c. 2000 Religion News Service

PERTH AMBOY, N.J. _ To some it’s just a trick of the light. To others it’s a miracle.

For everyone else in the neighborhood, it may end up being a big headache.

A splash of color that some say resembles the Virgin Mary has appeared in the window of a Perth Amboy house, drawing thousands of believers and curiosity-seekers and nearly overwhelming a small working-class neighborhood.

The first spectators started trickling in late last week as word of the apparent vision spread. This week thousands were pouring in from all over New Jersey, snapping pictures, saying prayers and filing through the split-level home of the Collado family to lay their hands on the cracked pane of glass.

At one point police erected barricades to keep the visitors corralled on the sidewalks, but the crowds grew so large that police closed the entire block Monday afternoon.

Neither the crowded streets nor the damp chill of an early fall day were enough to dissuade believers convinced that they were seeing God’s handiwork in a window.

“When I first looked at it I just saw a smeared window,” said Deborah Bartok, 50, of Manville. “But when I focused in on the window, I could actually see a face. I could feel something open up inside my chest, I just can’t describe it.”

Isaura Collado knows how she feels. The 24-year-old, whose mother lives in the home, was the first to see the image.

She said it appeared about a week earlier in the same second-floor window that her 38-year-old brother, Ramon Collado, had fallen from 11/2 years earlier after a bout of drinking. The fall left him paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair.

“I thought my mother put some picture in the window,” Isaura Collado said.

Ramon Collado remains paralyzed, she said, but Isaura Collado knew the image in the window was a sign of the miraculous. “Oh my God, I couldn’t believe it,” she said.

Like many in the heavily Hispanic neighborhood, the Collados are devout Catholics, and the second-story room where the image appeared has long been adorned with paintings of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

Now it is even more elaborate, accented with memorial candles and flowers left by visitors, many of whom say they can discern an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe accompanied by a smaller figure of Juan Diego, the Mexican boy to whom the mother of Jesus reportedly appeared in a famous episode in the 16th century.

Marian apparitions have become almost regular events around the country in recent years, some of them hugely popular. But while local Catholic officials so far have declined to comment on the Perth Amboy image, recent history suggests that authorities at the Diocese of Metuchen are going to give the pane a close examination before giving it their imprimatur.

Catholic leaders have become increasingly sensitive to the charges of sensationalism that often accompany claims of visions and apparitions, and today they generally prefer to encourage other, more traditional forms of devotion and popular piety.

“The church would approach it with extreme caution and be very careful in making any pronouncements,” said Bill Ryan, a spokesman for the Catholic Bishops Conference in Washington, D.C.

Already a few visitors could be seen handing money to the Collados, and though most did not _ “We don’t want money,” insisted Isaura Collado _ church authorities grow uneasy at the notion of someone cashing in on people’s beliefs.

In addition, bishops are alert to the sensibilities of neighborhoods that in some cases have been nearly overwhelmed by crowds when rumors of an alleged miracle get out.

In Perth Amboy, just a few days of crowds already have some neighbors denouncing the apparition as more a curse than a blessing.

“It’s a nightmare,” said Abner Velazquez, who lives a few doors from the Collado house. “I’ve swept the front of my house 1,000 times since last night.”

Velazquez complained that the crowds have left his property littered with debris and clogged parking spaces for blocks. “The cops should put a ladder up there, get some Windex and see if it’s real or not. This is unbearable,” he said.

Experts say the image is likely nothing more than a common light phenomenon known as “interference.”

Tad Pryor, an associate professor of astronomy at Rutgers University, said that if the window is double-paned, as it appears to be, a plastic coating between the two panes could cause light waves to interfere with each other and emit a ribbon of colors.

He said the same phenomenon is responsible for rainbowlike reflections on soap bubbles, or on a drop of oil in water.

DEA END LANE