Sorting the holy from the crazy

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THE MIRACLE DETECTIVE: AN INVESTIGATION OF HOLY VISIONS

By Randall Sullivan

Atlantic Monthly Press, $25, 450 pages

REVIEWED BY BART McDOWELL

Like its title, this book has something miraculous in it. Imagine, if you can, a book written by a hip editor of Rolling Stone. . . a book that deals with delicate religious matters . . . and a book -- called a "spiritual whodunit" -- that will interest, and satisfy, both the pious and the skeptical. That very book is this one.

How does the Roman Catholic Church certify a miracle as genuine? With elaborate, prosecutorial doubt, with ponderous delay, and with miles of red tape. It is a miracle that any miracle runs this course. In the tradition of St. Thomas the Doubter, Randall Sullivan examines the process, interviews the people who claim to have seen visions and the people who insist the visionaries are crazy or fakes.

But first, cards on the table. I am a relaxed, secular Episcopalian who can easily empathize with doubters. I have no idea what Mr. Sullivan's religion may be, though he asserts once, "I am not a Catholic." He presents his facts and anecdotes with careful neutrality. He lets his possible saints, his possible villains, and his probable crackpots tell their own stories, vividly and personally. He gives quotation marks a tough workout.

One clergyman asserts that most bishops would "rather have a child molester in their diocese than a weeping statue of the Virgin Mary." It's less work. A molester does not bring a parade of pilgrims, profiteers, hysterics, investigative theologians, and journalists. Of the 295 alleged apparitions investigated by the Roman Catholic Church between 1905 and 1995, only 11 have been approved -- fewer than one in 25.

Mr. Sullivan starts with one in an Oregon trailer park, when a glowing figure of the Virgin appears to a young Hispanic woman named Irma. After interviewing Irma and her friends in Oregon, Mr. Sullivan begins to read about miracles -- and also about hysteria, heresy, and witchcraft -- and comes across references to a village in the Balkans, Medjugorje, with apparitions that "had been subjected to perhaps more medical and scientific examination than any purported supernatural event in the history of the human race."