As good Bavarian Catholics, Gretl Gugel and Antonie Saam, both 11, and ten-year-old Marie Heilmann were much inspired by the movie The Song of Bernadette. They talked about the miraculous appearance of the Virgin at Lourdes as they walked home to the small village of Heroldsbach (pop. 1,100) where they lived. Suddenly one of them let out a scream. As they described it later, first she, then the others, saw a light and a vision of the Virgin. "Mother Mary came to us," they told their parents when they got home.
Heroldsbach's pious farmers believed them. Led by Father Johannes Gailer, 65, the village pastor, they marched to the hillside spot the children described. A few days later, two other children ran home to describe similar visions. Soon people from neighboring towns began flocking to the new holy place.
Within six months Heroldsbach was famous. Pious sightseers (more than 1,500,000 in two years) poured in by the thousands in buses and special trains. Ornate shrines sprouted on the hillside. Pilgrims carrying crosses made daily processions through the town. As the crowds got bigger, the children added to their visions.
Soon they could see Christ and a galaxy of saints on any clear night. The hillside was equipped with floodlights, and a public address system was installed to broadcast reports of the visions to the waiting crowds. Pilgrims contributed heavily for the shrines and other local improvements urged by the "vision children" on "instructions" which the Virgin passed on to them. Packed inns and crowded souvenir shops lifted Heroldsbach's 1,100 inhabitants to a wild zenith of prosperity.
An investigating committee sent from Bamberg by Archbishop Joseph Otto Kolb had some harsh things to say about the "vision children," whose stories were muddled and contradictory. The latest vision child, 17-year-old Hildegard Lang, had even scheduled her daily visions promptly at 3, 5 and 7. In May 1950, the archbishop declared that the visions were not supernatural and forbade Catholics to participate in the hillside rites.
The burghers of Heroldsbach were not easily convinced. When a priest from Bamberg read a papal condemnation of the visions from Heroldsbach's pulpit, he was shouted down by the villagers. The church proceeded slowly against the visionists. But when they kept organizing processions, the archbishop excommunicated 22 of the leaders.
Last week the law stepped in. A German civil court brought ten prominent visionists to trial, charged them with extracting contributions under false pretenses. A court order authorized police to destroy the hillside shrines for violations of the building code.