In August 1953, in a poor house in Syracuse, Sicily, a cheap plaster image of the Virgin Mary began to weep. It wept for four days, in front of hundreds of people. Then doctors collected the tears in a sterile vial, sent them to the laboratory, and published the result.

The plaque was a wedding gift, hanging over the bed of Angelo and Antonina Iannuso, a young couple with very little money. Antonina was pregnant that summer and dangerously ill. The convulsions were so severe that at times they left her blind. At half past eight on the morning of August 29th, after a terrible night, her sight came back, and the first thing she saw was the image above her bed. It was weeping. Large clear drops were welling from the eyes and running down the plaster face. She called her family. They saw it too.

For four days the little plaque wept, on the wall, off the wall, held in bare hands, out in the courtyard for the gathering crowds. Neighbours saw it. Police officers saw it, and one collected the tears in his own handkerchief. The city came in processions. And on the first of September, a commission sent by the Church arrived: doctors and chemists, with sterile glassware. While the image wept in front of them, they drew off about a cubic centimetre of the liquid and sent it for analysis, alongside real human tears for comparison.

On September 9th the laboratory reported. The liquid welling from the painted plaster eyes had the composition of human tears: the same salts, the same traces of protein. The plaque itself was X-rayed and examined: solid gypsum, no pores, no reservoir, no tube, no mechanism. And from the day the sample was taken, the image never wept again.

That December the bishops of Sicily, after their own inquiry, judged the weeping to be real. The Pope spoke of it on the radio the following year. A medical commission logged two hundred and ninety claimed cures from those four days and found a hundred and five of them worth taking seriously. Antonina, the sick young bride who saw it first, safely delivered her son that Christmas. Today a great sanctuary in Syracuse holds the little plaque, and the vial of analysed tears beside it. The lab report is still on file. You can go and read it.

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