The View from Mount Dog

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  If there does turn out to be a quote religious angle unquote to this unhappy affair we can rest assured that the Parazuelan Church hierarchy will experience little reluctance in siding with the military and supporting whatever line is chosen by the Generalissimo providing it is not too outrageously compromising stop Church links with the Government comma especially at the level of Cardinal Celso comma are extremely ramified as I believe I made clear in my Confidential Report entitled whatever and dated whenever stop Since that report was written links have been still further strengthened by the founding of the caps Gloria PFCTP colon the Christian Family comma Tradition comma and Property Party stop new para

  A private footnote colon it would in my view be a miracle if against this background we as foreigners in Parazuela can ever unravel the truth in all this but I have just been assured by the Embassy Chaplain comma a man whose tongue is never knowingly in his cheek comma that the age of miracles is not yet past stop That’s it, Gloria. Print it. And, oh, I’ll liberate some embassy wine for our dinner tonight: I’m sure as dammit not drinking that Barrio Plonk again.

  V

  Transcript of extracts from a Global Probe television documentary entitled Sister Pia: Saint, Hoaxer or Dupe? transmitted worldwide on 5 June 2025:

  PRESENTER: Parazuela. A hillside outside the bustling provincial town of Tutuban.

  On this very spot exactly forty years ago three little sisters had an experience which lasted a mere ten seconds but whose echoes simply won’t die down even today.

  For what those little girls claimed was that on the evening of 5 June 1985 they saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, who was the mother of Jesus Christ the prophet.

  Almost from that moment Tutuban … Parazuela … even the Christian world itself was sharply divided between those who believed in the vision and those who could not.

  And almost from that moment the miracles – as many claimed they were – began.

  Within a week of that fateful evening this place had become the destination of the first of countless thousands of pilgrims who began flocking here to worship and seek cures. Pilgrims who, to this day, still flock in undiminished numbers. For let us make no mistake: Tutuban is today the centre of a vast pilgrimage industry.

  It is Latin America’s answer to Lourdes in France. It is perhaps too easy to look at these hotels … at these restaurants … souvenir shops … fleets of buses at the bus station and rows of aircraft at the airport … in short at all the evident signs of prosperity glittering among the poverty like gold in a rotten tooth.

  Too easy to look at it all and think only of the enormous wealth which has undoubtedly been generated in four decades largely on the word of three illiterate Indian children. We should look also at these hostels for the pilgrims … at Tutuban’s impressive hospital with one of the most advanced psycho-surgery units in Latin America … and at the pilgrims themselves.

  Often poor, many have walked to Tutuban from hundreds of kilometres away.

  We should look, too, at these literally hundreds of thousands of testimonials of miraculous cures, many attested by independent medical opinion, and at these countless votive notes of thanks to the Virgin for spiritual and physical help….

  You will never convince Ms Josefina Kaspar that she was the victim of some cynical racket.

  This is how she looked eleven years ago when, as thirteen-year-old Josefina Suarez, she made the pilgrimage to Tutuban. Paralysed from the chest down in a street accident at the age of five she was pushed in her wheelchair across the Andes from her home town of Santiago by her father, himself a sufferer from a heart condition….

  So. Big business or a uniquely miraculous source of help?

  Well, maybe somewhere in between.

  It is a familiar story: at Lourdes … at Fatima … at Guadelupe. But there is something about the Madonna of Parazuela which makes her different from the others.

  A unique mystery surrounds her.

  Indeed, from the very first a key question-mark hung over her. Let us go back forty years to that evening.

  This imposing shrine which can seat three thousand pilgrims was not here then, of course.

  In those days this was a simple bare hillside.

  It was here that Milagros, Nimfa and Rosario Irubú were picking flowers when they had their vision.

  Every effort was made to fault their story but despite countless separate questionings it stood up in every detail.

  And this great picture hanging above the Grotto itself was painted under the children’s direction so as to be an exact likeness of the vision they claimed to have seen.

  A dark-skinned lady wearing old-fashioned spectacles, some sort of twentieth-century version of today’s moon-shift, and holding a jewelled box.

  In close-up here we can see the box is full of a grey powder and there is a pinch of this between the lady’s two fingers. We shall be coming back to this detail later.

  An unusual vision, perhaps.

  Certainly unexpected in that it did not conform to any Catholic images which the children would have been familiar with.

  And ever since that day there have been rumours. These rumours have said that this picture, far from representing a supernatural manifestation, is the portrait of a real person whom the children saw and merely mistook for the Virgin Mary. If this could ever be proved it would have shattering consequences.

  And from this first mystery a second one hangs.

  Why didn’t the investigators of the Church make more effort at the time to determine the true facts? And might this failure have something to do with the military government of the day?

  A good question.

  To understand the labyrinthine relationship between Church and State in Parazuela forty years ago we will need a brief explanation of the nature of Parazuelan politics then.

  Today’s social-democratic administration is an incredible twenty-seven governments removed from that military dictatorship in power in 1985.

  In those days the Roman Catholic Church was still a very powerful institution in terms of influencing the way ordinary people thought.

  But the secular power of the military was even greater in terms of the everyday control of life in Parazuela.

  Throughout the 1970s Church and State had been squaring off for a fight … and by 1985 State had won.

  The military could never have abolished the Church in Parazuela and nor would it have wanted to.

  It merely needed to ensure the support of the more important of the Church’s leaders.

  Such as Cardinal Celso, Archbishop of San Sacramento and effectively the head of the Church in Parazuela.

  A man whose weakness for rubber sex made him uniquely vulnerable to blackmail.

  Among officers in the Government who were directly involved, Generals Manolo Edmilson and Fernando Preciosa played a key role in….

  Global Probe has managed to reconstruct some of the major events that fateful June of so long ago and, against the background of the leading dramatis personae we have just been introduced to, can now present a diary which is probably as close to what really happened as anyone can ever get.

  One problem, of course, is that nearly all the people directly involved are dead.

  But Global Probe investigators have finally managed to trace a lady living in Australasia who may have the key to the entire mystery.

  She is Ms Ruth Tressell and her claim is a startling one.

  According to her, the story begins in Rio de Janeiro where she was a community service volunteer from 1984 to 1986.

  One of the other volunteers at the time, and a close friend of hers, was a certain American girl named Sage Maclean, who, in mid-1985….

  Why did Ruth not come forward at the time despite suspicions aroused by the first letter she had received from Sage Maclean and then the international press coverage of the story?

  More important, why did neither she nor Sage Maclean come forward later, after extensive correspondence between them in, respectively,
Rio and Texas?

  RUTH TRESSELL: Look, you’ve got to remember we were practically kids then and the whole thing struck us initially as too crazy.

  I really forget the sequence of events now but I do remember Sage and I were badly shaken by the news of Jack Brunner’s death, and as there didn’t seem to be any connection between the two stories the more personally urgent one took precedence.

  Then not long after she got back to the States poor Sage learned that she was pretty sick and that she might not make it, you know?

  I think they gave her up to a year to live, but she didn’t last that long.

  I swear it was Brazil that killed her; just one bout of hepatitis too many, they said.

  That, too, tended to push the whole Tutuban Virgin story on to the sidelines as far as we all were concerned.

  After Sage did die I remember looking around and thinking, well, there’s really only you left of the old gang, Ruthie, and look what happened to everyone else.

  And, besides, have you ever tried standing up in public suspiciously late in the day to pour cold water on a religious story that plenty of respectable people were accepting and which by then was becoming an industry?

  Me, a single girl, going on national TV to talk about conspiracy theories and in effect calling three kids liars who by then were practically little saints?

  No way.

  I’d lost two good friends and I was sick of the whole thing. And, God, you know those drug allegations about Jack Brunner? Some of that shit stuck and it was absolute lies from start to finish.

  I don’t know where that story came from.

  Jack was never into that and in that respect he … he was Mr Clean. I think it was that which really broke up his family.

  But I’m glad it’s all coming out now.

  We none of us live for ever and I’m happy not to have to … well, die with the story untold.

  PRESENTER: More and more the evidence seems to be indicating that there was a massive cover-up by the military government of the day, aided and abetted by senior Church officials.

  Three people could perhaps have cleared up the mystery once and for all but two are known to be dead and the third presumed to be.

  Jack S. Brunner. Murdered on the night of 16 June 1985.

  Sage Maclean. Died January 1986 of a liver disease almost certainly contracted during her service in Brazil.

  Foul play is not suspected.

  And the Irish priest, Father Ignatius O’Malley. Disappeared on that same 16 June aged forty-four. Never seen again.

  Foul play very strongly suspected.

  So we have to rely on the cover-up theory to explain certain otherwise inexplicable things.

  First, how was it that nobody else came forward to suggest that Sage Maclean had been mistaken for the Madonna?

  She must have been seen by dozens of people both in San Sacramento and Tutuban during her short visit.

  Only the military had the sort of power which could have prevented their voices being heard.

  And, secondly, why a cover-up at all?

  What was in it for the military government to have an American girl mistaken for the Virgin Mary?

  It is only a theory, but many people nowadays, Global Probe among them, think it was a shrewd piece of psychology on the part of the Generals.

  A sudden interest in a non-political, supernatural event gripping the imagination of the common people of Parazuela could divert their attention away from their very real grievances and make them that much more docile.

  Dr Zeke Chaffee is Professor of Humanist Psychology at MIT….

  Our story almost ends there.

  Almost, but not quite.

  For there is one other survivor of those fateful events, perhaps in her way the most important of all.

  This is the Convent of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Tutuban.

  And this nun quietly embroidering in the peace of its secluded garden, far removed from the hubbub of pilgrimage for which she was directly responsible, is Sister Pia, born Nimfa Irubú.

  For she is the last of the three sisters who saw the vision still alive.

  She has never left this convent since the day she entered its doors at the age of twelve.

  Still only fifty-two, she looks a good deal older.

  For even the reclusive world of the nun is not untouched by controversy.

  Sister Pia is by far the most famous nun in Parazuela, probably in the whole of Latin America.

  But this very fame, unsought though it may be, has inevitably brought with it the rumours, the gossip, the doubts.

  It is an open secret that even some other members of her Sisterhood privately question her popular status as the Convent’s visionary and bitterly resent her celebrity.

  In terms of fame she easily outranks her own Mother Superior, whose position she has never coveted.

  The rumours persist that she was the innocent victim of her own youthfulness and gullibility.

  But Sister Pia herself has never had a moment’s doubt.

  She remains supremely convinced that on that evening forty years ago she and her two little sisters were granted a glimpse of heaven on earth.

  And the Madonna she saw – unconventional in appearance though she might have been – lives on in Sister Pia’s memory as a person more real and more vivid than those who have surrounded her ever since.

  She has seen photographs of Sage Maclean but has always maintained that the young volunteer looked nothing like the person – or vision – she originally saw.

  Today Sister Pia devotes her time to prayer and embroidery.

  She declined to speak to a Global Probe investigator since all verbal contact is forbidden to her Order, although they talk freely among themselves.

  However, in a reply to written questions we submitted through her Mother Superior she stated that she is perfectly well aware of the rumours concerning the validity of her claims.

  She insists that all such reports casting doubt on her vision of Our Lady were originally manufactured by the corrupt military regime of the day in their unceasing and often brutal campaign against the spiritual values of the Church.

  Viewers of this documentary may well feel by now that such a view is at best simplistic….

  The question has sometimes been asked: ‘Is Sister Pia a saint?’

  It is something she herself has always emphatically denied.

  The Roman Catholic Church certainly doesn’t recognise her as one since she has not yet even been beatified, itself a necessary first step for full canonisation, or sainthood.

  Nowadays the Church’s rules governing beatification are so strict as to make becoming a modern saint virtually impossible.

  Indeed, Cardinal Nutzbaum of New York recently remarked that if Jesus Christ himself were to reappear on earth he might not even qualify.

  So once again we ask the question:

  Sister Pia: Saint? Hoaxer? Or Dupe?

  Global Probe believes it has put forward enough facts for open-minded viewers to be able to form their own judgement.

  But perhaps in all fairness the last word should go to Sister Pia herself, expressed in the earthy imagery of her own Indian origins:

  ‘The proof of the boat-making is in the floating,’ she says.

  ‘Are there or are there not miracles here in Tutuban?

  ‘Do not the incurably sick take up their beds and walk?

  ‘Do not the lame run, the afflicted smile again?

  ‘Have not a million hearts been filled these last forty years with that supreme happiness which is the special gift of Our Lady of Tears?’

  ENDS

  The Hidden Life

  When you are ‘something in the City’ – and more especially when you are someone – you become sad as you get older. Very likely people everywhere become sadder, but I wouldn’t know about them; I can only speak for myself and for certain of my close contemporaries. We are a select few among that great army which used to be mocked as ‘the pinstri
pe brigade’ whose regular commutings were the butt of every Punch humourist who, because he worked from home in a polo-necked sweater and didn’t have to shave every morning, flattered himself that he was somehow less trammelled by the conventions of society. I should like to say, en passant, that some of the most conventionally minded people I have ever met have been professional satirists.

  I have often wondered why we become sad, but of course we never discuss it. Everything is conveyed by looks, by glances, by an eyebrow scrupulously raised across a table, by an acknowledged coup d’œil from the other side of a railway carriage. I believe it has partly to do with the irony of our position. Here we are, the most conventional of social animals (if the humourists are to be believed), simultaneously being bulwarks, repositories of confidence, sustainers of traditional values as well as (if our company propaganda is to be believed) thrusting, innovative and forward-looking. I cannot think of a description in which I recognise less of myself and my few friends than in that piece of executive blarney; it alone would be grounds for melancholy. But there are plenty of other grounds, too, most of which in combination form a thousandfold treason. Treason here, betrayal there. For how can any of us pretend that what we think of and love as England and English values are nowadays comprehended to the least degree either by the work we do or – to put it bluntly – by the new class we have to do it with? Something has been let slip for ever; some quality is irretrievably gone, and it has to do with the heart.