The Seer of Bayside tells a lively story with compassion for its subjects and discernment regarding social and organizational forces. It centers on Veronica Lueken, a Roman Catholic from Bayside Hills in Queens, New York who gained an international following because of the spiritual ecstasies and visions of Mary that she reported, from 1968 until her death in 1995. A mother of five who worked as a Red Cross nurse during World War II and whose husband made a modest living as a construction engineer, Lueken became overcome with the scent of roses while praying for Robert Kennedy on the night he was shot. For two years after that, Lueken had visitations from St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whom she had urged to save Kennedy. St. Thérèse gave Lueken a poem about Kennedy kissing Mary and Moses (30). The Virgin Mary then promised to appear to Lueken in a shrine on the grounds of her parish church, St. Robert Bellarmine.
On the appointed day, June 18, 1970, Lueken prayed at the shrine from 9 a.sm. until 1 a.m., with a few supporters. Mary asked her for a basilica and for more vigils of people praying the rosary. As the crowds at vigils grew into the thousands, Lueken and her followers came into conflict with the homeowners of Bayside Hills and with officials of the Roman Catholic Church. There were bullhorn confrontations between neighborhood groups and Lueken's followers; competing occupations of the grounds of St. Bellarmine's and of the streets around the church; investigations by Chancellors of the Diocese of Brooklyn; and a criminal investigation by the Queens District Attorney of fraud in the making of “miraculous” Polaroid photos (76) of Lueken and the shrine. This “battle of Bayside” (61) went on until the summer of 1975, when Veronica Lueken and her followers (who came to call themselves “Baysiders”) agreed to hold their vigils at a monument in nearby Flushing Meadows Park that marked the site of the Vatican Pavilion during the 1964–1965 World's Fair (93).
Although the move to Flushing brought peace to Bayside, it did not resolve all tensions between Baysiders and the church. Most of this book explores a “dance of deference and defiance” (197) over the messages that Mary addressed to the Church and the negative responses of Church officials. According to Lueken, Mary warned of conspiracies, such as replacing Pope Paul VI with an impostor (108). She taught that UFOs were bringing demons from Hell (103). She alleged that David Berkowitz, a serial killer called the Son of Sam, was part of a Satanist conspiracy that included some of her former neighbors in Staten Island and current neighbors in Queens (118). Unifying all these theories was a view of history as a struggle with cosmic evil.
After Lueken's death, her organization (Our Lady of the Roses Shrine) broke into two groups, one headed by her husband, Arthur Lueken, and the other by Michael Mangan, paid director of the shrine. Schism began over setting a date of 1997 for a great “Warning” to humanity. The groups then reached an impasse over access to the Vatican Pavilion monument. Eventually, the Parks Department brokered a deal in which the two groups alternated holding vigils at the monument and on a traffic island (175).
When Joseph Laycock attended vigils during his research for this book, he found the groups praying simultaneously and not interacting. A passerby asked him which group was Catholic, and the question caused Laycock to ponder what it meant to be Catholic (2). He concluded that “the boundaries of Catholic culture are being negotiated every day in Flushing Meadows Park” and at other sites where Marian visionaries have lately arisen, such as “the suburbs of Windsor, Ontario, Naju, South Korea, and the barrios of Mexico City” (197).
Though it is hard to dispute such a general statement, one may ask whether Laycock has described the path of the Bayside movement in the shifting stream of Catholic culture well. He suggests a connection between Lueken and Mary Ann Van Hoof, a Wisconsin visionary famous in the 1950s, who was denied sacraments by the Church, and with whom Lueken possibly spoke on the phone. Unlike the Wisconsin group, the Baysiders remained in communion with the church, although neither group found affirmation from their bishops. Laycock raises questions about how visionaries and Catholic officials relate to each other, but offers no answers. He brings up theoretical frameworks, but sets them aside. Fortunately, he falls into jargon only once, when he writes that Lueken's “strategic use of UFOs demonstrates the kind of meaningful worldview that a skilled bricoleur can make from a subjugated discourse” (103).
This reviewer would have welcomed more focus on Lueken as a woman who took part in an intensely female movement in Catholic spirituality. Her first spiritual contact, St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), became a doctor of the church by writing one book that stressed devotion to God through domestic duties. Mary appeared to Lueken at a shrine to the Immaculate Conception, the sexually provocative name Mary called herself in many modern appearances. Although Laycock presents Bayside as a traditionalist response to changes in the Church set forth by the Second Vatican Council, it could also be argued that Lueken contributed to a revolution of Marian, female-centered piety that began in 1830. But that would be another book. This book is illuminating as it stands.
