4 ur entertainment:the Weeping Madona of Civitavecchia
11-10-2009
, 01:32 AM
I have no personal opinion on the issues surrounding this story except to say - why hasn't it been made into a movie yet? I only put part of it in here, it's well-worth it, I think, to read the entire article. I think Catholics and other Christians will find it funny and interesting and it goes without saying that atheists will.
BUT - under the ludicrousness of it all, and that is brought by the actions of almost everyone from the Bishop to the Prosecutor - there is an undercurrent of nameless faceless persons of faith, who I do not hold up to ridicule at all.
Still ... still ... well - you'll see. (The bolding is added)
story
BUT - under the ludicrousness of it all, and that is brought by the actions of almost everyone from the Bishop to the Prosecutor - there is an undercurrent of nameless faceless persons of faith, who I do not hold up to ridicule at all.
Still ... still ... well - you'll see. (The bolding is added)
story
Quote:
* The Guardian, Saturday 9 December 2000
What strikes people most when they first see the Weeping Madonna of Civitavecchia is her size. The white glazed plaster statue is only 16 inches high, her face, with its downcast eyes, no bigger than a man's thumb. Originally bought from a souvenir stall at the shrine of Our Lady at Medjugorje in Bosnia, she cost less than a fiver, but, as mass-produced religious statuettes go, is surprisingly untrashy.
For the past five years, La Madonnina, the little madonna, as she is known locally, has stood behind bulletproof 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.
La Madonnina's worldwide renown is due as much to her supposed mystical powers as to the fact that, for the past 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 enquiry 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 nonbeliever 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. With nothing to distinguish it from the serried ranks of Madonnas around the Bosnian pilgrimage site, Father Pablo nevertheless believed that this one had special powers, claiming 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 the afternoon of Thursday, 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, gawping, 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. I wanted to see the Madonna, too, and drove down there, but was forced to park far away and walk. It took hours to reach the shrine. They were battering down his gate, hundreds of people at a time trampling around his garden. 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 90s throughout the world. In India and England, reports that animal statues at various Hindu temples had begun "drinking" milk also drew crowds for several months.
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? And what makes locals, such as Dinardo, an ardent believer in miracles, and her friend, Christiana Vallarino, a local reporter from Il Messaggero, who saw the tears but insists it's a clever trick, still argue over the incident in the cafes on Civitavecchia's seafront? 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 about the story, Monsignor 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 Monsignor 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 Monsignor 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, Bishop Grillo wouldn't let the matter rest. Father Pablo, disobeying instructions, had given the statue to one of Gregori's brothers, so Monsignor 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 Monsignor 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, Monsignor 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, Monsignor 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 up-side 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, which can drag on for years, even if there is insufficient evidence to prosecute. What happened a week later added a whole new dimension to an already farcical situation. While saying mass at home with his sister, brother-in-law, nephew and two Romanian nuns, the bishop claims that La Madonnina cried tears of blood as he held her in his hands.
Although he announced what he had witnessed in a TV interview a week later, in effect endorsing the miracle, he refuses to use the word miracle: "It's a mystery - there is no rational explanation," he tells me, with the first sign of gravitas that afternoon.
The bishop's announcement - 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 statute. Neither request was met.
"Since I had witnessed the weeping myself, the Vatican gave me authority to tell the police to stay away from the case and not permit the statue to be confiscated," says Monsignor Grillo. "That didn't go down so well. Now the prosecutor was convinced that Gregori and I were in this together. They accused me of being in cahoots with the Vatican and both of us of fraud. At this stage, they would have liked to put me in jail for being the hoaxer, but a bishop is still a bishop, so they tried to seize the Madonnina. The law always puts its foot in it when getting involved in religious matters. In Lourdes, Fatima, now here, they've made a hash of things."
The upshot, Fabio 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. Hundreds of irate local parishioners had been publicly protesting at the state's interference with their plans to carry the statue "home" to St Agostino church in the town's traditional Good Friday procession, which more than 10,000 worshippers were expected to attend. 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...
What strikes people most when they first see the Weeping Madonna of Civitavecchia is her size. The white glazed plaster statue is only 16 inches high, her face, with its downcast eyes, no bigger than a man's thumb. Originally bought from a souvenir stall at the shrine of Our Lady at Medjugorje in Bosnia, she cost less than a fiver, but, as mass-produced religious statuettes go, is surprisingly untrashy.
For the past five years, La Madonnina, the little madonna, as she is known locally, has stood behind bulletproof 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.
La Madonnina's worldwide renown is due as much to her supposed mystical powers as to the fact that, for the past 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 enquiry 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 nonbeliever 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. With nothing to distinguish it from the serried ranks of Madonnas around the Bosnian pilgrimage site, Father Pablo nevertheless believed that this one had special powers, claiming 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 the afternoon of Thursday, 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, gawping, 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. I wanted to see the Madonna, too, and drove down there, but was forced to park far away and walk. It took hours to reach the shrine. They were battering down his gate, hundreds of people at a time trampling around his garden. 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 90s throughout the world. In India and England, reports that animal statues at various Hindu temples had begun "drinking" milk also drew crowds for several months.
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? And what makes locals, such as Dinardo, an ardent believer in miracles, and her friend, Christiana Vallarino, a local reporter from Il Messaggero, who saw the tears but insists it's a clever trick, still argue over the incident in the cafes on Civitavecchia's seafront? 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 about the story, Monsignor 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 Monsignor 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 Monsignor 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, Bishop Grillo wouldn't let the matter rest. Father Pablo, disobeying instructions, had given the statue to one of Gregori's brothers, so Monsignor 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 Monsignor 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, Monsignor 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, Monsignor 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 up-side 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, which can drag on for years, even if there is insufficient evidence to prosecute. What happened a week later added a whole new dimension to an already farcical situation. While saying mass at home with his sister, brother-in-law, nephew and two Romanian nuns, the bishop claims that La Madonnina cried tears of blood as he held her in his hands.
Although he announced what he had witnessed in a TV interview a week later, in effect endorsing the miracle, he refuses to use the word miracle: "It's a mystery - there is no rational explanation," he tells me, with the first sign of gravitas that afternoon.
The bishop's announcement - 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 statute. Neither request was met.
"Since I had witnessed the weeping myself, the Vatican gave me authority to tell the police to stay away from the case and not permit the statue to be confiscated," says Monsignor Grillo. "That didn't go down so well. Now the prosecutor was convinced that Gregori and I were in this together. They accused me of being in cahoots with the Vatican and both of us of fraud. At this stage, they would have liked to put me in jail for being the hoaxer, but a bishop is still a bishop, so they tried to seize the Madonnina. The law always puts its foot in it when getting involved in religious matters. In Lourdes, Fatima, now here, they've made a hash of things."
The upshot, Fabio 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. Hundreds of irate local parishioners had been publicly protesting at the state's interference with their plans to carry the statue "home" to St Agostino church in the town's traditional Good Friday procession, which more than 10,000 worshippers were expected to attend. 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...
11-10-2009
, 04:21 AM
11-10-2009
, 06:49 AM
