Maria Divine Mercy . . . New Ebook, Newspaper Coverage Focus Fresh Attention On Internet Seer

By DEXTER DUGGAN

An anonymous international Internet seer without ecclesiastical authorization apparently didn’t like it when an Irish Sunday newspaper publicized what seemed to be her name as February dawned.
Although “Maria Divine Mercy” (MDM) claims a direct line to God warning of the “end times,” she hadn’t revealed her own identity since she began presenting her apparently widely followed apocalyptic messages online in 2010.
The closest she came was during an interview with a Pennsylvania religious radio station in 2011, when she said she was an Irish mother of four from a Catholic background. Since then, she reportedly avoided revealing her voice.
The Wanderer wrote her up last year, in the May 29, 2014, issue, based on an interview with and material from “Mark Saseen,” the pseudonym of one of a team of international Catholic bloggers who researched her phenomenon.
Saseen, a U.S. citizen, met personally with The Wanderer, but said he didn’t want to focus attention on himself and take credit away from other bloggers who also had been contributing to the “Midway Street” blog (midwaystreet
.wordpress.com) about MDM.
After they brought out an ebook about the seer this January, The Outing of Mary Carberry, they caught the attention of one of the major Irish newspapers, the tabloid-size Mail on Sunday, which began its own investigation.
The result was coverage spread across two pages in its February 1 edition, including likely confirmation of the disclosure by Midway Street that the seer is well-known Dublin public-relations executive Mary Carberry, also known by her maiden name of Mary McGovern.
The Mail on Sunday, which also goes by its acronym MoS, wrote that it recorded brief remarks by Carberry when she brushed off an offer for an interview by its reporter, then it turned that recording over to an expert forensic audio analyst, who compared the voice with the one on the Pennsylvania radio interview in 2011.
Noting that the two recordings were made in different formats and circumstances, MoS said the audio analyst “reports that the accents, spacing, and pacing of words and deliberate pronunciations are all identical.”
Using biometric voice-recognition software for secondary identification, MoS said, its expert found “a positive match. His conclusion is ‘the unknown voice matches that of the known voice beyond 90 percent degree of scientific certainty’.”
Although MoS’s package of MDM stories and photos in the February 1 edition was on two facing pages inside the paper, Carberry dominated most of the MoS front page the following Sunday, February 8, with the banner headline “A Sellout” and a security camera’s photo of her going out a shop door with her arms loaded with copies of the February 1 issue.
Inside the February 8 paper were photos of Carberry at other shops as well, carrying away all the February 1 copies they could sell her.
MoS attributed her action to trying to prevent readers from seeing the coverage. “The story this woman doesn’t want you to read,” proclaimed large type on the front page. “PR guru linked to Maria Divine Mercy buys up hundreds of Irish Mail on Sundays after we expose doomsday sect. More pictures inside.”
The National Newspapers of Ireland website gives the MoS circulation as 100,151 hardcopy issues in the first six months of 2014, in addition to online traffic.
Although trying to purchase the entire press run that Sunday morning was well beyond the realm of possibility, MoS reported that Carberry purchased “all copies…in several towns across north Dublin last week.”
This two-page spread of security-camera photos accompanying the story was headlined, “Give me ALL of the newspapers.”
MoS investigations editor Michael O’Farrell wrote that the paper learned a woman had turned up at shops soon after they opened, saying she needed every copy and giving “an assortment of reasons . . . including that she wanted to avail of a promotion in the newspaper, and that she was involved in a charity featured in the paper.”
One shop worker told of carrying copies out to the car for her and finding the trunk full, and the back seat full up to the roof, O’Farrell wrote.
Although some readers may have missed the story in the paper, MoS said, a Dublin national talk-radio host, Joe Duffy, picked up on the topic for three days, inviting MDM to come on the air to talk about her identity, but receiving no response.
The newspaper said that when Carberry declined its interview, she referred to “Internet trolls who are trying to destroy my life because of a job I did for somebody,” without being more specific.
MoS, the “Midway Street” blog, and the ebook The Outing of Mary Carberry all report on Carberry’s connections with business enterprises selling MDM material, including a “Medal of Salvation” whose possession is said to guarantee entry to Heaven.
The ebook can be accessed for free at the Midway Street site.

What Can We Learn?

In a February 8 email to The Wanderer, responding to a request for comment, Midway Street blogger and researcher Saseen said:
“It is impossible to project how successful MDM would have been, and for how long, were it not for the work of the team of researchers that I am a part of. Truly, no one person could have managed the thousands of hours of web-based research uncovering the complexity of links associated with this . . . enterprise.
“There is probably a 30-year spread in our ages. We are single, married, parents, grandparents. We are all practicing Catholics who joined ranks with one objective: What can we learn about the secret seer who uses the name Maria Divine Mercy that would authenticate her ‘visions’? We never dreamed what we ultimately uncovered,” Saseen said.
“Nine Catholic bishops and the Slovakian Conference of Bishops have issued public condemnations of the seer, including her own Dublin bishop,” he said. “While other U.S. Catholic publications have addressed the non-theology of MDM’s messages, The Wanderer [in the May 29, 2014, issue] was the first to identify her by name, now verified by science!
“The book and the new media attention must be upsetting to MDM and her handlers. Will she persist? For sure, my research team will not stop until Carberry puts down her pen and fades into the ‘sunset of forgotten visionaries’,” Saseen said.
After MoS tackled the issue, Saseen said, “a major Catholic journalist and author, Michael Hesemann, wrote a lengthy article citing my book and O’Farrell’s articles at a major German Catholic website, kath.net. Hesemann previously wrote on Maria Divine Mercy at kath.net in November 2013 shortly after my website, Midway Street, went online.
“It was Hesemann’s November 2013 article that helped push Carberry’s German business partner, Heinrich Martin Roth, to issue a 30-page ‘rant’ on his website in February 2014 responding to charges against Carberry. By addressing our research, Roth had to confess to the identity of the woman who . . . only admitted to being a European business woman with children,” Saseen said.
Although the ebook is a useful compilation of the MDM story, much of its information isn’t appearing for the first time. “Only about 20 percent of the book is new information,” Saseen said. “The rest previously appeared at Midway Street and other sites exposing the false visionary. Among new information is a handwritten letter received from William Kamm, an Australian ‘seer,’ admitting to involvement with Mary Carberry.”