Baking with the BVM

Big news in Houston this weekend: the Blessed Virgin Mary, that holy trickster known for showing up in all sorts of unexpected places, chose to make an appearance on a pizza pan in a local elementary school kitchen. It happened on Ash Wednesday when Guadalupe Rodriguez, a cafeteria worker at Pugh Elementary, was washing the pizza pan in question and noticed a stubborn stain. "On the third rinse I started watching it, trying to discover what it was," Rodriguez said. She eventually figured out that the spot formed the silhouette of the BVM; Rodriguez took the pan to her manager, Coralia Pacay, and school Principal Lyda Guerrero, who both said they saw the image.

Students saw the pan and told their parents, who showed up at Pugh wanting to see Mary, too. Pacay propped the pan up near the lunch line and more people came, including HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra. The general consensus: The pan was drawing so much attention that it needed to be moved. So the school gave the pan to the PTA, which displayed it on a makeshift shrine in member Sylvia Calderon's yard. Since then, Calderon's street has been overrun with pilgrims:

At dawn, one woman arrived at Calderon's home in the Denver Harbor neighborhood asking to see the Virgin's image before her 8-year-old son had surgery. That afternoon another woman came for a blessing bearing a picture of her grandson, who has cerebral palsy.

Scientists call this phenomenon religious pareidolia, when the eye sees religious images in objects such as tree trunks and grilled cheese sandwiches.

Believers say it's a miracle.

The stain on the pizza pan does sort of look like the silhouette of Mary, at least as she's traditionally depicted: in three-quarter view, head slightly downturned and covered by a shawl. Of course, the Pugh pizza pan is only the latest in a long line of Marian apparitions, some with a little more gravitas than others. But what's important to the people going to see the pan is that it means good things: "I think someone was watching over us," Guerrero told the Chronicle. "I think someone is watching over this community and this school district and this school."

(As the Chron reported yesterday, the only problem with the holy pizza pan was that, well, it was still a perfectly good pizza pan and cafeteria manager Pacay wanted it back. But Guerrero was able to step in and work out a deal to Rodriguez can keep the pan, which she plans to display on her own altar.)