The Curious Case Of The Weeping Statue Mary

By Sandra Perry


Many urban legends have stemmed out about the crying statue of mother Mary. A lot of people would say that it is the work of some sort of supernatural force while the Catholic church would call it a miracle on earth. Despite all of this though, it is very interesting to look into the overall story of the weeping statue mary to know whether this is fact or fiction.

While there have been many reported cases of crying statues for many years. However, one of the earliest documented case was sometime in the early fifties in a church in Sicily. It is a relic of the holy Virgin Mother inside a church in Siracusa wherein the relic was seen to have started crying exactly in 1953.

Many onlookers captured the act on camera and spread the news. This resulted in a lot of controversies wherein people were saying it was a hoax. Followers, on the other hand, were quick to say that there was a message from Heaven or some sort of divine intervention that was being shown.

Now, the spreading of this case prompted many other cases to pop out as well, although the 1953 case was the only case accepted by the church. One example was an incident that happened during 2004 in a church in Brisbane. According to the report, the mother mary figure inside bled and emitted scented oil. The church that housed the miraculous statue was the Inala Vietnamese Catholic Centre.

Naturally, there were also some people tried to look for a logical explanation to solve the problem. One such person was a chemist from the University of Pavia named Dr Luigi Garlaschelli. What he did was that he tried to replicate the statue of the virgin mother and tried to see the possible ways for water to come out of the eyes without anyone inducing it.

What he did is he created a figure made out of thin plaster which was coated with impermeable glazing. According to Garlaschelli, the material absorbs moisture except when there are scratches or holes in the thin plaster. If ever the plaster in the eyes have scratches, then the moisture that was absorbed would seep out of the eyes giving the illusion that the statue is crying.

As for the one in the Brisbane church, the Archbishop Bathersby already concluded that it was not a miracle made by the supernatural but rather, were man made. First, he concluded that the scented oil was a scented oil that could be bought in any store and applied by someone on said figure. He also concluded that the red substance was not blood. Finally, his team also discovered that there were small holes in the eyes in which liquids could be injected.

While the Brisbane incident was pretty much proven to be a hoax, the Sicily incident was never concluded by Garlaschelli. The original crying holy mother was already locked away in the church and was not to be touch by anyone except staffed authorized. With that, Garlaschelli could only give a possible scientific explanation for the phenomenon but not a concrete one since he could never examine the actual figure.




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