A miracle or an insidious hoax: scientists check the "tears" of the statue of the "Weeping Virgin Mary"

In a church in New Mexico, there is a statue of the Virgin Mary that weeps. Parishioners of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces witnessed this phenomenon.

After the rumors of this "miracle" spread, a huge number of people began to come to the church to see how it was happening.

After that, scientists decided to analyze the substance that flowed from the statue's eyes and found out that it was olive oil mixed with substances similar in composition to myrrh, an anointing balm often used in Christian rites.

According to IFLScience, the clergy was then accused of deception, alleging that the priests resorted to such a trick to attract more people to the church. The clergymen themselves deny all accusations, saying that the church has video surveillance cameras that can prove that the clergy were not involved in the tearing of the statue.

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The publication writes that tears in an olive oil statue may seem like a surprising event, and also reminds us that crying statues have been a common occurrence in the Catholic world for the past seven decades.

"It is relatively easy to create a fake weeping statue - sometimes it happens naturally through condensation, but usually even the most innovative approaches are not too complicated. Hoaxes are so easy to make that the Catholic Church itself either acts quickly enough with investigators or takes no official position and let it unfold. Only a few weeping statues have been recognized by the Church," IFLScience writes.

The publication recalls that over the past few decades in Italy, there have been several cases of statues crying blood. In particular, in 2002, a statue of the Catholic saint Padre Pio with "tears of blood" was seen, which turned out to belong to a woman. In 2008, a church rector was tried for imitating bloody tears on a statue of the Virgin Mary. His DNA matched the DNA of the "tears".

And in 1995, the most controversial case was the statue of the Virgin Mary in the Italian city of Civitavecchia, where about 60 people claimed to have seen the statue shedding bloody tears 14 times. It turned out that the blood was male. However, the owner of the statue refused to take a DNA test.

As a reminder, an international team from Sweden and Germany has developed a method that uses electrical stimulation to speed up the wound-healing process. After experiments with artificial skin, scientists will soon test their invention on humans.

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