The Case of The Weeping Madonna
Are the extraordinary events in a Virginia suburb a miracle or a hoax?
A young priest. Upswept brown hair. Mustache. A taste for RC Cola and pizza with green peppers. A hesitant Southern drawl. Nervous eyes. He is Exhibit A. Exhibit B is a 12-inch statue: a plaster reproduction of Our Lady of Grace, ordered from a mail-order religious supply house in Havertown, Pa. Her robes are blue, her face touched with pink. Her eyes gaze down in earthly contemplation, even as her arms open prayerfully for heavenly redemption of sinners. Long before the word "miracle," long before the TV newscasts and newspaper headlines and tour buses, there were the priest and the statue, neither of them particularly remarkable. Which makes all the more intriguing the events that started unfolding on Nov. 28, 1991, when, without warning, droplets of water welled in the eyes of the statue, slid down its plaster face and plunked onto an oak server in the living room of the priest's parents, Jim and Ann Bruse of Stafford, Va. Father, mother and son watched in puzzlement and awe.
That was how it began. Later--when Father Jim's hands and feet bled, when the 4-foot statue at the Lake Ridge, Va., parish wept in front of 500 people, when stories of unexplained "healings" and a sun that "spins" made whispered rounds among the Northern Virginia faithful--Channel 9 in nearby Washington, D.C., broke the story, publicly posing the question that more than a few had already dared ask in private: "Is it a miracle?"
Is it a miracle? Lake Ridge is only one American community where the question has preoccupied, baffled, inspired and even angered residents. In the past year, an enigmatic array of supernatural "sightings" has erupted across the United States: In Arizona, nine otherwise "normal" young adults say Mary, Jesus's mother, has visited and spoken to them; in Texas, an icon of Jesus reportedly wept; in a Denver suburb, a woman described visions of the Virgin wearing a "pink gown" in a mountainside shrine.
Whether these events indeed constitute divine intervention--much less what it means if they do--has created a kind of litmus-test controversy about the value of faith, instincts and science. Millions of Americans are of two minds about miracles. On the one hand, they want to believe in them (and a 1989 Gallup Poll found that 83 percent of Americans do) because such events suggest that God exists and our daily lives have a purpose. At the same time, people have a conflicting urge to dismiss miracles as fakes. To lend them credence seems to demonstrate naivete or ignorance. It is one thing to privately cheer on Kevin Costner when a disembodied voice tells him in "Field of Dreams," "If you build it, he will come." It is quite another to tell your boss that God spoke to you in the back yard about your real-estate plans.
The debate goes not just to the question of whether miracles exist but to how they have been used and abused. The religiously inspired maintain that events like those in Lake Ridge, Va., are proof that God is using his powers to call sinners back to him. Skeptics, including much of the press and the scientific community, consider the notion of miracles as nutty as Bigfoot or UFOs, a distraction for the gullible from the often frustrating realities of daily life. The fact that miracles, by their very nature, cannot be scientifically proved only perpetuates the debate. Even the Roman Catholic Church--which has recognized just 14 Virgin sightings and weeping statue episodes in the past two centuries--allows that, at some point, it's up to the believer to decide.
And that is what they say in Lake Ridge, where this tale begins.
THE TOWN ON I-95 Tidy, edged lawns. Freshly mulched shrubs. Uniform rows of mailboxes fronting brand-new split-levels and ranches. Lake Ridge has a certain military precision about it, as if nothing could happen here that wasn't the result of exacting and deliberate design, as if the business of living could be rendered as predictable as the 4 p.m. thud of the Potomac News on the doorstep. Many Lake Ridge residents, in fact, work at the Pentagon, the FBI Academy and a nearby U.S. Marine base, and it was to house such professionals that developers bulldozed the stands of oaks and poplars that blanketed the area in the late 1960s. They envisioned a "planned community," with no more than 13 people per acre and 1,000-plus acres for parks.
As a result, everything in Lake Ridge seems new: new schools, new brick-and-glass churches and new streets with names like "Cassandra Court" and "Willowood Drive." Many couples and families are youthful, too--the median age is just over 30. Although Washington, D.C., is just 40 minutes away by car, a football game between Woodbridge High School and its archrival, Gar-Field, generates far more interest than the latest play at the Kennedy Center.
Not surprisingly, Lake Ridge residents are also a churchgoing lot. Tucked among the colonials on Valleywood Drive is St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, a looming, modern edifice whose sloping roofs and redwood siding give it the look of an out-of-season ski lodge set among snowless trees. But despite a burgeoning congregation that overflows 11 a.m. mass on Sundays, the church has struggled. In 1986, the assistant pastor, a handsome young priest just a few years out of seminary, fell in love with a married parishioner, quit the priesthood and later married her. A few years later, another young assistant disappeared after mass one Sunday and never came back, leaving the pastor, Father Daniel Hamilton, to do the work of two men. So it was with some trepidation that pastor and congregation awaited the arrival of a new young priest sent by the bishop in June of 1990.
THE PRIEST IN LEATHER BOOTS "Did this guy really go to a seminary?" Parishioners looked at each other in amazement when the new priest with the pompadour and leather boots got up to give his first sermon at Sunday mass. It was hard to imagine anyone more ill-prepared than Father James Bruse. He fumbled for words. His eyes darted nervously; he seemed preoccupied. His grammar was atrocious ("the beautifulest, the wonderfulest ..."), and his delivery hurtled like a runaway train. It seemed the quicker Father Jim could get away from the pulpit, the happier he was--and many in the pews felt the same.
The son of a tea company salesman, Jim Bruse had grown up in Marlow Heights, Md., where he was a solid but unexceptional pupil of the parochial schools, an altar boy and trumpet player in the high-school band. He completed college in 1976 and soon thereafter, in his only diversion from an otherwise unremarkable youth, entered a series of roller-coaster riding contests. By the time he had secured a spot in the Guinness Book of Records for riding five days, he had also decided to quit his job repairing trucks and act on a long-held ambition to become a priest.
In some ways, the very qualities that made Jim Bruse poor at sermonizing and a mediocre seminary student made him a compassionate assistant pastor at his first two parishes. Where other priests might be more brusque and uncommunicative, Father Jim, with his kind eyes and boyish, guileless demeanor, was always approachable, never in a hurry. In the confessional, people felt like they were talking to a friend. "I know just what you mean," he would tell startled penitents.
At St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the young priest settled into a routine of masses, baptisms, parish council meetings and doctrine classes, slowly earning the support of members of his flock. But being an assistant pastor means being on call 24 hours a day; the job is not just repetitive, it is lonely. In the seventh year of his priesthood, as his daily duties merged into a numbing sameness, Father Jim began to struggle with the depression and doubt that typify the priesthood's legendary "seven-year itch." His once close-knit family had drifted apart, and he worried that his father was having doubts about his faith in God.
By November of 1991, Father Jim almost wondered himself. One night, dispirited and alone in his room at the rectory, he began to question whether he should be a priest at all. What was the point? And if Christ was real, why couldn't he feel his presence? Confused and distraught, he prayed to God: "I don't know where to turn. Please help me." A few days later, at Thanksgiving, the priest went home to visit his parents.
THE FAMILY AND THE STATUE "Jimmy, come here." Ann Bruse, a kindly woman with a tight brown perm, stood in the center of her tidy living room on Thanksgiving Day. She was staring at a statue of Our Lady of Grace, which her son had brought her as an early Christmas present. The statue had a drop of water on its cheek. As Mrs. Bruse, her husband and son watched, more drops appeared.
"It's crying," said Mrs. Bruse. Her husband stared in befuddlement. "There must be some explanation," he said. Jim Bruse was born a Presbyterian, and though he had converted to Catholicism, he had never shared his wife's unswerving faith, privately believing her a bit "brainwashed." He picked the statue up, scrutinized it, turned it upside down, shook it. Later, he removed a tiny jeweled halo from its head, then took a flashlight and magnifying glass and peered into the holes. The tears kept coming.
In subsequent days, the statue dripped intermittently, sometimes when just the Bruses were at home, sometimes when the house was empty, but it always seemed to happen when Father Jim came into the room. Before long, four other statues in the house started to weep, too, so much so that Mrs. Bruse finally put them in bowls to protect the furniture. The family speculated that perhaps "the Holy Spirit is in the room," or "it's a sign from God." Beyond that, they remained baffled. They told no one.
Then, the day after Christmas, Father Jim complained of sharp, stabbing pains in his wrists. Before long, blood appeared to seep from unbroken skin on his wrists and, later, from his feet and side. As a girl in Catholic school, Ann Bruse had read how some of the saints carried on their hands, feet and side the wounds that Christ suffered on the cross. Some stigmatists, she knew, had endured tremendous physical pain as well. Now, her awe was coupled with fear for her son, and she thought, "Oh, what he has to suffer!" But her next thought was: Father Dan will know what to do.
THE PASTOR WHO DOUBTED Daniel Hamilton, 50, is a burly, unfoolish man with thinning gray hair who sometimes conceals his warmhearted kindness beneath a benign gruffness. A priest of the old school with a degree in canon law, he believes in the sacraments, the gospel and the traditional teachings of the church. He has little use for shortcuts to God, doesn't know--or care--a lot about "this mystical stuff."
At 4 p.m. on New Year's Eve, Father Dan, as he is known, looked up from his desk to find his curate standing in his office doorway. "I need to speak to you," said Father Jim, closing the door.
In a voice that shook, the young priest told his story while Hamilton listened, his face impassive. But the pastor's thoughts raced with incredulity. "Holy smoke," he said later. "Guy who works for me walks into my office and goes on about statues that are crying and so forth, that he has this funny bleeding. And I'm sitting right here saying to myself, 'This guy's got a real problem!' "
Yet a few hours later, alone in the rectory, Hamilton was forced to reconsider. The two priests had decided to trade statues, as an experiment, and then Father Jim had gone to the church to say mass. The pastor, meanwhile, searched the basement for a copy of the Catholic Encyclopedia, since Father Jim had said he was unfamiliar with the concept of stigmata. Later that evening, Hamilton dropped by his assistant's bedroom, planning to leave the book. But what he saw made him freeze. A statue of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton--the same one he had loaned Father Jim--was crying. The tears looked like blood.
This can't be happening, he thought, backing slowly out of the room. He tiptoed down the hall, slumped onto his own bed and inhaled deeply. Then he looked up at the statue of Mary on his dresser, the one Father Jim had given him. It was crying tears, right into his sock drawer.
When Father Dan got out of bed the next morning, New Year's Day, water was still running down the face of the statue in his room. All day long, during breaks in the bowl games on his color TV, the priest checked the still dripping statues. By now he felt that something extraordinary was going on. But what did it mean? And what should he do about it? There had been no course in the seminary on the proper procedure to follow when one's assistant made statues weep.
Finally, Hamilton decided to call his superior, Bishop John R. Keating of the Diocese of Arlington. According to sources close to Keating, the bishop told Hamilton to keep the story quiet and get Father Jim to a doctor. A few days later, when the two priests arrived at the bishop's home, Father Jim brought with him a 12-inch statue of Our Lady of Fatima. When he handed it to Keating, it was crying. Before long, a statue of Mary on the bishop's polished wood mantle began to weep, too.
Bishop Keating didn't need this problem. From a bishop's standpoint, the question of miracles is a sure-fire loser. If a bishop gives a miracle his blessing and it turns out to be a hoax, the church looks ridiculous. But if he discourages the faithful from believing, he risks driving away the thousands whom the miracles have drawn to mass. Keating tried to keep the lid on the story, but on March 1, the big fiberglass Madonna at St. Elizabeth's began to weep before 500 parishioners as Father Jim said mass.
By then, both an internist and a psychiatrist had examined Bruse, each reporting back to the bishop that they could find nothing wrong with the priest. Still, when news reporters called, Keating issued a cautious statement advising against "any speculation on the causes or possible significance of the reported events." Even so, 3,000 people mobbed the church the following Sunday, spilling out the doors, trampling the daffodils and jamming the streets so badly that two county police officers were called in to direct traffic. Inside, people fell to their knees before the Madonna, weeping, praying aloud and straining for a glimpse of tears. The "miracle" had begun.
THE SKEPTICS IN LAB COATS There are dozens of ways to make a statue "weep." You can rub its face with calcium chloride, which causes water vapor to condense from the air, giving the appearance of "tears." You can smear cold oil or lard on the eyes; the grease will warm to room temperature and drip. If the statue is hollow, like the Madonna at St. Elizabeth's, you can run a thin infusion hose through the core and out the eyes with a tiny needle, to deliver a steady flow. But the method that came immediately to the mind of Chip Denman, as he stood in front of the Madonna one evening last April, was far simpler. "Misdirection," said Denman, a statistician and president of the National Capital Area Skeptics, whose 350 members include physicists, psychologists and magicians. "You distract people, then get a little bit of water splashed on the face, secretly using a sponge or squirt gun."
The skeptics group is dedicated to applying scientific methods to claims of the paranormal, and shortly after Denman's visit, a club officer contacted the bishop's office and offered to investigate. The offer was politely rejected, a spokesman explaining that the church investigates only in cases purporting to bear a divine "message." But a few months later, a California astrophysicist named Shawn Carlson, who had heard about the "miracles" of Lake Ridge and other American towns, reproduced a crying statue on the CBS-TV show "48 Hours." Carlson, who works at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories and makes a hobby of debunking charlatans, made several pictures weep, too; one even cried "blood." And although he refused to reveal his secrets, he makes no secret of his views: "There is nothing about this encounter that could not be duplicated by trickery."
Many other skeptics agreed with Carlson, speculating that even Father Jim's stigmata could be faked. At the time of his bleeding, one Washington, D.C., magic shop sold no fewer than four varieties of fake blood, which magicians say can be easily secreted up a sleeve. Even Dr. Oscar D. Ratnoff, a Cleveland hematologist who has studied more than 100 cases of spontaneous bruising and bleeding and believes the blood of stigmatists is real, says such cases are often psychogenic, linked to severe emotional stress.
But since the church refused to investigate, the skeptics could do little more than speculate. Their doubts in no way affected the faithful, who now arrived daily from as far away as Japan.
THE BELIEVERS IN BUSES Throughout last April, everywhere Father Jim went--churches, homes, offices--statues wept. By now, the unassuming priest had begun to warm to the limelight and gave several interviews, displaying his arms for the TV cameras, describing the "excruciating pain" that felt like "the nail going through," opining that "it's the work of Jesus Christ and Mary." Wearing his purple chasuble and white alb, he stood quietly in the church vestibule day after day to bless those who tarried after mass. Many carried statues, and sometimes, even before he handed them back, the statues were crying. Cancer victims and crippled children came, too, and Father Jim pressed his hands to their foreheads and prayed over them with closed eyes.
Before long, parishioners began whispering of other inexplicable events--spinning suns, rays of vibrant colors, statues and rosaries changing colors and amazing healings. One morning in May, 8-year-old Jackie Forsythe waited after mass for Father Jim outside her second-grade classroom at Aquinas School. Eighteen months earlier, Jackie had been diagnosed with a mild case of juvenile scoliosis, which had left her with an 18-degree curvature in her spine that doctors said was probably irreversible. She hated the uncomfortable, molded plastic body cast that she wore 23 hours a day, and she thought maybe a blessing by Father Jim could make her back straight.
Two weeks later, when her mother took her to the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, Dr. Laura L. Tosi, a pediatric orthopedist, confirmed that Jackie's back had improved, and subsequent X-rays showed that the curvature had been reduced to 4 degrees. Dr. Tosi, however, said that some children improve with bracing or get better on their own--"we don't know why." But Jackie remains convinced: "I really believe it was Father Bruse," she insists.
Stories of other "healings," equally sketchy and ambiguous, traveled through the parish. An 11-year-old girl from Dale City, Va., reportedly recovered from blindness in one eye and a tumor after being blessed by Father Jim. (The girl's family declined to be interviewed or to release medical records that might confirm the report.) But most of the hundreds of visitors to the church went away as ill as before. Many didn't even see the statues cry. Still, they didn't seem to care. Standing quietly before the Virgin Mary statue or in the vestibule, they spoke of how the miraculous events had brought them "back to the church" or helped them "feel God's presence" in their daily lives. The tears and blood, many believed, were "God's way of getting our attention"--sort of a prelude. A prelude to what, they couldn't say.
THE MESSAGE IN THE TEARS By August of 1992, the bishop had long since ordered Father Jim to stop talking to the press. With the absence of headlines and sound bites, the crowds began to dwindle, and the daily 9 a.m. mass that once attracted 150 now drew just 40. By late August, the priest's bleeding had stopped, and the big Madonna in the church no longer wept.
Still, reports of healings and other phenomena continue even now, and occasionally, an odd statue--usually at the Bruse home or in the rectory--cries in Father Jim's presence. The priest spends much of his time making the rounds of hospitals to bless the sick, in addition to his regular parish duties. Whatever doubts about God he once had are gone. "We don't have to worry about what's beyond death," he told a friend, describing one of his ongoing periods of mystical rapture. "We know. It's total love."
At the request of U.S. News, a Virginia medical laboratory recently tested a sample of one statue's "tears" and found no evidence of the salt and proteins present in human tears. Beyond that, there is no objective physical documentation--at least none made public--to prove or disprove the phenomena.
If, in fact, the Lake Ridge story is a hoax, it is certainly an elaborately choreographed one, relying on a variety of gimmicks and perhaps one or more accomplices. Most parishioners believe that such complex trickery is beyond the capability of the simple priest, and family members attest that Father Jim has never dabbled with magic. Yet even if one supposes, for a moment, that the Lake Ridge events are all genuine, a final puzzling question remains: What do they mean?
Father Jim says that Christ is using the events to show us that he is real. But what if the priest is wrong, and the weeping statues mean something else? Until the Lord takes to skywriting his message, both the veracity and the consequences of such phenomena are likely to remain unsettled. Which leaves us, in the end, with just a priest, some statues and a host of decent people, dreaming a beautiful dream. Whether the dream is real, and what it means, are up to you to decide.
The Priest When the bleeding started, Father Jim first thought it was a skin rash or insect bite, or even a blood problem. He took Advil for the pain, but no medicine helped. Finally, he began wearing wrist bands to hide the blood while he said mass. He believes that the stigmata and weeping statues are not the important thing. What counts, Father Jim says, is that these things are bringing people back to God.
The Town There is nothing in the centuries-old literature of religious mysticism to suggest that God might show his hand in the orderly suburb of Lake Ridge, Va.
The Parents The crucifix at the Virginia home of James and Ann Bruse sometimes cried so much that tears would stream down the wall. "If we knew my son was coming over," said Ann Bruse, "we would put bowls under the statues. They'd start weeping before he'd get out of the car."
The Pastor The Rev. Daniel Hamilton, was a self-described skeptic, but the Madonna at his church wept so much that staffers had to mop up the water with turkish towels. "All of us have faith," he now says, "but sometimes it's nice to have that faith bolstered by events in the real world."
The Skeptic "I could walk through an airport, never having been there before, and make virtually anything cry without touching it," says physicist Shawn Carlson. "I can also make statues cry for days to weeks on end and keep them crying, without anyone around. And these techniques have been available for hundreds of years."
The Believers Homemaker Jackie Tucker and her kids, Andy and Grace, were on the back deck of their Lake Ridge home last September when the sun began to spin and pulsate, then rained brilliant purples, reds and golds onto house and lawn. Other believers line up for Father Jim's healing prayers after Sunday masss.
This story appears in the March 29, 1993 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.