It was just before Holy Week, the most solemn period of the Christian year, when Sister Carla Dolce, prioress of the small community of Ursuline nuns, called Archbishop Gregory Aymond to tell him about something unusual developing at the Shrine of Our Lady of Prompt Succor, the chapel on the campus of Ursuline Academy. Crowds, larger by the day, were coming to see a shadow on a pillar near the altar, she told him.
It unmistakably suggested a man’s face — in fact, suggested most strongly the face of Jesus, even to its apparent crown of thorns, she said.
It was also quite clearly a shadow cast through an ornate chandelier, although no one seems to have noticed it before, she told Aymond.
Over the next few days, the shadow-on-the-pillar at Ursuline drew thousands of spectators; and its popularity revealed a continuing characteristic of religious life in New Orleans.
It also highlighted a contrast between the culture of devotional Catholicism, with its hospitality to signs and wonders, and the relative austerity of Protestantism, especially evangelical Christianity, and its wariness of public religious experience outside of Scripture.
In subsequent days, the shadow attracted thousands to the Ursuline shrine, where many Catholics honor Mary in a special role as patroness of New Orleans and intercessor against hurricanes.
Its popularity flourished in a city still imbued with an Old World Catholicism of holy days, devotions and traditions springing from French and Spanish colonial roots, later nourished by waves of Irish, Sicilian and Vietnamese Catholic immigrants.
That devotional culture was vividly on display in the mid-1980s, when 20,000 to 30,000 New Orleanians made pilgrimages to Medjugorje, a rough-hewn little Croatian town with nothing to offer tourists except the opportunity to pray with thousands of other pilgrims, all drawn by reports that the Blessed Mother was regularly — and invisibly — appearing to a group of young adults there.
Thousands of New Orleanians know distant Medjugorje as well as they know Gulf Shores, the popular summer retreat 200 miles east of the city.
Of course, what was happening at Ursuline last week was very different, most said in interviews: a natural phenomenon, and yes, pretty certainly a shadow.
But few in that self-selected group seemed dismissive.
“It’s a sign for people who have faith,” said Isabelle Macaluso, sitting in the dim chapel fingering a rosary. Her analysis was typical. “It’s a sign of hope at a time when we really need hope.”
Aymond, the pastoral leader of 485,000 regional Catholics, rendered a carefully measured judgment.
“It’s by ordinary means of light and shadow this image is being portrayed,” Aymond said.
"Whether it is anything more than that, “I’d leave up to the individual. If one believes God is communicating something about their faith, they should hold to that. If another thinks it’s just a distorted image or an inkblot, that’s their prerogative.”
But, Aymond said, “Our Catholic tradition for a very long time has accepted the fact the God acts and reveals himself as he wishes. And that there can be, through apparitions, extra ways in which Jesus shows himself.”
“Creation is revelatory,” said Chris Baglow, a professor of systematic theology at Notre Dame Seminary. “The Catholic way is to see his hand in everything.”
By contrast, in the upheaval of the Reformation, Protestant Christianity refocused itself on the power of the written word, Scripture, as the authoritative link between God and humans, said Timothy Larsen, the MacManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, one of the nation’s leading evangelical institutions.
“Protestantism is deliberately centered on words,” he said.
Recovering Scripture as the center of Christian life, Protestant churches purged themselves of ornamentation and statuary. Sacraments, signs and wonders were diminished or rejected entirely.
“The central focus was moved from the altar to the pulpit, because the most important thing that happens in church is hearing God’s word,” Larsen said.
Larsen said evangelical culture is uneasy with claims of public apparitions, visions and so forth “because it comes from outside the revelation of Jesus Christ through Scripture; because it could deflect, rather than reinforce, that revelation.”
Even so, Larsen said, there is plenty of room in Protestant Christianity for the miraculous — although on a different stage.
“Protestants tells stories of hearing audible voices; of God telling them what to do with their lives. There is a space for that,” Larsen said.
Evangelical culture is full of tales of personal healing, of unexpected rescues in the form of a new job, or a check showing up in the mail, he said.
“If someone says, ‘I was praying and God said to me I should be a lawyer,’ evangelicals can accept that. But that’s not something a community needs to attend to.”
Of shadows, visions and apparitions, “Protestants wouldn’t say this has to be wrong because God just doesn’t work that way,” Larsen said.
“But they are uneasy, because they’d be worried about what kind of spirituality it was fostering — the danger, for example, of people thinking they could only be near God at a particular place.”
Aymond and Baglow said they see the same danger.
“Popular piety is good, but it can lead to extremes,” said Baglow. “When the shadow on the pillar becomes more important to me than my baptism, or the Eucharist, if it draws me away from the center of revelation, that’s a problem. And the problem is not with the thing on the pillar, but my response to it.”
Aymond said that if there were seriously puzzling signs at Ursuline that also inspired onlookers to faith and prayer, the church might invoke a formal process of inquiry to determine whether to pronounce them legitimate.
On these matters, the Catholic church can be very slow.
Last year, Green Bay, Wis., Bishop David Ricken, acting on the findings of an investigative panel of three Marian experts, declared that the Blessed Mother appeared to a local farm woman — 153 years ago.
The church still hasn’t advised the faithful whether it regards as legitimate the reported Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, even though millions have flocked to the town for more than 30 years.
“Thirty years is nothing in the life of the church,” Aymond said.
On such matters, Aymond said, formal inquiry is interested in the credibility of physical evidence of the miraculous — but much more interested in the long term effect of the phenomenon on faith.
Because such phenomena are not central to the Gospel, Catholics can dismiss or marginalize them, if they choose, Aymond said.
Of those that pass muster, “the church merely ‘commends’ these events to the faithful.