Italians bank on Madonna's tears of blood to bring back good life

Hundreds of pilgrims are flocking to sites of `miracle' statues, writes Andrew Gumbel in Rome

It is turning into something of an epidemic. Madonnas have been exuding all manner of bodily fluids throughout Italy. On 2 February, an electrician from the port of Civitavecchia, north of Rome, announced to a sceptical world that a statue of the Madonna that he kept in his garden was weeping tears of human blood. The local church took an interest, and pilgrims flocked to his house.

In Subiaco, east of the capital, local inhabitants watched in wonder for 10 days as a statue emitted a substance that was later identified by university biologists as human pus.

Further incidents took place in Bergamo and Laziso in the north of Italy, and in Castovillari in the deep south.

In the past few days alone, a bas-relief of the Holy Virgin in Tivoli, just east of Rome, has begun weeping, while in Taranta Peligna, in the Abruzzi mountains, a statue bought by a pilgrim in Lourdes has developed bloodstains on its face, throat, breasts and hands.

Miracles, or just elaboratetricks? This being Italy, there is no sure way to tell. Madonnas have a habit of weeping whenever this most superstitious of countries hits hard times. What with the tumbling lira and a poisonous atmosphere of political confrontation paralysing the country, few are living the good life in the material sense.

The Catholic Church has been distinctly ambiguous, urging caution on one hand, but on the other doing nothing to deter hundreds of the faithful from rushing to view supposed evidence of the supernatural. The biblical prohibition against the worship of graven images has fallen curiously by the wayside.

On Thursday, the Bishop of Civitavecchia, Girolamo Grillo, announced that as far as he was concerned Mr Gregori's weeping statue, bought by a parish priest on a pilgrimage to the Marian shrine at Medjugorje in Bosnia, was genuine. "It's real blood; the clinical analyses have confirmed it," he said. "At first I was very sceptical, but not any more."

Scientists have confirmed that the tears of the Madonna are human blood and, after X-raying the statue seven times, found no trace of trick devices.

But certain mysteries remain. Like why the blood is, according to DNA tests, that of a man, and why, of the hundreds of people who allegedly saw the "miracle", only a few dozen have come forward to testify.

The whole verification process has been rather less than transparent. Four days after the first Civitavecchia bleeding, just before national television cameras could get a good look, local church officials suddenly removed the statue from Mr Gregori's garden and placed it in a bank vault.

That has not deterred the coaches of tourists, which have been pouring into Civitavecchia so pilgrims can worship at the site where the statue once stood. No one has mentioned so dirty a word, but money is becoming an increasingly obvious consideration.

Strangely, there has been little mention of a firm from Florence that, until recently, specialised in producing trick tear-duct devices ideal for installation in plaster-cast statues.

Nor has anyone talked of the powder, found in other statues from Medjugorje, which turns to liquid after gradual exposure to sunshine.