IT WAS raining. Mud and puddles were all around. In the grounds of St Mary’s church, Rathkeale, last Saturday afternoon, a solitary young man stood before the tree stump, his head hooded against the elements.
He contemplated the madonna- shaped piece of wood. He reached to it. He caressed it. A gust of wind blew a Padre Pio leaflet from the stump base where it has been placed with a St Martin de Porres card, an Our Lady of Lourdes medal, a miniature rosary, two earrings.
He reached into the mud and picked up the leaflet, lightly stroked the mud from it and put it back. He stood up to take a photo on his mobile phone.
He looked at it, studied it and then at the wooden object. He went to the tree stump again and furtively, as though he felt he shouldn’t, began to pick at the remaining bark on the wood until a little came away. Discreetly he put the reward in his pocket as others began to gather. He walked away, speaking to nobody. What private agony there? What consolation sought from lines on a tree stump?
At early Mass yesterday, Fr Willie Russell spoke about Mary. He pointed to her statue at the altar to his left. “All it is is a statue, a reminder of Mary,” he told the congregation. There was “so much evidence of the presence of Mary in the Bible”, he continued, “but in her humility she always remains in the background.”
He reminded the congregation that “the only words she said in the Bible were at the wedding feast of Cana, when she said ‘do whatever he tells you’.” It was also her message to us, he said. And he referred to Luke’s gospel and all that Mary had stored in her heart. “She remained in the background,” he repeated.
A man leaving the Mass later remarked how on one occasion last week there had been hundreds at the tree stump “and just three in the church”.
Frank Marham (79) is not happy with Fr Russell. “He’s against it,” he said of the fuss over the tree stump. Frank is not.
He regretted that candles and flowers left at the stump as offerings the night before had been removed overnight. It was the same yesterday morning. “If it was left to Fr Russell it would be gone,” Frank said.
Standing by the tree stump, he told another devotee the story of how someone had gone to Fr Russell during the week testifying belief that the tree stump featured the madonna and child and the priest’s response had been to hold up a piece of wood and say: “Do you see Michael Jackson in that?”“Sure that was hardly right at all?” said Frank.
Nora Sheridan spoke of the hundreds who had come to see the stump and that it was bringing “all sorts together to pray, black and white, young and old.”
A more sceptical Eugene McNamara remarked that he had seen “known criminals praying there this week. If it brings out the good in them, then what harm?”
A group of young Traveller girls placed hair bobs at the bottom of the stump which they had wrapped around stones. “For luck,” one of them explained.
Helen Collins from Rathkeale could see “what they’re on about.” She felt, however, “it might be a case of what you want to see”.
At the later Mass yesterday, parish priest Canon Joseph Dempsey spoke of scandals in the Church and the need for repentance and forgiveness. He did not refer to the would-be apparition in the grounds.