Religion: An Italian Lourdes?

The little Madonna was a poor thing. She was made of plaster, and her face was blank and pink. In the shapeless, pudgy fingers of her right hand she held a bleeding heart limned in red and gold. She was exactly like hundreds of other foot-high, hollow, plaster Madonnas that the Sicilian factory sold for $3, and like many of them she was a wedding present—to Antonietta and Angelo lannuso of Syracuse. Soon after they got the present in the spring of 1953, the commotion began.

Dark, devout Antonietta, then 20, became pregnant and began to suffer agonizing pains, during which her sight became clouded, and she prayed fervently to the Madonna for deliverance. Then, she recalls, on the morning of Aug. 29, 1953, in the midst of one of these seizures, "I saw tears pouring down the Madonna's face. It was incredible. For a moment I thought I was mad. She was crying like a child. Then I began to shout, 'La Madonnina piange [The little Madonna is weeping]!' "

Two Tears Like Pearls. Antonietta's mother and sister-in-law thought she was hysterical, tried to calm her until they looked at the Madonna. "So plentiful were those tears," wrote a monk reporting the case, "that they spilled over into the right hand holding the heart."

Antonietta's husband, a farm laborer and Communist sympathizer, was skeptical. For four days crowds flooded into Syracuse while, according to many accounts, the Madonna continued to weep. Said a doubter: "I took the statue from the wall and found the wall behind it dry. I unscrewed the statue from its base and thoroughly dried it. Then two tears, like pearls, began to appear in the eyes of the Madonna." The Syracuse police force added its weight to the evidence. When the figure was removed to headquarters, its tears were said to have wet the tunic of the policeman who carried it. Some were caught in a vial, analyzed chemically, identified as human tears.

Antonietta's seizures stopped when the Madonna's weeping began. Other cures swiftly followed. All that seemed needed was to brush the lame and the halt with a bit of cloth wetted by the tears of the Madonna; a 49-year-old man got back the use of his crippled left arm, a three-year-old girl moved her polio-paralyzed arm, an 18-year-old girl who had been dumb suddenly spoke.

Crutches & Cardinals. A month after she wept, the Madonna was carried at the head of a procession of 30,000 of the devout to a railway shed, where the figure was sealed in a glass-walled case topped by a brass cross. Thousands of pilgrims, including 72 bishops and archbishops and three cardinals, have flocked to the shrine of the little Madonna, now surrounded by a display of crutches and braces presumably thrown away by the cured. All day long Masses were being said, and assisting the local priests was Antonietta's husband Angelo. While the church has not formally accredited the miracolo, Pope Pius XII, in a message to Sicilians, has referred to the weeping Madonna: "So ardent are the people of Sicily in their devotion to Mary that who would marvel if she had chosen the illustrious city [of Syracuse] to give a sign of her grace?"