By Anne W. Semmes
For the last three months Rob Barricelli, the decades-serving residential counselor of Pathways in Greenwich has been carrying around in his head and in his heart an apparition he found on his iPhone.
Rob is a man of faith with a propensity to stop by a Catholic church to pray – this time at St. Michael’s Church on North Street. He was on his way home to his family up north after a day of work on New Year’s Day. “I was driving from Pathways towards the highway,” he tells. “It’s 6:15 at night and I noticed that all the lights are off in the church, but the offertory candles were still lit.”
Rob enters the foyer of the church, where a painted statue of the Virgin Mary stands by the entrance to the church’s main sanctuary. “It was actually a feast day for Mary – the solemnity of Mary,” he tells, “in the Catholic faith a holy day of obligation.” Rob’s devotion for Mary goes back to his childhood. “I always used to talk to Mary, like I’m talking to you, because I was always very upset that my mother was taken from me [at age four]. And then my father eight years later…And I prayed all the time, and I cried a lot. And I had seven older brothers.”
Rob finds the candle-lit entryway “just beautiful.” And this particular night he was exhausted, he tells. “There was a lot going on that I was dealing with. And I started talking to Mary. I’m on my knees.” He’s praying for a good family friend who was in the hospital with COVID who was kind to him in his childhood. “I was lighting a candle for her asking Mary if she could not pass away in the hospital with nobody near her.”
But then, his prayers turn once again to his loss of his mother and how he never got to know her. He’s asking Mary for strength “to get through life,” he says, “like the strength my mother gave my father. He said the Rosary every morning to give him strength to raise six sons by himself. And I too am devoted to the Rosary.”
After 20 minutes of praying Rob pulls himself together – he’s got to make that long drive home. But with all that candlelit beauty around him he has to take a few pictures with his iPhone, including that statue of Mary.
Rob gets home to his family, “And now it’s three hours later…we’re watching TV, the kids are in bed. And I’m just looking at my pictures.” The one of the statue of Mary he does not recognize. “I’ve got 20 pictures in my iPhone of that same statue,” he says, “And they all look like this,” he shows them to me. “But on January 1, her feast day, she lifted her head and she looked at me, and I didn’t notice it until I got home.”
Sitting in a pew of St. Michael’s where Rob recently shared his story, he shows the former photograph of Mary, then shows me the photo with that different Mary, with the date and time, January 1, 6:53 p.m. Rob has shared that apparition photo to scores of people. “I showed it to Father Murphy at St. Michaels,” tells Rob. “He actually looked at it 15 times and said, this is absolutely remarkable.”
Rob is no stranger to apparitions of the Virgin Mary that have appeared in the world. But the one that appeared in Egypt, in a district outside of Cairo called Zeitoun, Rob calls “the number one apparition in the entire planet ever, on top of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima.” He discovered it 25 years ago in a TV documentary and has done some serious research on it over the years.
Found online on Wikipedia and elsewhere, that Mary apparition that includes the Holy Family reportedly appeared countless times in the years 1968 to 1971 atop St. Mary’s Coptic Church and is cited as the most witnessed apparition in the 20th century. The church location is said to be where the Holy Family stopped on their flight to Egypt to escape King Herod’s murder of the innocents.
After finding some updated articles on that apparition Rob has been sharing that updated story with friends and others. “I want to preach this from the mountaintops,” he shares, “for all those doubting Thomases out there.” There were conversions “of people dropping to their knees…and miracles that were performed.” And to everyone he has told – “high school, college educated, doctors, lawyers, they’re like, why hasn’t the world heard about this? It boggles my mind.” He tells them, “You’ve got to pray. You’ve got to have faith. She’s up there, she’s listening.”
So, did that Zeitoun apparition confirm his faith? No, he answers, “I didn’t need it to confirm my faith – that started when I was six.”
And how has that Virgin Mary apparition on his iPhone fed his faith? “It’s a confirmation, like the Egypt event is a confirmation. “I’m just thankful that in her own little way, she gave me a sign that she’s there. I know she came to me because she was consoling me because I was praying so hard.” But that consoling didn’t come until he got home. It was seeing Mary’s “neck straightened, and her eyes lifted, and her head lifted the second I took the picture,” he says. “And with the lighting, I didn’t even notice because I was praying so hard.”
“It’s pretty profound,” he says, “what has been bestowed upon me.”
“Everybody I’ve talked to who knows me,” he says, has told him, “It’s no wonder she came to you. Your devotion is just off the scale.” Every day he gets texts he says from people saying. “The story of your little miracle is still exploding all over.” “So, I’ve got friends and family that are sharing it with so many people. It’s been unbelievable.”
