Our Lady of Surbiton

Patricia de Menezes was born on 4 March 1940 in Bristol, the youngest of six children. She was evacuated in the war, spent time in an orphanage and grew up in Blackpool. Later she became a freelance jewellery designer, a mother of three and a convert to Catholicism.

Her home was in Surbiton, Surrey, in the Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark. Her movement dates the turning point to 1984. That year she made an Act of Consecration to Mary. Afterwards, it says, "spiritual entities" began to appear to her. The Telegraph told it differently. She began hearing divine messages while cycling near her home. Visions of Mary and Jesus followed.

21 July 1985. The movement gives its first full description. Our Lady wore a white-pink veil, a soft blue-grey cloak and a white-pink dress. She was barefoot and wore the crown of the Immaculate Conception. There were mystical wounds on her head. On her heart, a gold sphere below white roses, and a silver five-pointed star above. She called herself the "Mother of the Hidden and Mystical Wounds" and "Mother of England and Mother of the world." She had come, she said, to gather her children.

The place was a pine tree at the de Menezes home. The messages came as visions and as interior locutions, words heard inwardly. They were gathered as "Inspirations," given through "the instrument, Patricia de Menezes, Surbiton, Surrey, England." They asked that children killed before birth, by abortion or embryo experiments, be proclaimed "companion martyrs of the first Holy Innocents."

No one else reported seeing the figure. A community formed all the same. In January 2002 Andrew Gimson visited for The Spectator. An elderly couple told him Mary came Monday to Friday at 12 noon, and at 9 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Her followers said the apparitions were daily. De Menezes put local membership at about 10 to 12, among 2,000 to 3,000 worldwide. By 2007 the Community of Divine Innocence claimed members in nearly 50 countries.

In 2001 Archbishop Kevin McDonald of Southwark warned that the authenticity of the alleged apparitions "has not been accepted." Followers were told not to meet as a group under the Divine Innocence name. Praying together was still allowed.

Later the community sent its statutes and documents to Rome. On 16 July 2007 Archbishop Angelo Amato wrote to the archdiocese for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He reported an in-depth study and four concerns. Exaggerated claims about the community. Inappropriate words attributed to Jesus. The demand about aborted children and a "Baptism of Love." Intemperate attacks on Church authority. The revelations were "highly questionable," so the spirituality was "flawed at its root." On 21 September 2007 McDonald made the ruling public. Divine Innocence had "no recognition or approval whatsoever."

The press was blunter. The Telegraph said the visions had been "dismissed as a fraud," and reported that Amato called the claims "exaggerated" and "hysterical." The Church texts themselves do not use the word fraud and allege no deliberate deception. They judged the messages by their content. In December 2007 the community published its "Reply to the Observations," arguing the messages fit Catholic teaching. De Menezes was unavailable for comment for the Telegraph story.

Our Lady of Surbiton now sits among the rejected claims in lists of Marian apparitions, beside cases such as Veronica Lueken at Bayside, New York. It was never a crowd event. It was one woman, one pine tree, and a movement that carried her messages far beyond Surrey.