Police in this northern Italian town are investigating the case of a statue of the Virgin Mary which reportedly wept tears of blood last week.
A group of elderly lady worshippers first noticed that red tear-like drops had appeared on the face of the statue in the town's Santa Lucia Church.
The news of a possible miracle was reported to the local bishop who immediately removed the figure, replacing it with a similar one, and called the police. The 1.2-metre-high statue of the Madonna looking up to heaven, her hands drawn together in prayer, has not wept since it was moved to the bishop's offices.
"We heard the news from the parish priest, who was told about it by some of the faithful," said Monsignor Franco Zaghini, the clergyman who is overseeing the case. "The bishop went to the church and saw the situation was not normal and that things had to be checked."
Police experts are running tests on the statue to determine the nature of the 'teardrops'. "It's a delicate, complex situation in which you cannot afford to make mistakes, both from a scientific point of view and in terms of an eventual crime regarding (the abuse of) people's credulity," Zaghini added.
The number of reported cases of Madonna appearances and of statues moving or weeping has grown in recent years and
the Vatican has become extremely cautious about giving its seal of approval.
One case which caused a commotion in the Italian Church revolved around a Madonna statue which started weeping tears of blood in 1995. The 43-cm-high statue belonged to a family who had placed it in the garden of their home in Civitavecchia, north of Rome.
Reports that it was weeping attracted a whirlwind of media attention and thousands of visitors eager to see the miraculous statue. Excitement rose to a peak when the local bishop said he too had seen it cry tears of blood. But the Italian bishop's conference later took the matter out of the bishop's hands and the Vatican subsequently avoided making any pronouncement on the authenticity of the plaster Virgin's tears.
In the wake of the Madonna of Civitavecchia, dozens of statues were reported to be weeping all over the country. Practically all were shown to be copycat cases of people splashing red paint on the cheeks of statues or surreptitiously throwing water on their faces.
In September the Catholic Church said that tears of blood found on a statue of Saint (Padre) Pio in the southern Italian town of Marsicovetere were not a miraculous act of God.
All this is a far cry from the 1950s when a 'weeping' Madonna in a Sicilian house was deemed a miracle. Pope John Paul II consecrated a shrine devoted to her in 1994.
