The Scottsdale Visionaries, St. Maria Goretti Parish

September 1987. Scottsdale, Arizona. Gianna Talone, a clinical pharmacist born in Phoenix in 1957, dreamed of Our Lady three nights in a row. Then she saw a young woman, who prayed over her. "The mysterious woman smiled and then disappeared, without saying a word." The visions continued for several days.

Her parish was St. Maria Goretti, about 2,500 families by 1993, and said to have formed one of the first US prayer groups devoted to the Medjugorje messages. In 1988 the pastor, Fr. Jack Spaulding, led a pilgrimage to Medjugorje. Talone went with 97 other parishioners. There she reported hearing the Blessed Mother's voice and seeing Jesus "as an infant."

Back home, she told her priest she had seen, in a vision, other young parishioners who would become visionaries and locutionists. They did report mystical experiences. The 2017 New Times essay calls them "a chosen group of nine young adults and youth ministers from the parish," six of them women. Spaulding began receiving what he described as ongoing locutions from Jesus and Mary. Our Lady appeared under the title Our Lady of Joy.

From the late summer of 1988, Talone received "lessons" from Jesus, later published as I Am Your Jesus of Mercy. The theme was prayer and conversion. "Prayer basically doesn't change God's mind at all," Spaulding told the Associated Press in 1993. "It changes our hearts."

Then the crowds came. Hundreds, by one account. Thousands of pilgrims from around the world, by another. In 1991 Jeanette Welch and Delphia Thomas leased a bus and took 43 Utahns to the parish. "They came back with hearts full of joy and peace," Thomas said. At the meetings, Jesus and Mary were said to speak through Spaulding. The visionaries were described in a "trance-like ecstatic state."

R. Bradley Snyder was a youth minister and janitor at the parish. In a wry 2017 memoir he recalled the new 8-foot-tall bronze statue of Mary on the altar. "Celestial beams of green, orange, and yellow light would fan out from behind the tall, bronze figure." The statue, he wrote, would take human form.

In 1989 Bishop Thomas J. O'Brien of Phoenix appointed a commission led by Fr. Ernest Larkin, a Carmelite theologian. Larkin said it did not believe the messages were hoaxes. "We simply maintain that there is not enough evidence to say that these are miracles."

January 8, 1990. The bishop gave his statement. "The commission concluded that the messages (locutions) are explainable within the range of ordinary human experience." Whether they were miraculous in the strict sense, it could not know for certain. The prayer meetings were not banned. Spaulding called the investigation "absolutely crazy." Robert Faricy and Lucy Rooney disagreed from the other side. Their 1991 book, Our Lady Comes to Scottsdale: Is It Authentic?, found the events "authentic."

In early 1991 Talone's husband, Michael Bianchi, left her and filed for divorce. The circle began to disintegrate. In November 1992 she met physician Michael Sullivan. At a private apparition, she says, the Virgin told her: "Allow me to introduce you to your husband." They married in January 1993 and moved east to Emmitsburg, Maryland. Her later messages there were judged not supernatural.

Most of the nine, Snyder recalls, "got married, became street musicians, started families, and became professors." Journalist Randall Sullivan closed The Miracle Detective, his roughly eight-year investigation, in Scottsdale. His publisher called it the "site of America's largest and most controversial instances of Virgin Mary sightings."