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Leaning Toward a Conclusion

Two years after the first reports that a statue of the Virgin Mary was shedding tears of blood, the bishop of Civitavecchia has concluded a theological inquiry, and found no evidence of trickery or hypnosis. Now he awaits a pronouncement from Rome.

On February 2, 1995--the feast of the Presentation--a 6-year-old Italian girl named Jessica was playing outside her family home in Civitavecchia, a town on Mediterranean coast about 50 miles north of Rome. Between two pathways in the yard, in a little stone grotto, stood a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Jessica's father, Fabio Gregori, a relatively obscure worker at a large Italian industrial concern, had built this little backyard shrine with his own hands. The statue--which had been brought to him from Medjugorge by Father Pablo Martin Santiago, the Spanish priest who serves at the local parish, San Agostino--had a special significance in his life.

Fabio Gregori, like many of the inhabitants of Civitavecchia, had left the practice of the Catholic faith to become a Jehovah's Witness. But Father Pablo--by the force of his prayer, his witness, and his personality--had brought the Gregori family back into the Catholic fold. As a sign of welcome to the family returning to the Church, he had given them this statue: a white stone figure about 16 inches high.

The statue in itself appeared unremarkable. But on that memorable day, Jessica's shout ripped through the quiet of a Saturday afternoon: "Papa, papa! The Madonna is weeping!"

Jessica's parents rushed out, and they too saw tears of blood welling out of the statue's eyes, and running slowly down its cheeks.

The news of their discovery had an electric effect. First their neighbors rushed to see the statue; they were soon followed by the local police, who were called by Fabio Gregori to help control the crowd. A steady parade of curiosity-seekers trooped through the yard of the Gregori home, until finally Fabio--thoroughly exhausted by the constant attention, and near the point of collapse--decided that he must find another safe place for the statue.

The bishop of Civitavecchia, Girolamo Grillo, had been quickly apprised of the news about the weeping statue, and made no effort to conceal his skepticism. He pointed out that the region had been troubled for years by rumors of supernatural occurrences--and, more troubling, by reports that some local residents were participating in Satanic rituals. With a reputation for being a very sober, rational man himself, the bishop carefully distanced himself from these spectacular new reports.

But Bishop Grillo could not escape involvement in the story of the weeping statue. On February 10, the doorbell rang at the bishop's residence. It was Fabio Gregori, carrying a small package. Gregori, in his desire to find a safe place for the statue, had been unable to think of anywhere better than the bishop's own home. The bishop reluctantly accepted the gift. But if he thought the story would end there, he was sorely mistaken.

Barely one month later, on March 15, the bishop was celebrating Mass in his private chapel for a small congregation, made up of his sister, his nephew, and two Romanian nuns. Bishop Grillo recalls the drama:

In a moment, the bishop's position was overthrown. He had been drawn, reluctantly, into the search to explain an extraordinary phenomenon. Now suddenly he was no longer just the judge; he was one of the 60 witnesses who reported seeing the tears of blood.

Ordinarily Bishop Grillo might have been inclined to discuss his remarkable experience. But even before that fateful day in his chapel, he had received a clear directive from the Vatican, cautioning him to proceed quietly and to avoid any public declarations about the phenomenon.

The bishop would break his silence on one notable occasion. On April 5, 1995, he was interviewed on an Italian television newscast. Before an audience estimated in the millions, Grillo recalled how "on March 15, I saw the tears running down to the foot of the statue."

Bishop Grillo explained that he had brought his experiences to public attention in order to curb public attacks on the owner of the statue, Fabio Gregori. Very soon after the first manifestations of the phenomenon, Gregori had been accused of engaging in an elaborate hoax.

In context, those accusations were anything but outlandish. In Italy, there were at least ten different reports of weeping statues during the first three months of 1995. The newspapers seemed constantly to be full of photos of weeping Madonnas; in one case, there were three separate stories on consecutive days in March. Ordinarily, these reports were soon debunked, either because there were no reliable witnesses to the alleged phenomena, or because investigators discovered a very human (and usually not very subtle) explanation.

In Civitavecchia, two different groups arose to question Gregori's credibility. Threatened even with legal charges for falsifying evidence, Gregori was forced to hire a lawyer to defend him.

The public case against Gregori naturally led to investigations of the statute itself. A variety of experts were called in to examine the Madonna, to analyze the blood found on the statue, and to examine the stone itself in excruciating detail.

All across Italy, self-styled experts offered their own explanations for the weeping Madonnas. One laboratory showed a television audience how the phenomenon could be staged, by injecting a statue with a chemical compound which then reappeared some time later, through no power more mysterious than condensation. Several newspapers published scientific explanations of how the same result could be arranged: an ingenious variety of schemes involving microscopic secretions and remote-control mechanisms.

However, while the media were engaged in testing these hypotheses, technicians were finishing their examination of Fabio Gregori's statue. There was no trace of any mechanism in the body of the marble statue, they reported. The blood which had been found on the statue was indeed the blood of a human--in fact, a male.

Now the cry arose for Fabio Gregori to submit a sample of his blood, to be compared with what was found on the statue. But on the advice of his lawyer, Gregori refused. Was he simply trying to avoid self-incrimination? Gregori answered his detractors:

The "theological commission" to which Gregori referred had been set up by Bishop Grillo, to work alongside the civil investigation. The bishop had brought in a group of eleven experts, led by Father René Laurentin, to conduct an interdisciplinary study of the affair.

Once his commission had taken some samples of the blood from the statue, Bishop Grillo decided that the Madonna should be made available for public viewing once again. On June 17, 1995, the statue was placed in a new niche, behind bullet-proof glass, in the local parish church of San Agostino. And while the scholars continued their inquiry, the ordinary Catholic faithful began to come by the thousands to see the weeping statue.

One year after the first reports of the phenomenon, on February 2, 1996, Bishop Grillo announced that 300,000 pilgrims had come to Civitavecchia to see the famous Madonna. More importantly, he revealed for the first time that a number of healings and conversions had taken place. "More than twenty cases of healing have been attributed to Mary's intercession," he said, "with the most remarkable being the case of a child who had been diagnosed as being in an irreversible coma. There have also been quite a few conversions, including 120 people who were Jehovah's Witnesses."

The bishop also revealed that he had taken the precaution of conducting an exorcism on both the statue and the Gregori family. He concluded:

To be sure, the Vatican remains non-committal. Asked to comment about the phenomena at Civitavecchia, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave a careful response:

Cardinal Ratzinger made that statement in April 1995. But now he is faced with a request for a more specific answer to the questions of Civitavecchia: a response to the work of Grillo's theological commission, which has produced a 173-page report eliminating any discernible natural explanation for the weeping statue.

Bishop Grillo has insisted that he will not issue a final report on the phenomenon without guidance from Ratzinger's Congregation. Still, on December 29, when he announced that his commission had finished its work, Bishop Grillo could not hide his satisfaction. And his comments today seem to presume that he will eventually receive a green light from the Vatican--although even now he is careful to point out that any statement he might issue would still not be definitive: