In a church in New Mexico, USA, there is a statue of the Virgin Mary, strikingly "weeping" with olive oil, thus perplexing the leadership of the church.
The event brought a huge number of people to the church and this “crying” allegedly happened several times, according to Judy Ronquillo, the church's business manager.
Scientists analyzed the substance and found that it is olive oil mixed with perfume, similar in composition to chrism or oil, the oil of the holy anointing, often used in Christian rituals such as baptism, writes IFLScience.
After that, skeptics can say that since oil is extremely common in the church, some of the clergy used it to create a hoax, trying to attract as many people as possible.
But diocese officials believe this is not the case. They have camera footage in the church that doesn't seem to show any anthropogenic causes.
While crying with olive oil may seem like a strange experience, weeping statues are quite common in the Catholic world. It is relatively easy to create a fake crying statue - sometimes it happens as a result of a natural condensation process, but even the most innovative approaches are not too difficult.
That is why the Catholic Church itself either conducts an investigation rather quickly, or does not announce the official position and allows the situation to take its course. The church has only recognized a couple of crying statues.
Promotional video:
Note that in the last few decades in Italy, there have been several well-known cases when the statues began to cry blood. In 2002, on the statue of the Catholic saint Padre Pio, they noticed "tears" of blood, which, as it turned out, belonged to a woman. In 2008, a church keeper was brought to trial for fake bloody tears on a statue of the Virgin Mary. His DNA matched "tears."
The most controversial case was the situation in 1995 with the statue of the Virgin Mary in the Italian city of Civitavecchia, where about 60 people claimed that on 14 occasions they saw the statue crying bloody tears. It was later revealed that the blood was male, and the owner of the statue, a man named Fabio Gregory, refused to undergo a DNA test.