Published: July 23, 2008 10:14 am      

Divine sign?

The arm of an excavator, the shading of the clouds and, perhaps, a trick of the eye combined to create a startling image captured by Mary Lehmann’s cell phone.

It looks like the Virgin Mary, appearing through the rubble of the demolished Saint Camillus school building.

Lehmann, who works at nearby Sacred Heart Catholic Church, took the photo as the old 1914 school building at Saint Camillus Academy was recently torn down.

“I work here at the church and the secretary and I, we just walked up to the school one day to watch, because that’s when they first started taking down the building. I said ‘I wished I had brought my camera,’ and I remembered I had a camera on my cell phone, and so I just snapped a couple of pictures... I didn’t see it in the camera when I took the picture. I was just taking the pictures basically to show my son because he graduated from there.”

Later, Lehmann’s daughter downloaded the photos and Lehmann e-mailed them to friends and others who had ties to the school.

One of those was the former priest of Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

“I sent it to our previous priest, Father Mark, and he e-mailed me right back and wrote, ‘it looks like the Blessed Mother is looking over this building,’” Lehmann said. “I thought, ‘what is he talking about?’ I didn’t really look at the pictures.”

At second glance, however, Lehmann noticed the shape of the giant excavator’s arm looked like a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In the photo, “Mary” appears to have her head tilted down, her arms in front of her in a traditional depiction of her cradling the baby Jesus, and a blue veil over her head and shoulders.

“Everybody sees it,” Lehmann said. “When they look at the picture, most people say, “I didn’t know there was a statue in that building,’ and other people have said, ‘why didn’t they take that statue down before they took the building down?’”

Interestingly, Saint Camillus Principal, Sister Juanita Nadicksbernd, said other pictures have been taken by the Sisters where the crane also appears to resemble Mary. And though “Mary’s” veil appears blue in the photos, the crane itself is entirely yellow.

“You couldn’t miss it, and you just thought, ‘OK, the Blessed Mother is taking care of it, it was the right thing to do, despite all the controversy,” Nadicksbernd said.

Images of the Virgin Mary have been spotted world-wide, supposedly cropping up in reflections of window panes, the sides of trees, tortillas and even on a grilled cheese sandwich. In other instances, some hundreds of years old, people have claimed to speak with the Virgin Mary.

Private revelations are not a necessary part of the Roman Catholic faith and members aren’t required to believe in them. But in some rare instances, the Roman Catholic Church has researched some claims and deemed them officially “worthy of belief.” In May of this year, the Roman Catholic church officially recognized that the Virgin Mary appeared to a teenage shepherd girl in the French Alps starting in the mid-1600s.

“Maybe that’s where I have a downfall in my faith, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to imagine these things, but in this picture, it appeared,” Lehmann said. “Whoever looks at it can read into it what they want to read into it. I just think it’s unusual and I’ve never had anything like that happen to me while taking pictures.

“There’s a lot of controversy over the building being torn down, and it was just unfortunate that the different organizations and the school couldn’t come up with the money to renovate it,” Lehmann said. “The people that I showed it to and talked to have just said the Blessed Mother is looking over this and is she trying to tell us something... Now what sign that is, I don’t have a clue. It’s just something that happened and I don’t know what that sign is.”

But some have an idea of what the image was meant to say.

“In the (Catholic) church, we have a part in the mass where we ask for a sign of peace, and I think this community received that sign of peace, and it’s time to move on,” said Saint Camillus Alumni Association member Mario Cima.

The demolition of the building was strongly contested by some members of the alumni association, who stated they were not given enough time or cooperation by the school to find an alternative use for the building. The 1914 building was on the National Register of Historic Places, and at one time served as home for members of the Sisters of Divine Providence and as boarding school for students. It was abandoned as a school building several years ago and ultimately deemed too expensive to rehabilitate.

After a series of last-minute efforts to save the school and a few letters to the editor, with both sides exchanging barbs, the school was torn down earlier this month.

Though not everyone agrees with him, Cima believes the sisters were unfairly burdened with most of the blame for the loss of the building, and the alumni board could have done more on their part.

“We needed a sign that it is OK to move on, and the memories were never torn down or destroyed. They are still in each and every mind and heart that ever walked on that hill,” Cima said.

Demolition is nearing completion and a memorial garden is planned where it once stood. Parts of the building are planned to be recycled for use in the garden — a granite slab that was actually a stall partition from a bathroom was salvaged and etched with the names of the 187 sisters that lived in the building over the years.

And though they may not have a supernatural explanation, the photos have helped Nadicksbernd come to terms with the decision to demolish the building.

“I know it is a crane, but I like to think the Blessed Mother Mary is looking over the project,” she said.