Looking for Mary: (Or, the Blessed
Mother and Me) by Beverly Donofrio
I Read It Twice
Entering her fortieth year, Beverly Donofrio, a lapsed Catholic, inexplicably
begins collecting Virgin Mary memorabilia at yard sales. Her search for
kitsch, however, soon becomes a spiritual quest, leading her to make a
pilgrimage to the holy city of Medjugorje. There, she learns that Mary
comes into your life only when pride steps out and receives a bonus: hope.
In Looking for Mary, Donofrio offers the universal story about a woman
who-in a quest for the Blessed Mother-finds herself.
Personal Review: Looking for Mary: (Or, the Blessed Mother
and Me) by Beverly Donofrio
The Virgin Mary is a remarkable woman. I adore her. And she has done a
world of good in her role as the Queen of Heaven. But she can be a
handful. Catholics think they know Mary. They don't.

That's why _Looking for Mary_ is such an important book. Its author,
Beverly Donofrio, has been to Bosnia: Donofrio has seen with her own
eyes that Mother Mary is hardly the whispery milquetoast maiden that
many reverend fathers take her for. Mary is a woman who can hold her
own in a Man's world, let me tell you!
As you may have noticed in the millennium just past, there has been some
desultory tension between Mary and Yahveh, both of whom enjoy being
worshiped as Jesus' Mother and Father, respectively, but neither of whom
thinks the other should have sole dibs on Christian affection. Their rivalry,
though jocular, can sometimes become more animated, as during the
Reformation, when the fans of Mary and of Yahveh killed one another by
the tens of thousands all across Europe; and again for just these past
fifteen years, when the Virgin Mother and your heavenly Father have
themselves been in a snit over who best deserves the loyalty of little
children, a quarrel they have not yet resolved.
I am reminded of four-year-old Cooper W-- of Sykesville, Maryland, whose
grandmother took him, in May 1993, to Our Lady Center, to see a child-
sized statue of the Virgin Mary. It did not escape Yahveh's notice that Our
Lady Center had statues of the Happy Virgin in almost every size, and
shape, and chaste posture, but no statues depicting God the Father for
little children to honour with comparable reverence. So when young
Cooper approached a concrete manikin of the Blessed Virgin to adore her,
the Lord gave the statue an invisible push. Sadly, the stone Virgin fell over
and clobbered the boy on the head and killed him. (Your heavenly Father
was not angry with little Cooper: He just expects equal representation, and
His fair share of adoration from the little ones.)
When the Southern Baptists heard about Cooper's fate, they said that it
illustrated, to Roman Catholics, God's contempt for the sin of "Mariolatry."
The Virgin Mary just smiled, beatifically, like Mona Lisa, not showing her
teeth. But she soon espied her chance to even the score, while upping the
irony. On 5 August 1996, at the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Summerville,
Georgia, third-graders attending the Vacation Bible School were taken
outside to the cool, shady graveyard for their afternoon lesson. They
gathered in a large circle, and bowed their heads in prayer as their
teacher, Miss Knox, said, "Our Father, who art in Heaven...." And that is
the exact moment when the Blessed Virgin made her move: she caused a
six-foot granite cross to topple over onto the head of Andrew H-- , a nine-
year-old boy who often praised his heavenly Father but never worshiped
Mary.
The police, when they arrived to help, flipped over the fallen stone. Guess
what surname was inscribed on the granite tombstone that crushed the
boy's skull? "POPE"! And guess where Andrew was pronounced dead,
after being transported there by an ambulance? in "Rome"! (i.e., Rome,
Georgia).

Things like that do not just happen by accident. For things like that to
happen to children, there has to be a God. Also, a Virgin Mother of God.
Not to be outdone, your Father blasted a four-year-old boy in Rockaway,
Queens. Little Rayangelo A--, who was born deaf, was learning how to
pray to the Virgin Mother using sign language. A bright little boy, he was
making good progress despite his God-given handicap, until that day at his
grandma's house when he found an M-80 in the kitchen. Rayangelo, who
had seen powerful firecrackers before, in TV cartoons, but had never
heard one explode, lit the fuse - not realising the danger. The boy's signing
hand was blown to pieces and had to be amputated.
Yahveh just shrugged. "If a little child's hand gives offense," He said, "then
I say, cut it off and toss it! Better that his hand should perish, than for Me
to cast his entire little body into Hell, forever" (Matt. 19:14, 5:30).
I know what you're thinking: why must your heavenly Father beat up twice
on the same child? Rayangelo was a good kid. Wasn't it enough, to make
him be born deaf? So what if he adores the Virgin Mother?
But that is not the way your heavenly Father thinks about it.
Not to be outdone, the Queen of Heaven on Christmas night, 1996,
assaulted a six-year-old Colorado princess with a flashlight, cracking her
skull. An elaborate PR effort pinned the mishap on a small foreign faction
who slid down the chimney that night, although it was again the Mother
who did it.
The Father waited till Christmas Eve, 1997. He then sent a team of
Protestant priistas to a coffee plantation near Acteal, Mexico, to instruct the
Roman Catholic peasants who lived there - members of Las Abejas, a
small foreign faction - that Maryolatrous "liberation theology" may not be
good for their health. By the time the lesson was over, every child in the
camp had been cut to pieces with a Protestant machete or riddled with
bullets from an evangelical AK-47.
It's not that God is unwilling to protect children from adult violence - He
saves boys and girls from harm almost every day, all over the world,
without complaining. But when children adore the blessed Mother more
than they ought, that is when God may strike someone with divine irony, or
with an iron fist. For one thing, when Christian tykes die and go to
Heaven, the Lord doesn't mind as much as you might think. In fact, He
likes it. "Suffer the little children to come unto me, the sooner the better,
even if it's one piece at a time" - that's Yahveh's policy (Mark 10:14). As it
is written in Scripture, "Blessed shall he be," therefore, "who takes your
little children by the feet and dashes them against the rocks!" (Psalms
137:9).

- L.
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