Visionary readies for return of apparition Feast of Annunciation begins season

March 21, 2004 - Reported in Spirit Daily.com from the Toledoblade.com. Written by Jetta Fraser. John Lewinski, president of Our Lady of Toledo Shrine, and Marvel Sally Steadman, visionary, are anxiously awaiting the Catholic Church’s Feast of the Annunciation on Thursday. That’s the date each year, they say, that public apparitions of the Blessed Mother end their winter-long absence and return to the suburban Toledo shrine.

“She always comes back on the 25th of March and then on the first Saturday of the month,” Mr. Lewinski said. “She’ll be coming on the 25th. Everybody is looking forward to that,” said Mrs. Steadman, the 83-year-old retired Food Town worker who first began seeing Marian apparitions in 1992. The shrine, which opened on a 17-acre site on Coy Road in Oregon in June 1997.

After the annual March 25 appearance, the apparitions seen only by Mrs. Steadman, who describes what she sees to the crowd came year-round on the first Saturday of each month. But the faithful, who turn out by the hundreds for the monthly sessions, shivered and froze in the bitter cold. Mrs. Steadman said the Blessed Mother told her she would no longer appear during the Toledo winter out of concern for her followers’ health.

That may change, however, as work is being completed on an enclosed pavilion that will have heat and air conditioning. The new building, expected to be finished in the next few weeks, cost about $200,000, bringing the total investment in the shrine’s grounds and property to more than $1.6 million. Every dime has been provided through private donations, Mr. Lewinski said, starting with the initial purchase of the land priced at $360,000. Mrs. Steadman, a retired widow living on Social Security, said she had no idea how she would pay for the property that the Virgin Mary told her to buy.

“It was like asking for something impossible. But when you think who her son is, nothing is impossible with God,” Mrs. Steadman said this week. “I guess I didn’t have the faith I should have had.” The donations have always arrived, sometimes “out of the blue,” the visionary said, in time to pay for the projects the Virgin Mary tells her to undertake. “Whatever she asks for, we’ve gotten,” Mrs. Steadman said.

Run as a nonprofit organization with a board of directors, the shrine has been expanded from 17 to 23 acres through the purchase of several adjacent properties. Mrs. Steadman said she told a doctor who worked in a neighboring office that the Virgin Mary wanted her to buy his land. “He thought I was crazy. He said, ‘Who?’ I’ll never forget it,” Mrs. Steadman said. “He said, ‘This is my office, don’t want to give it up.’ I said, ‘You say that today, but the Holy Spirit will work on you.’ He said, ‘What?’

“In a week, he came to me and said, can’t fight heaven. You can have my office if you have the money.” Other improvements have been the blacktop paving of a seven-acre parking lot, the building of a stations of the cross walk, the installation of a large statue of the Virgin Mary, a rosary walk, and the building of a white stone grotto. Mr. Lewinski, who has been president for four years, said running the shrine has been a test of his patience and his faith. “The Blessed Mother always gives us enough to run the shrine,” he said, “but it seems she always waits ’til the last minute and she drives me crazy, personally.”

When the apparition appears, the feeling is indescribable,” said Mr. Lewinski, 74, a retired construction company owner who is a member of Immaculate Conception parish. Mrs. Steadman said she was frightened when the Virgin Mary first appeared to her in 1992, but she has become comfortable with the visions. The Virgin Mary appears regularly in private to her, she said, and monthly for the public gatherings at the shrine. At the public apparitions, Mrs. Steadman uses a microphone and amplifier to tell the crowds what the Blessed Mother is doing and saying. Some of the sessions have drawn more than 1,600 people to Our Lady of Toledo Shrine.

The late Toledo Bishop James Hoffman said in 1997 that he considers the visions to be “private revelations” that do not contradict or add to the church’s teachings. Mrs. Steadman, whose husband Arthur died in 1982, said she is puzzled why the Virgin Mary chose her. “I think I always had faith because I was raised a cradle Catholic. I never knew any other faith. I had devotions but I was not overly pious, I was not holier than thou. I don’t walk around with my hands folded. I have children and grandchildren.… But I think the things that have happened make others see what they couldn’t see before. I think I’ve brought faith to others.”

When the Virgin Mary asked her to be her “messenger,” Mrs. Steadman said she thought it meant praying more and being more active in her parish, Our Lady of Lourdes in Genoa. But one step at a time, Jesus’ mother revealed plans for a shrine, including a home for unwed mothers, and for Mrs. Steadman to start a religious order. “When she told me what she wanted, I almost collapsed,” said Mrs. Steadman, who wears a nun’s habit designed she said by the Virgin Mary. The shrine includes a house that accommodates up to six unwed mothers, who are allowed to stay for up to three months. “We’ve saved 138 babies that would have been dead,” Mrs. Steadman said. “Just think, that’s 138 human lives! And we’ve helped hundreds that didn’t stay with us but we helped them get food and clothes and food stamps and welfare. Some of
these girls don’t even have a bed to put their little heads down on. We see that they have furniture and we follow up.”

Mrs. Steadman said her health has not been good lately, having undergone heart surgery and radiation treatments for cancer. “But I’m not complaining. Most of my school mates are gone. And I’m like everybody else, my day will come. But I just feel that right now she has plans for me. I pray, ‘Lord, if this place can run without me, then take me. Let me enjoy my graduation.’ But for now, I need to be here.”

The return of the Virgin Mary apparition is expected during the Feast of the Annunciation prayer service at 2 p.m. Thursday at Our Lady of Toledo Shrine, 655 South Coy Rd. Oregon, Ohio.

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