When villagers at Civitavecchia witnessed tears of blood falling down the face of a souvenir Madonna, they proclaimed it a miracle. But soon, experts were branding it a cunning hoax and a row ensued
Alix Kirsta What strikes people most when they first see the weeping Madonna of Civitavecchia is her size. The white glazed plaster statue is only 40cm high, her face, with its downcast eyes, no bigger than a man’s thumb.
For five years La Madonnina, the little madonna, as she is known locally, has stood behind bullet-proof glass in the little church of St Agostino in Pantano, a poor agricultural suburb of the port of Civitavecchia, near Rome. Every year she attracts thousands of pilgrims. Of the scores of “miracles” reported in Italy during the lead-up to the millennium, only this “weeping Madonna”, who even has her own website, continues to bring in the charabancs, transforming a once-unknown chapel off a dirt-track into an international religious shrine.
However, anyone hoping to see her weep, or detect traces of blood on her cheeks, will be disappointed. Since allegedly weeping tears of blood in front of thousands of witnesses in February 1995, La Madonnina has remained dry-eyed and all traces of blood have long since faded. Which is more than can be said for the controversy that surrounds her.
La Madonnina’s worldwide renown is due as much to her supposed mystical powers as to the fact that, for five years, she has been the subject of an unprecedented and bizarre criminal investigation in which the Italian authorities have become embroiled in a so-called “pious fraud”, a charge normally ignored, or dealt with by the Church. In this case, the procura, or district attorney, is determined to expose La Madonnina’s tears as a hoax and identify the culprits as the statue’s owner, Fabio Gregori, and his family.
The inquiry appears set to run indefinitely and has all the makings of an absurdist melodrama, involving the diverging interests of anti-cult campaigners, judicial authorities, the Catholic Church and the mayor of Civitavecchia, Pietro Tidei, a communist non-believer who is determined that the shrine at Pantano should become as commercially viable as Lourdes, Fatima or Medjugorje.
Meanwhile, like many thousands of believers, Gregori, a 37-year-old electrician from Pantano, believes that what he witnessed five years ago was a miracle. What he also knows is that it has changed his life, largely for the worse.
It began, like most mystical experiences, in the most humdrum circumstances. As a devout Catholic, Gregori was overjoyed when his local priest, Father Don Pablo Martin, returned from a visit to Medjugorje in September 1994 and gave him a plaster statuette of the virgin to protect his home and family. Father Pablo claimed he was guided by one of Italy’s most celebrated religious figures, the late Capuchin friar Padre Pio, to bring the statue back to Civitavecchia, where “the most beautiful event of this life” would occur.
Five months on an event did indeed occur that propelled the tiny hamlet into the spotlight. On February 2 1995 Gregori was hurrying to mass when his six-year-old daughter Jessica’s shrieks pierced the air. “Papa, Papa, come and look. The Madonnina is crying. There’s blood everywhere!” Rushing to join her at the little stone shrine he had built in the garden, he saw, he says, red liquid well up in the statuette’s eyes and trickle down her cheeks and gown.
Deeply shaken, he drove to mass, where he recounted the incident to Father Pablo. Within hours, news of the “weeping” had spread throughout the district and crowds of acquaintances and strangers began gathering outside his gate. The circus had begun.
Throughout the weekend, as the story hit the headlines, the faithful and the merely curious, including reporters and TV crews, thronged in their thousands down the small country lane to Gregori’s house, pushing into his small garden, praying, weeping, gawking, chattering and crossing themselves as they filed past the tiny statue before shuffling out again to gossip and speak to the press.
“It was a mass invasion, they were swinging from the trees,” recalls Scottish-born Carmela Dinardo, who runs Civitavecchia’s foreign-language school. “You couldn’t move for cars, buses and people blocking the way to his home. People had come from all over Italy. The Gregoris simply locked themselves inside the house.” After several people had tried to handle the statue and touch the blood, police were called to maintain order at the site.
By late Sunday February 5 the statuette had, according to many witnesses, wept blood 13 times. By the following day Gregori could take the strain no longer and, pursued by paparazzi, delivered the statuette to Father Pablo at St Agostino for safekeeping. Then he locked the gates to his garden and put up a notice: “Please don’t stop here. The Madonna is no longer here.”
And there the drama should have ended. It was, after all, just the latest in a long line of incidents involving holy effigies, animated statues and sightings of the Virgin Mary during the 1990s throughout the world.
Even in Italy, with nine separate lacrimazioni (weepings) reported in the first two months of 1995 alone, belief had begun to give way to scepticism as each incident was either dismissed due to unreliable eyewitness reports or found to be a practical joke or some natural phenomenon, such as dewdrops forming on a statue.
Why should La Madonnina of Civitavecchia be any different? The answer lies in the web of intrigue that still surrounds the case and speculation over one of the most colourful characters involved in it, Monsignor Girolamo Grillo, the bishop of Civitavecchia.
As he welcomes me to his house to tell me the story, Grillo, a jocular 70-year-old known locally as “il grillo parlante” (the talking cricket) because of his outspokenness, still chuckles over his initial reaction. After taking the statuette from Gregori, Father Pablo delivered a report to Grillo, describing what had occurred in the family’s garden that weekend.
Phoning him several hours later to ask him what to do with the statue, Father Pablo was shocked at the bishop’s response: “I tore up the report and threw it in the bin and told Don Pablo to destroy the statue immediately, so as to end all this trouble! I had no doubt it was a hoax. Naturally, I started hearing from angry parishioners condemning me for not believing in all this rubbish.”
There were well-founded reasons for Grillo’s wish to distance himself from “this rubbish”. According to rumour, the area around Civitavecchia is heaving with Jehovah’s Witnesses, occult groups and Satanists, any of whom could have planned a hoax. More significantly, the Vatican, sensitive to charges of superstition, favours a cautious attitude towards reported “miracles”, especially those involving inanimate objects, rather than mystic “seers” as in Fatima.
His next step, which was to phone the police and ask them to investigate the Gregori family, therefore, seems logical, as does his request to his own doctor to carry out tests on the “blood” now congealed on the statue. What he wasn’t prepared for was the result: the substance was haemoglobin.
That report, says Grillo, only strengthened his resolve to expose the trick. “The Gregoris, I found out, were simple, poor, hard-working, local people, honest and devoutly religious, with no criminal record. I even did an exorcism on them, believing it was a satanic set up.”
But, being something of an amateur sleuth, Grillo wouldn’t let the matter rest. Father Pablo, disobeying instructions, had given the statue to one of Gregori’s brothers, so Grillo persuaded the family to let him take it to Rome for analysis of the bloodstains and x-rays of the structure. The tests were repeated several times by separate teams, one headed by Professor Angelo Fiori at the Vatican’s Gemelli hospital, the other by Rome’s leading forensic medical examiner and DNA expert, Giancarlo Umani-Ronchi, director of the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the University of Rome.
“When I handed the statue in at the lab, they assured me it would turn out to be animal blood,” laughs Grillo, drawing out the story for effect. “Then they found it was human blood.” But greater revelations were to come: repeated analysis and DNA tests established that it was male blood, while a series of x-rays and CAT scans of the statue itself confirmed that it was solid, with no sign of having been rigged. “That actually increased my doubts. Obviously it was a hoax. The blood of Our Lady ought to have been female, no?”
After reporting these developments to the Vatican, Grillo was authorised to set up a theological commission to study the case. It was the start of many sleepless nights, he says. On March 1, soon after the statue had been returned to him, Codacons, Italy’s largest consumer protection group, alarmed at extensive media coverage of the case, issued a formal complaint against “unknown persons”. The charge was “abuso della credulita popolare [abuse of the people’s belief]”, under a law introduced in 1930 to deter magicians and hoaxers from duping the public.
This was followed by an allegation of fraud from a prominent Italian helpline, Telefono Antiplagio, run by Professor Giovanni Panunzio, a children’s religion teacher in Sardinia and director of the Italian Committee to Help Victims of Charlatans and Gurus.
Again, Grillo admits giving police the go-ahead to investigate. “I called in the law, hoping they would finally help me prove the weeping was a joke, because I was so sure it was.” But when police raided the homes of all four Gregori brothers and their mother at dawn on March 8, turning everything upside down in the search for evidence of trickery, they drew a blank.
Fabio Gregori’s ordeal, however, was far from over. Under Italian law, once an accusation is made, the public prosecutor is obliged to open a full-scale criminal investigation. What happened a week later added a whole new dimension to an already farcical situation.
While saying mass at home with family and two Romanian nuns, the bishop claims that La Madonnina cried tears of blood as he held her in his hands.
The bishop’s announcement in a TV interview a week later carried out against the advice of the Vatican merely cranked up Antonio Abano, the public prosecutor, who enlisted Criminal-pol, the Italian equivalent of the FBI, to dig further into the case. Abano ordered the bishop to hand over La Madonnina and requested all male members of the Gregori family to submit blood samples for DNA testing against that on the statue. Neither request was met and the authorities tried to seize the Madonnina.
The upshot, Gregori’s lawyer, Bruno Forestieri, says drily, was “a very Italian-style compromise”. The courts agreed to let the bishop keep the statue in a sealed cupboard in his residence while the enquiry continued. “It was a diplomatic solution: the state prosecutor intervened, but without violating the Church’s autonomy,” explains Forestieri, who, at Gregori’s request, appealed to the Court of Cassation in Rome for the statue’s release in time for Easter. Two weeks later an order was issued for its release. “Which makes me the only lawyer in history to set the Virgin Mary free,” says Forestieri.
However, the order came too late for the Easter procession. La Madonnina was finally returned to the parish church in June, after undergoing further x-rays and scans together with DNA analysis of the new bloodstains, which were reportedly identical to the first. This finally led Grillo to state publicly that because they were of male blood, the tears could only be those of Christ.
Since then, the shrine of La Madonnina has become a magnet for tourists. To cope with the influx, Mayor Tidei has allocated billions of lire for the construction of roads, street lighting, drainage and toilets, parking facilities, a pilgrim’s hostel and a large consecrated marquee to meet the demand for extra services, vigils and communions.
The entire saga, says Forestieri, has had a “tragic impact on Gregori’s life, making him mistrustful and withdrawn”.
His refusal to submit to a DNA test is still regarded by many as suspicious, but Forestieri remains dubious about standards of the original forensic analysis, in which only five strands of DNA were identified from blood on the statue, instead of the dozen or more required for accurate matching. What especially grieves Gregori who declined Forestieri’s request to speak to me is that a profoundly mystical event has become not only a money-grabbing enterprise but is also fodder for pop-science TV shows.
One can see his point. In February this year, after a service celebrating the fifth anniversary of the original “weeping”, Alfredo Barrago, a popular magician, shone a red laser beam on to the statue from a gallery in the church as part of a TV demonstration on how to conjure tears of blood.
In recent years such exposs of the paranormal have become increasingly popular. Among the more bizarre explanations for La Madonnina’s tears is the suggestion that someone fitted the statue with special contact lenses, which expand and release liquid when exposed to heat, or that a blood-filled syringe fitted inside the figurine was attached to a hidden battery, allowing the device to be electronically activated by remote control. The suggestion that Gregori may have resorted to such tricks has, says Forestieri, reduced his client to an emotional wreck.
Panunzio of the anti-charlatan hotline, who has conducted his own research into phoney miracles, is convinced that Gregori was set up: “Almost certainly he and Bishop Grillo were cheated by unscrupulous people who want to increase superstition and decrease faith. Exploitation of holy icons is widespread among occultists.”
In the case of Civitavecchia, he claims to have received several tip-offs: “In December 1994 a man, who introduced himself as an expert in ‘esotericism’, called me and warned me about a ‘weeping’ that was being planned in Civitavecchia. Don’t you think that’s a very strange coincidence?”
Although Panunzio counts himself among a growing category of special investigators of pious frauds, being a non-scientist who often relies on the magician Barrago’s expertise in identifying possible trickery, he comes across more as an enthusiastic dabbler. What really disqualifies him from being a rigorous, impartial investigator is that he has his own agenda: to strengthen true religious faith and stamp out rampant occultism and New Age beliefs, which he likens to pornography.
Even if the truth behind La Madonnina is never revealed, the case, by setting a precedent for police involvement in Church affairs, raises important questions over the whole issue of “pious fraud” and the rigour with which such apparent misdemeanours are investigated. In their persistent hounding of Gregori when so many other people might have played a part in the incident, the authorities in Civitavecchia have displayed an astonishing lack of common sense. Why else enlist the help of illusionists whose prime instinct is to entertain?
Theories, such as those propounded by Barrago, seem to have convinced prosecutors that the “weeping” was the result of some absurdly elaborate mechanism, when in fact there is likely to be a far simpler, if mundane explanation.
Until Grillo’s astonishing volte-face, priests were often the first, and best qualified, to debunk reported “miracles”, if only to reassure those who might reject a Church that embraces superstition. Their lack of scientific expertise has even led some priests to call on help from the unlikeliest sources, such as the Italian Committee for Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (Cicap).
Although best known for investigations into psychic healing and extra-sensory perception, one of Cicap’s founder members, Luigi Garlaschelli, is increasingly focusing his attention on pious frauds, sometimes at the request of the clergy. Although he has not been asked to investigate the weeping Madonna of Civitavecchia, he has followed events closely and taken part in TV debates on the case.
Garlaschelli is Italy’s foremost investigator of “miracles” involving tears and blood. He invites me to his laboratory on a scorching Saturday afternoon to demonstrate how statues can be made to weep and bleed. He brings out a selection of male and female plaster busts, their faces streaked and eyes rimmed bright red.
One is a kitsch replica of the head of Michelangelo’s David, the top neatly sawn off. Garlaschelli takes the detached section, and pops it on and off like the lid of a teapot, the join hidden by the curls of hair: inside are two thin plastic tubes connected to a hollow central chamber and glued at the other end behind each of the eyes. Other busts have one or more tiny holes drilled into their scalps and are hollow inside or contain a small cavity behind the eyes.
The mechanisms all work on a similar principle. “The statue must be of thin, porous plaster or ceramic and glazed all over outside, allowing the material to absorb fluid without anything seeping out,” says Garlaschelli. “You fill the statue or inner reservoir with water, plain or dyed red. Make tiny, almost invisible pinpricks or scratches in the glaze on the corners of the lower eyelid; the fluid eventually trickles or flows through and there you have your tears.”
The notion that an unsophisticated man such as Gregori would go to such lengths strikes me as unlikely. Garlaschelli agrees, maintaining that most icons are “magicked up” far more crudely.
“I am not suggesting that the Civitavecchia Madonna involved any of these methods, even if the statue was replaced before testing, which, of course, it could have been. The most likely explanation is that someone pricked or cut their finger and smeared the blood on to the eyes of the statue and let it trickle down. Trivial, but this is the way it goes very often!”
But what about the forensic examiners’ report that ruled out any tricks? “If you recall, what they said was, ‘The statue does not contain any trick, and the blood is real blood.’ Which translates to: ‘Science rules out tricks it can only be a miracle.’ You can lie, or mislead, even by saying the truth. And when the bishop declared that it had wept in his hands, the forensic examiner reported that he could not doubt it, since it came from extremely reliable sources.”
Handing me a container of solid brownish gel, he tells me to shake or swing it from side to side, as priests do when flourishing blood relics in front of a congregation. After a few seconds of being jiggled around, the gel begins flowing freely and turns a brighter red, a startlingly realistic effect.
By concocting such gels using naturally occurring reddish chemicals such as molysite or iron chloride, which is found only near active volcanoes such as Mount Vesuvius near Naples and has been commonly used by painters and artisans throughout the centuries, Garlaschelli may have cracked another ancient mystery.
Whether this proves that, since its earliest days, the Church has knowingly deceived worshippers with such tricks is another matter. What if an outsider introduced the relic to the Church, rather than the other way around? Instead of being purposely cooked up by some fanatical abbot to dupe and convert the masses, Garlaschelli believes that these compounds were more likely to have been created by accident, probably by medieval artists who stumbled across the method by chance when experimenting with pigments.
Although the commission that was appointed to study the Madonna of Civitavecchia recently completed its report, since the Vatican is traditionally reticent about issuing declarations on miracles, the final verdict could be a long way off yet. Since 1830 the Vatican has “approved” 15 apparitions of the Virgin, but authenticated only one “weeping” Madonna, when a statue wept tears in Siracuse, Sicily, in 1954 a highly dubious event, says Garlaschelli, who has investigated the incident.
In some ways the Vatican’s response seems irrelevant, especially since Grillo’s statements have put La Madonnina in the big league. From the rows of souvenir stalls and ranks of parked tour buses to the booming lunchtime trade at Signora Amina’s trattoria next to the church, all the signs are that La Madonnina remains a crowd-puller, perhaps because of, rather than despite, being shrouded in mystery.
One person you won’t see mingling with the crowds at St Agostino’s is Fabio Gregori. Although a less hawkish public prosecutor was recently appointed, the case against Gregori has yet to be wound up. Forestieri, his lawyer, now wishes that it would just come to court, “so I could finally show the world what really went on”.
Anyone passing Gregori’s house today will find it shuttered and silent, the gates locked and the sides of his fence bricked up to prevent people peering into his garden. Recent photographs of Fabio and his daughter Jessica, now 11, show both looking sullen and withdrawn. I wonder, do the Gregoris still believe in miracles?