VIDEO: Virgin Mary Statue Cries One Tear of Blood

Hundreds of ecstatic pilgrims are flocking to a statue of the Virgin Mary believed to be crying a single tear of blood. Images of the statue with a red liquid dripping down its cheek have been shared on social media, prompting a mass pilgrimage to Floridablanca, in Columbia. Locals believe they have witnessed a miracle and others are swarming to catch a glimpse. What do you think? Is the statue really crying or is it just a well-elaborated trick? After all, we’ve heard of dozens of weeping statues and crying paintings over the years – not all of them legit.

According to Wikipedia, reported weeping statues are most often of the Virgin Mary and are at times accompanied by claims of Marian apparitions. However, to date only one single example of a combined weeping statue and apparition (namely Our Lady of Akita) has been certified by the Vatican while most have been dismissed as hoaxes. An unusual nature of the Our Lady of Akita apparitions was that unlike other cases the entire nation of Japan was able to view the tears of the statue of the Virgin Mary on national television.

Authorities of the Catholic Church have been very careful in their approach and treatment of weeping statues, and generally set very high barriers for their acceptance. For instance when a statue of the popular Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina in Messina, Sicily, was found to have tears of blood one day in 2002, Church officials quickly ordered tests that showed the blood belonged to a woman and then dismissed the case as a hoax. Even at the local level, Catholic priests have expelled people who claim weeping statues from their local Church.

Weeping statues have also been dismissed by rationalists as a purely psychological and/or fraudulent phenomenon. The witnesses are said to be deluded by their own state of mind or strong group suggestion. In this altered state of mind, they believe they see something that isn’t really there.

Another possible explanation attributes the so-called tears to condensation. The tears that statues appear to weep are said to actually be beads of condensation from microscopic cracks on the surface of the statues. Unpublished reports of the testing have supposedly been able to verify this theory, but peer reviewed scientific research is rarely, if ever, carried out into the phenomenon.

A number of weeping statues have been declared fake by Catholic church officials.

In 1995, a Madonna statue appeared to weep blood in the town of Civitavecchia in Italy. About 60 witnesses testified to witnessing the miracle. The local bishop said that he himself had seen it weep. The blood on the statue was later found to be male. The statue’s owner, Fabio Gregori, refused to take a DNA test. After the Civitavecchia case, dozens of reputedly miraculous statues were reported. Almost all were shown to be hoaxes, where blood, red paint, or water was splashed on the faces of the statues.

In 2008 church custodian Vincenzo Di Costanzo went on trial in northern Italy for faking blood on a statue of the Virgin Mary when his own DNA was matched to the blood.

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