Our Lady has gone green. Having previously touched base with the Irish people in the guise of man-made statues, the Mother of God has gone back to nature for her latest apparition by taking the form of a tree stump. It’s the ultimate means of supernatural communication for the environmentalist age: a trunk call.

Despite this concession to trendy modernity, however, the veneration of the Virgin of Rathkeale is actually a throwback to the primitive infancy of our species. What’s alarming about this pitiful tale of mass delusion is that so many apparently sane people see it as a good news story, a ray of hope in troubled times. In reality, it’s the exact opposite.

Last Monday, workmen clearing trees in the grounds of St Mary’s church in the Limerick town were taken aback by the “funny shape” revealed when they cut through the base of an 80-year-old willow. While some of the lumberjacks simply chuckled at the curious configuration of growth rings, others believed they were witnessing a vision of the Virgin Mary. Word spread like Dutch elm disease and, within days, hundreds of pilgrims were visiting what’s become a revered shrine.

When media sniggering subsided, much of the commentary centred on the similarities between last week’s events and the moving statues hysteria which gripped a sizable swathe of the populace during the summer of 1985. Then, as now, the country was enduring chronic recession. Unemployment was mounting and self-confidence was ebbing way. Genuine fear stalked the land.

However, it’s a grievous mistake to accept that rampant religious mania is an inevitable public reaction to economic adversity. For it to happen, there must be a potent force in the culture that actively promotes a mystical solution to recessionary travails. Unfortunately, such a force is alive and kicking, and spoiling for a comeback.

Since the onset of the economic collapse, senior Catholic clerics and pious political worthies, including President Mary McAleese, have vigorously promoted the notion that Ireland’s ills can be cured by a return to old-style religion. Not surprisingly, more than one devotee of the stumpy Virgin has hailed it as “Our Lady’s way of bringing people back to the church”.

The moving statues fiasco vividly illustrated the alarming speed with which religious hysteria of this kind can spread. The most famous icon of 1985 was the Virgin of Ballinspittle, Co Cork, which attracted more than 200,000 visitors at the height of its career. And the phenomenon became much more widespread. Large crowds also gathered at Mount Melleray in Waterford where three children claimed a Virgin had descended from her pedestal to announce that God was angry with the world. Thousands also knelt before moving statues at sites in Wexford, Limerick and other parts of Cork.

The craze actually began in the Kerry village of Asdee. On February 14 that year, four schoolchildren said they saw statues of Jesus and Mary moving in their local church. Significantly, Asdee is located near the epicentre of the 1984 Kerry Babies scandal, a shocking saga of concealed pregnancies and dead infants that rocked cosy assumptions about the godliness of Catholic Ireland in a similar way to the recent Ryan Report into clerical child abuse. In the fevered imaginations of some believers, the scene is set for another admonitory celestial intervention.

The Catholic hierarchy has dismissed devotion to the holy stump as mere “superstition” — far removed from the rationality-based doctrines in which the clergy trades, apparently. Nobody in the church seems inclined to accept responsibility for peddling the apocalyptic propaganda that often incites hysterical hallucinations of this kind.

What we’re left with, therefore, is a field full of indoctrinated sheep without a shepherd, a flock of self-deceiving unfortunates who can no longer see the wood for the magic trees.

Scientologists will be lucky to rake in farmer's cash

No matter how muddy their boots may end up, farmers at this summer’s agricultural shows will have no trouble getting their brains washed. Highly skilled at cultivating a cash crop of followers in unlikely quarters, Scientologists are reportedly targeting farming fairs in their efforts to flog Dianetics, the cod-counselling system devised by L. Ron Hubbard to clean out the souls and wallets of the gullible.

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