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.

In order to know more about the phenomenon, it is crucial to look at one of the first cases. Probably the earliest documented one was in a church in Siracusa, Sicily sometime during the year 1953. According to the reports, the Virgin Mother statue cried tears straight from her eyes for everyone in the vicinity to see.

This prompted a lot of followers to witness the phenomenon and even video taped while it was happening. Due to this leaking, there were many unsolved questions that were popping up as to why this happened in the first place. Of course, the more hardcore followers believed that it was a sign of faith and that God was trying to speak to them through divine intervention.

This was not the only isolated case though as there was another popular case that popped up in Brisbane in the year 2004. This one involved religious figures inside the Inala Vietnamese Catholic Centre. According to the case, the Holy Mother figure bled a red substance that looked like blood and scented oil. Aside from these two, there were many more cases that popped out.

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.

He made his statue out of a plaster material that had a glazing that could absorb liquids. After that, he tried making some scratches and small holes in the eyes area of his figure. He was able to discover that when there is a crack in the plaster, there is a high chance that the liquid absorbed by the thin plaster would come out and make the figure look like it 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.

As one can see, the Brisbane incident was proven to be a fake, manmade phenomenon. However, the case of Garlaschelli couldn't really be proven because he was never able to make any tests on the original figure as it is locked up in the said Sicily church. What he has is only a possible phenomenon that could explain the strange occurrence of the crying virgin mother figure in the fifties.




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