Madonna
of Tears
29 August 1998
This
is the story of the Madonna della Lacrime, the Madonna of Tears. A Siracusan
family buys a little factory-made plaster plaque-relief of the Madonna
back in 1953. They hang it on the wall. The next morning the husband
goes off to work, after which the gypsum Madonna image starts crying,
at 8:30 a.m. on Aug 29, 1953. Wife calls husband. He comes home. They
marvel at the thing, a bit scared, and try to figure out what to do.
Relatives they call start coming over to see it and confer. Then neighbors
start arriving to see the miraculous Madonna (that'll teach them to
reveal secrets to nosy Sicilian relatives). Then strangers start showing
up at the door.
You can see where this is heading.
Within days, hordes are descending on the residential block in Siracusa.
The family lets them troop through their modest living room, pray, and
tramp out the back door. The local top prelate, at a loss for how to call
this one (genuine miracles in this century have been few and far between),
starts making phone calls. The town doctor and local pharmacist show up
as representatives of the world of detached authority figures.
The pharmacist performs perhaps the most common scientific test known
and announces that the water leaking from the Madonna's eyes tastes just
like human tears. (Careful kids, don't try this at home. It takes years
of pharmacology training in order to know how to lick salt water off a
chunk of plaster.) On the third day, a scientific team arrives in time
to take samples of the last tears to flow down the plaster Madonna's cheek.
She stops weeping at 11:40 a.m. on September 1, 1953.
The samples turn out to have the exact chemical composition of human tears,
and basic chemistry precludes that either gypsum or the paint on the relief
could have produced such a liquid. No longer weeping, the Madonna proceeds
to perform a whole passel of miracles of the curing-the-blind and healing-the-maimed
variety.
The little mass-produced plaque is quickly proclaimed a holy, miraculous
relic and Siracusa sets about building the requisite God-awful enormous
church to house it, across the street from the archeological museum. Recently
completed, the oversized shrine resembles nothing so much a giant alien
badminton birdie that landed out of bounds smack on a site that turned
out to be, as they dug the foundations, a temple to Demter and Kore/Persephone,
Sicily's oldest goddesses (lots of ancient devotional statuettes for the
Archaeology museum).
I, until this morning ignorant of all this history but knowing vaguely
that some Big Time miracle thingy from the 50s was cooling its holy heels
in that skyline-defining ice cream cone structure, decided to stop by
this morning on my way to the San Giovanni catacombs.
If you will kindly recall from a few paragraphs ago, the Madonna of the
Tears started weeping at 8:30 a.m. on Aug 29, 1953. Today is Aug 29.
I showed up at the church around 9am, and ran headlong into the Mass celebrating
the exact moment of the 45th anniversary of the miracle. The miraculous
Madonna plaque itself was in attendance, looking kind of funny and out
of place. Up at the altar was this itty bitty kitschy Christian cast-off,
mass produced to be placed above the mantle of people who are just a little
too religious.
And here it was, surrounded by legions of the faithful
in a structure built for it alone and that clearly follows the architectural
premise that if you pile cement high enough into the sky, God will notice.
There were grown-ups dressed like ersatz cub scouts passing 'round the
collection plates. Throngs filled the church. People wiped their hands
down their faces repeatedly as they prayed and moaned. Weird weird weird.
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