A dramatic final act for a famous local tree

It’s unlikely that the Roman Catholic Church would agree, but neighbors of a tree locally famous as a site for visions of the Virgin Mary declare that it met a miraculous end.

That thick pecan tree in southeast Opelousas crashed to earth during Tuesday night’s windy thunderstorms. It narrowly missed nearby houses, including one where a woman lives with six children.

“Had we been in bed, it would have hit me and my two daughters,” said Carla Johnson, who lives on Larry Street. The tree removed a few roof tiles and crushed part of the wooden backyard fence. Johnson said she felt lucky to be able to talk about it.

She and her family heard the tree fall shortly after 7 p.m. “The house rumbled. I thought it was a tornado,” she said. “I grabbed my kids and we were running.”

A call to one of her sons visiting a few houses away confirmed that the tree had toppled.

Decades ago — in different stretches of the 1970s and 1990s — that tree drew crowds of people who claimed to see the mother of Christ in its branches. The visions generated national headlines and local memories.

“I remember people coming here after work every day,” said Hugh Richard, whose mother lives on nearby Nash Street. He recalled that cars lined the streets in his neighborhood, “some from out of the state.

“They’d try to view the Blessed Mother in the tree. My sister did and my brother did,” he said. “I didn’t.”

In general, the Catholic Church discounts sightings like this unless and until its own investigations verify that they were real.

Even when the Vatican declares what it calls a “Marian apparition” worthy of belief, as it has at Fatima, Portugal and Lourdes, France, these beliefs are not considered central to church doctrine.

Whether or not the apparitions were true matters little to Theresa Thibodeaux, who lives a few houses from the fallen tree.

The former nurse turned real estate manager has lived on the block 16 years, not long enough to have witnessed the throngs who claimed to have seen visions in the tree.

Still, she said, “based on the stories of the ’70s and the ’90s, the Blessed Mother saved these people.”

Before Tuesday night, Thibodeaux said, she and her neighbors have never worried that it would fall.

Standing alongside the root structure she and Richard measured as 9-by-12 feet, she remembered, “That tree rode many a storm. In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve only had to pick up only one limb. Not a big one.

“I’ve always thought it was sacred,” she added Thibodeaux, a lifelong Catholic. “The end of that story is that the lives of so many people have been spared. It had to have been a miracle.”

Johnson hesitated to use that word. The last set of visions happened when she was in high school, and her shrug suggested that sightings of the Virgin Mary didn’t mean much to her back then.

“I wish I could see her now,” she said as the massive tree rested mere feet from her home. “I’m on my spiritual journey. That’s where my life is now.”