The El Cajas Apparitions: María, Madre Guardiana de la Fe

Cuenca, Ecuador. Patricia "Pachi" Talbot Borrero was 16 and came from a well-off family. Talbot was a pupil at the Colegio Rosa de Jesús Cordero, a religious school.

28 August 1988. 4:50 a.m. A great light filled Talbot's bedroom, and Mary came out of it. The words, as devotional sources record them: "Do not be afraid. I am your Mother from Heaven… I am the Guardian of the Faith, and I will always be with you." The figure asked for prayer for world peace and for an altar with blessed candles. Afterwards a delicate aroma of flowers stayed in the house for three days. Talbot's mother was the first to be told.

About a year later, Talbot said the instruction was to pray on the mountain. The choice fell on El Cajas, the high grassland west of Cuenca, at about 3,550 m beside the highway to Molleturo. From June 1989 the apparitions came every Thursday and Saturday.

Talbot went into trance. The Virgin was said to speak through the seer. Only Talbot saw and heard her. A group of young people, the Guardianes de la Fe led by Gastón Ramírez, formed first to protect Talbot and then to spread the messages. Prayer. The Rosary. The Brown Scapular. Fasting. Service to the poor. Warnings of disasters to come.

The crowds reported something too. Notable movements of the sun, as at Fátima. Faces and hands that shone with "pequeñas escarchitas", little frost crystals. The scent of flowers. Talbot counted more than 100 apparitions across 18 months. The last came on 3 March 1990. Devotional sources say about 115,000 people attended. One later report places the largest gathering in August 1990, with tens of thousands.

The bishops kept their distance. The Ecuadorian Episcopal Conference reportedly called it "psicosis colectiva", collective psychosis. In 2000 its president, Mons. Mario Ruiz, said those involved "are certainly not responsible to the Christian community." A church spokesperson offered a gentler line: "Between lie and truth there is also the possibility of being deceived."

Yet devotion endured, and on 1 May 2000 Archbishop Vicente Cisneros Durán approved the Asociación María Madre Guardiana de la Fe, not the apparitions. A sanctuary was set up on 8 December 2002. A summary of the messages received an imprimatur in March 2009. On 28 August 2013, Archbishop Luis Gerardo Cabrera crowned the image. Today it is an archdiocesan sanctuary, a place of prayer without a categorical pronouncement on the supernatural.

2000. About ten years on, sound engineer Hugo Rekalde spoke to Vistazo magazine. On the recordings, Talbot's voice and then Mary's voice came from different sources. Rekalde concluded the Virgin's voice was dubbed by means of a recording system. Rekalde had also filmed a trance. According to Rekalde, the footage shows a person removing a recording player from Talbot's coat and subtly handing the tape to someone else to hide. The newspaper Hoy reported that a technical study, never made public, had apparently influenced the end of the apparitions. No reply from Talbot appears in the record. Talbot married Andrés Vega in 1991 and later took a vow of silence, withdrawing from public life.

The explanations range from deliberate fraud to mass suggestion to a seer sincerely deceived. Sister Isabel Bettwy published a devotional book of messages and witness accounts in 1991. Pilgrims still climb to El Cajas on first Saturdays.