man in Marlboro Township, N.J., after he said that the Virgin Mary visited him on the first Sunday of each month. During Christmas 1996, nearly a half-million people traveled to an office building in Clearwater, Fla., where people believed there was a two-story, rainbow-colored image of the Virgin Mary. And for years, thousands of pilgrims have gathered at a farm in Conyers, Ga., to hear a retired nurse speak what many believed was a channeled message from Mary.

In Milton three years ago, thousands of Mary devotees flocked to a hospital parking lot to pray in front of a second-story window that appeared to many to be the Madonna holding a baby Jesus. The image remains and visitors are still coming.

It was not always this way. Mary is mentioned only two dozen times in the New Testament. She is mentioned more often in the Koran, Matovina said. Only in the book of Luke is she hailed as "full of grace" and only the Apostle John places her at the Crucifixion.

But that very paucity of information has made her a ready mirror onto which cultures have projected different characteristics through the ages.

Mary's role in popular culture began to expand in the fifth century when she was formally declared the mother of God and began to absorb the attributes of a wide range of pagan goddesses of life and fertility. In the Middle Ages, as the perception of Jesus became increasingly stern and judgmental, the Madonna became the compassionate face of the church.

By the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church moved to proclaim that Mary was born without original sin, broadening the rift between Catholics and Protestants and casting Mary as a symbol of papal arrogance. It's at that point she also became increasingly identified with Catholicism.

As humanity's bloodiest century dawned, Mary became the merciful and maternal counterpoint to the harsh realities of war and poverty. The horrors of World War I and the persecution of Portuguese priests set the stage for the vision in Fatima.

The sightings there took place over six months, according to the church. Mary showed herself to the three children as a beautiful lady in white holding a rosary made of pearls. As the story goes, the visions ended with the sun dancing in the sky above 70,000 people, an event the church decreed as "worthy of belief."

Because part of Mary's prophecies in Fatima was to warn about the danger of evil spreading from the Soviet Union, the Lady of Fatima became identified with the West's fight against Communism. The statue enjoyed its greatest popularity through the height of the Cold War.

More recently, she has been reclaimed by Catholic feminist theologians who, a half-century ago, saw Mary as subservient but have since come to see her as life-affirming and empowered, said professor Thomas Groom, director of the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College.

Today, Malburg estimates he is on the road with the statue about 250 days a year and it draws about a half-million people. Malburg fields requests for the statue from around the world and arranges its travel schedule. Some of the requests come in through the website, www.pilgrimvirginstatue.com.

Our Lady of Fatima holds a particularly dear place in the Portuguese community. Indeed, the idea to bring the statue to this area was hatched by John Hunt, a Portuguese-American from Billerica who came up with the idea while he was on a pilgrimage last year to Lourdes, France, another site to which pilgrims go to venerate Mary.

There were tens of thousands of pilgrims walking with candles at night and Hunt, well aware of the pain that the closing of churches in the Boston Archdiocese was causing, decided he wanted to bring some of the joy to this area.

"Why not here?" he said.

Eight months later, she is set to arrive.

"No matter what, we want people to know the church is still here for you," Veloso said. "No matter what, the church is here and will always be here."

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