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Revered Virgin 'visits' faithful Message from Our Lady of Sierras

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Horacio Soria Salazar didn't expect a miracle.

Soria is a rational man, a mathematician, a former university president and secretary of education in the Mexican border state of Sonora.

He was a Sunday Catholic when prostate cancer moved him to ramp up his prayer regimen.

He had sought medical help, had the prostate removed. The cancer came back.

He and his wife and some friends journeyed to Our Lady of the Sierras shrine in the foothills of the Huachuca Mountains. They had heard about a woman named Pat who spoke regularly to the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. Soria thought that connection to a higher power might be helpful.

Soria prayed with Pat and she relayed what she called a message from the Virgin Mary that his body was being healed. His cancer vanished and hasn't returned in two years.

Then his grandson was born with West syndrome, a rare form of infantile epilepsy that wracked his tiny body with up to 100 seizures a day.

The family consulted medical experts in Hermosillo and Phoenix. The doctors experimented with varying levels of new medications.

Finally, the family took the child to the shrine where Pat prayed with them. That was 18 months ago — the last day the child had any seizures, Soria said.

"It won't happen," says Gerald Chouinard on the phone.

Jerry is Pat's husband, the man who has plowed millions of dollars into building a shrine, Our Lady of the Sierras, and a retreat center, "La Purisima," south of Sierra Vista, near the unincorporated settlement of Hereford in Cochise County.

Jerry says he and Pat aren't interested in newspaper articles. He's 76 years old and Pat, 64, is frail. The visions have taken a toll. She is shy and spends her time in prayer and meditation, usually doesn't speak until the Holy Spirit moves her. They worry about "the slant" a newspaper article might take.

I tell Jerry I'll be down tomorrow. I'll drop off some stories I've written about people of faith, and we'll talk if he's around.

I take my wife, Ginny, with me for what I expect to be nothing more than a nice drive in the country.

Our Lady of the Sierras is in Ash Canyon in the Huachuca Mountains, which rise up dramatically from the San Pedro Valley, topping out at Miller Peak, elevation 9,466 feet.

In late fall, wheat-colored grasses offset darker hues of oak and manzanita thatspill off the foothills in fingers of dark green beneath rock cliffs and peaks capped with conifers.

The shrine sits halfway up a hill at the front of the mountains, its 75-foot Celtic cross and 31-foot tall statue of Mary visible from miles off as you drive south on Arizona 92 out of Sierra Vista.

When Ginny and I arrive at Mary's Knoll, a home converted into an office and chapel that sits beneath the shrine, we are surprised to find Pat, Jerry and another couple sitting at a round table.

Rudy Ruiz and his wife, Marnie, had stopped by to thank the Chouinards for their shrine, where Rudy, customer service supervisor for the U.S. Postal Service in nearby Sierra Vista, had prayed for his wife's recovery from cancer. She has been cancer-free three years now.

"We have a healing," says Jerry.

It's not the first such claim.

Articles about healings at the shrine in newspapers in Mexico have produced a steady stream of visitors. Jerry estimates that 80 percent of the shrine's pilgrims are from Mexico.

Healing prayers usually follow the 7:30 p.m. Friday rosaries at Mary's Knoll and the 3 p.m. Sunday devotions at the stone chapel beneath the cross.

Ginny and I sit down to chat. Jerry does most of the talking, though I state my case for being able to write sensitively about them and present my credentials as a lapsed Catholic from a religious family with 14 years of Catholic schooling.

Pat mostly keeps her head bowed, her eyes closed and hands folded. After about half an hour, she speaks softly to Jerry. "They're here."

She feels moved by the spirit to say something, so we all move into the small chapel whose window wall gives an eastern view of the San Pedro Valley, the river outlined by cottonwoods and willows.

To the southeast, San José Peak rises up out of Mexico. In the mid-distance is Miracle Valley, where the Holy Spirit has been at work since the late 1950s when a pentecostal preacher named A.A. Allen established a Bible college there for his Miracle Revival ministry.

On the wall of the chapel, a mural depicts Jesus before the Huachuca Mountains, his left hand seeming to cup the shrine site, with its cross, chapel and statue. Jesus has blue eyes, light skin and Caucasian features.

There is an altar, flowers and a large statue of the Virgin.

Pat stands and delivers a homily that seems directed at me and Rudy, who, like me, is a lapsed Catholic who finds time to pray only when life produces a threatening moment, like his wife's cancer surgery.

Pat says it's OK to pray when the need is there but emphasizes the need for a return to the sacraments, even if you haven't confessed in 40 years. I imagine the scene: "Bless me father, for I have sinned, it's been 40 years since my last confession. Got some time?"

Pat's homily is a strong tug at long-buried beliefs.

Our Lord and his mother have plans for me, she says, but first I must surrender to God's will.

She seems to look directly at me, though Ginny reports the same thing. Pat's hands are oddly expressive. Her face is, well, beatific. She is a tall woman — 6 foot before the two hip-replacement surgeries.

After the talk, she walks over to Marnie and Rudy and, one at a time, places her hand on their heads and prays.

Then me. Her touch is gentle but not particularly electric. I'm trying to be open to this. Is there something there?

Ginny will be my touchstone. She is more empathic than I. Ginny. Pat and Ginny are hugging when Pat collapses, falling gently to the carpet.

Jerry calls for paper and pen to document what will come next.

Pat has "gone into the spirit," he says. Odds are the Blessed Virgin is about to speak through her. Nannette and I both retrieve notepads. Pat lies on the floor for about five minutes. Her breathing seems normal. Her eyes are closed. The pulse in her neck bulges broadly.

Pat begins to speak, at first in unintelligible syllables — "tongues."

Pat has a Pentecostal background, she will later tell me.

As a child, she says, her Aunt Evelyn took her to an Assembly of God church in Alexandria, Va. that was routinely visited by the Holy Spirit. Pat said she began speaking in tongues at age 8. Her mother, who was not religious, would say "Stop that babbling."

She begins to speak in English, in her own voice:

We return to the office, where Ginny and Pat hold hands. Ginny tells me later she felt a strong spiritual connection. They cry.

I'm a bit over the line here. I pulled the Catholic card. Gave them a bit of biography. I've brought my wife to an interview. Pat has lain hands on me. Delivered me a message from the Virgin herself.

The good news is the Chouinards decide to cooperate on a story. They are impressed that Our Lady decided to talk to me. "This never happens," says Jerry, who says Pat's "locutions" from Our Lady happen in private, or at spirit-filled gatherings. Our Lady and the Holy Spirit obviously have something in mind for me and will guide my writing.

If I begin typing in tongues, I hope you'll understand.

On another visit, Jerry agrees to talk about his life and his mission.

Jerry Chouinard is the son of a German mother and French Catholic father who attended church regularly and got on their knees to pray each evening.

"I'm a cradle Catholic, always strong in my faith and so forth, though at arm's length for a number of years, and I never left the faith."

He was born in Minneapolis and grew up in northern Illinois. He had polio at age 3 and was left with one leg slightly thinner than the other. These days, he walks with the aid of a cane.

After Army service at the end of the Korean War, he went to work in Chicago as a printer and later opened his own shop a few blocks from Underwriters Laboratories, the outfit that tests the safety of electrical devices and certifies them with that little UL-approved tag you see on everything with a wire and plug.

Jerry developed a patented process to make the tags counterfeit-resistant. Though retired, he remains a 30 percent owner of the company, which recently signed its latest multiyear contract with Underwriters Laboratories — for 350 billion labels.

He is probably the most unassuming multimillionaire you'll ever meet.

Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson remembers, on his first visit to the shrine, "encountering this fella putting down rocks, dressed in his overalls."

Jerry is loquacious but he clams up when talk strays to his wife and her pipeline to Mary.

Pat, too, talks easily, but only about life before Our Lady began speaking to her.

She finished high school in Alexandria, Va., and went to work as a secretary at the Pentagon. She moved to the Chicago area when her husband switched jobs. They had four children.

Her husband was a salesman, a functioning alcoholic and compulsive gambler. Pat recalls walking home from a card game at which her husband had lost title to their car. She was nine months pregnant. They laughed about it at the time, she said. It took a while for her to realize she was trapped in that role.

"I knew things had to change and, fortunately, and I do mean fortunately, I came down with cancer (of the thyroid). It was a large turning point in my life. I said 'We just can't go on like this.' " They divorced and Pat went to work to support her four children. Her husband would die a few years later at age 46.

She eventually landed a job at a label printing company whose owner was known as "Jerry the Ogre."

"He was the guy in the back office with the big, wild eyebrows and an aquarium full of piranhas," said Pat.

He wasn't an ogre, Pat discovered.

Jerry had gotten an annulment from his first marriage and was free to remarry in the church. Pat agreed to convert. "This was just a baby step towards what God was leading me to."

They married in 1984 after six weeks of Catholic lessons. They attended church together but weren't particularly devout.

Pilgrims in Medjugorje

Then they saw a brochure for a pilgrimage to Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where six young people claimed to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary, beginning in 1981 and continuing to this day.

"The calling was so strong I don't think anything could have stopped us from going," said Pat.

They went in 1990. They saw no phenomena. Heard no calling.

"We didn't think we did. The truth is we witnessed an action, the faith of millions of people," said Pat. "It was awesome to see people that wait to cram into church, not like here where they leave before it's over. That breaks my heart."

Their faith slowly deepened. They began going to Mass more often, praying the rosary, joining prayer groups. "We just wanted to be with people who spoke the same language," said Pat.

Jerry left his business in the hands of a partner and the couple moved to Hereford, where Jerry hired an architect to help him design his "dream house on the hill." The valley reminded them of Medjugorje.

"We decided to put up a 20-foot cross," said Jerry. "It sorta grew." Battling neighbors and zoning officials, they eventually built a 75-foot cross, a 31-foot-tall statue of the Virgin and a small stone chapel, completed in 1998.

The Chouinards have established two foundations here. Our Lady of the Sierras includes the shrine site, the house at Mary's Knoll, a house for visiting priests, a bed-and breakfast named Mary's Farm and 100 acres of former farmland just south of Arizona 92, where Jerry hopes to one day build a church to handle the growing crowds of pilgrims.

The land and buildings are valued at nearly $2 million on the forms Jerry must file with the Internal Revenue Service. In addition, Jerry has endowed the foundation with nearly $1 million in stocks. Until the market meltdown, dividends nearly covered the yearly expenses, which are minimal with only one paid employee, daughter Nan, who received an annual salary of $31,662 in 2007.

A separate foundation, which the Chouinards no longer control, is set up to run La Purisima (Spanish for Immaculate Conception), the retreat center at the bottom of the hill, which the Chouinards built for $2 million. It is used for retreats by the Catholic Diocese of Tucson, and it houses monthly busloads of pilgrims from Hermosillo and elsewhere in Mexico.

During construction of the shrine, Pat began to "experience phenomena that many people would be skeptical about, including (me), her husband," said Jerry.

Pat's first visit from the Virgin Mary came in the form of a song, sung in Spanish, while she lay in bed with a fever of 106 degrees, later traced to an infected kidney.

Jerry thought the high fever might have something to do with it. "If it was your wife you'd say that."

Pat wasn't totally certain herself.

"It was very difficult to believe," said Pat, "because you do question your own sanity."

The locutions and visions began coming regularly for seven years from June 1997 to June 2004. Pat will say little more about them. They have been collected into a book, published as "private revelation" without the imprimatur of the church. Pat not only relays locutions — the oral messages — but also the visual phenomena she has experienced.

Many of the messages are apocalyptic in nature, warning of imminent catastrophe in our world, urging immediate repentance. The book is titled "Our Lady of the Sierras: A Call of Urgency."

Jerry continued to worry about his wife, at times doubting her sanity. Pat had her own misgivings, but says Mary kept speaking to her, telling her not to doubt and delivering specific messages for Jerry to share that faith.

"The heart of your husband has been prepared," the Virgin told her on July 31, 1997, "he now hears my words through you."

Today, Jerry is fully in the fold. About a month ago, for the first time, he went "into the spirit," collapsing at one of the twice-weekly prayer events. "I'm the tin man,'' he told me. "I finally have a heart."

The Catholic Diocese of Tucson has no plans to investigate the "phenomena" at Our Lady of the Sierras.

"(It) has not gotten to the point where there is a need to do that," Bishop Kicanas told me.

Kicanas has visited the shrine and found it "a place of prayer, an opportunity for people to ease their suffering." He called the Chouinards "very sincerely, deeply concerned to assist people in their spiritual lives and to assist the work of the church."

The church allows the Eucharist — the consecrated host that is said to be the body of Christ — to be displayed in the chapel and has assigned two deacons to assist in services there. Three bishops, including Kicanas's predecessor Manuel Moreno, and 80 priests have said Mass at the chapel.

Pat discusses all of her "locutions" with a spiritual adviser. In the beginning, it was the Rev. Louis Hasenfuss, founder of the Benedictine monastery in St. David, also in Cochise County.

Today, it is the Rev. Gregory P. Adolf, their parish priest at St. Andrew's in Sierra Vista. "Father Greg" is not interested in talking to me, Pat and Jerry report on one of my visits. I got that feeling when he did not return any messages left with the church secretary.

Most claims of messages and visions are not investigated, said the Rev. Johann Roten, director of the International Marian Research Institute and Library at the University of Dayton.

The center's Web site records 386 cases of Marian apparitions in the 20th Century.

The Church has made "no decision" about 299 of them. Of the 87 that were investigated, only eight were deemed to have "a supernatural character."

Roten, in a telephone interview, says the Web site doesn't include the more trivial claims — "one of these cheese sandwiches found one day and the next day is sold on eBay and nobody hears about it anymore."

Roten says he is not familiar with Our Lady of the Sierras but is not at all surprised by it. He hears from many people who began seeing apparitions after visiting Medjugorje.

It's an old story, he said. When the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette at Lourdes, France, in 1858, apparitions sprung up all over Europe in the following years — at least 100 of them, said Roten.

Myrna Mungia of Tucson, who visited the shrine on a recent Sunday, said she has no problem believing that God and the Virgin Mary are speaking to Pat. "Oh, I believe. I truly believe that, even nowadays, God chooses his apostles."

Says Pat: "There is nothing really out of the ordinary because, everywhere God is, everything is extraordinary."

The office at Mary's Knoll displays a number of photographs with the cross or the statue surrounded by a corona of light. Dan Moody, who with his wife, Mary, volunteers at the shrine, says the eyes of the statue of Mary inside the little chapel have clouded over with tears on at least two occasions.

Others have seen or sensed Mary's presence on the mountainside, said Jerry.

As Christmas approached this year, enthusiasm built for Friday, December 19, a day on which Our Lady told Pat she may have a special message.

Jerry erected a canopy outside the window wall of the chapel and posted a memo on the shrine's Web site warning that seating inside is limited and people should bring warm clothing and blankets to attend rosary that evening.

On a Friday in November, Ginny and I attend rosary at Mary's Knoll.

Rosary was big in my youth, as was devotion to Mary. At St. Theresa's School in Runnemede, N.J., we knelt to pray weekly in the church next door, fingering the beads, reciting the response rapidly: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."

We held processions each day of May to the statue of Mary in the school courtyard. "Oh Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May."

It was the toward the end of the "Marian Century," marked by many apparitions, including Lourdes in 1858 and Fatima, Portugal in 1917. It was the century in which popes proclaimed the infallibility of the Marian doctrines of Mary's immaculate conception (1884) and her assumption into heaven (1950).

Then came the Second Vatican Council in the early '60s, which urged a return to the essentials of the Catholic liturgy, exemplified by the decision to say Mass in vernacular language instead of Latin.

The rosary and devotion to Mary diminished, said Roten, but began making a comeback in the 1980s, with a big boost from Pope John Paul II, who traveled to Lourdes and to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

When the rosary ends on this night, two families come forward to pray with Pat, seeking healing. She prays softly in English, which is translated into Spanish. It is a prayer of gratitude, for what God has given and what he will grant in the future.

The book the Chouinards published addresses the question of whether God always answers prayers. "Yes … but it is always in His time and in His way. Remember, sometimes His answer is no!"

Pat does not collapse into the spirit this night.

Soria Salazar says Pat did collapse on the night his prostate cancer was cured.

"I was scared. I said please call 911, something is wrong." He and his wife watched as members of the prayer team surrounded her.

"This lady suddenly talks to us. 'Is there anybody here whose name is Horacio?'

"'Please come here close to Pat,' " she said and then she said the Virgin said you must not worry. Everything is going to be OK, again. The Virgin said those bochornos (hot flashes) you are suffering right now is because the Holy Spirit is going inside of you. In this moment, you are beginning to get well."

Soria Salazar has not stopped his medical treatments nor has his grandson. He does not know the doctors' opinions of what he regards as miracles. "I haven't told them," he said.

He will be in attendance on the Friday before Christmas, he said, to give thanks to God.

Jerry expects 150 to 200 people that night. "There is no guarantee, but we are anticipating (a message). We know she is going to come and I won't see her, never have, but there are others besides Pat who do see things — maybe you, Tom."

● Tomorrow: Other healings, the Mexican connection and the Christmas rosary.