Visionary has double vision of Virgin Mary

Joe Coleman claims to get messages from the mother of the son of the creator of the universe. People who believe him have damaged their eyes by staring into the sun. Last Friday Coleman was on RTE’s Late Late Show, promoting a book about his alleged visions. But his stories while being interviewed do not match up to what he has written in his book.

Let’s start with page one of chapter one. Coleman says he had his first apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the age of twelve, when he was looking at a picture of her in his grandmother’s house. Now, you would imagine that such a momentous event would be indelibly imprinted on his memory. But you would be mistaken.

In his book, Coleman describes the event as “a scene of utter silence” in which the image of Mary seemed to float towards him in a hazy cloud, then beamed at him with a beautiful smile, and “then it was over just as quickly as it had begun.”

But on the Late Late Show, Coleman says “She told me she was my blessed mother, and I was going to work for her in years to come, and I have to prepare myself”. When Ryan Tubridy volunteers the phrase “She said brace yourself”, Coleman replies “She said brace yourself, my child. It was the first time she called me my child. She said, you have come back to the earth, you have to work for me, but I didn’t understand that, because I didn’t even know who she was.”

So, based on his Late Late Show interview, Coleman believes the image of the Virgin Mary told him specific things when she first appeared to him, things that were central to his later role as a messenger of her visions. Yet he fails to mention any of these comments in his book. Instead, he specifically describes “a scene of utter silence” in which the apparition smiles at him and “then it was over just as quickly as it had begun.”

This leaves three broad possibilities: (a) while writing, revising and editing the first page of chapter one of a book about being visited by the mother of the son of the creator of the universe, Joe Coleman forgot that she had told him these very important things; or (b) he remembered that she had told him these things, but thought this too trivial to include in his book; or (c) he is making up or embellishing his stories as he goes along.

I know which option I am leaning towards.

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